Chapter 3

She shucked off the trappings of the dinner party and got into her pajamas. Not sexy lingerie, but pajamas. Then she called Britt and told her about meeting the Wicked Queen. Marj was in her element, retelling a dramatized version of the ignominious evening, detailing her showdown with the evil stepmother.

“Her fake boob job was just right out there, hanging out the front of her dress. It’s no wonder I couldn’t eat my snot and cilantro,” Marj cackled.

“Didn’t you get loaded at my rehearsal dinner and try to hit on my brother-in-law?” Britt asked.

“What is your point?”

“That you’re slut shaming the stepmother.”

“So what?”

“So, you’ve always gone on and on about me not being judgmental just because I was a good girl...mostly a good girl, except for Jack, I guess. And that you were an independent woman with sexual agency who had every right to—”

“Well, crap, Britt, you’re ruining my fun right now. Yes, I like hot guys and clubs and Tinder and casual sex. I’m not saving myself for the right man. I also had both my boobs covered at dinner,” she said.

“For once,” Britt teased. “I used to accuse you of wearing tinfoil to clubs.”

“Not foil. Just a very thin silver top,” she corrected. “And I’m married now. That’s all changed.”

“Really? You’re transformed now? Where is the lucky man, anyway? Don’t tell me he’s asleep at ten o’clock.”

“He’s working. He runs, you know, a huge multinational company. I think tonight’s a Skype with the Hong Kong team,” she said, trying to seem both totally comfortable with the fact he was working late and familiar with his exact plans—neither of which was really based in reality.

“Sounds exciting. I would’ve thought the two of you would’ve been...never mind,” Britt said. “I’m going to send you the MP3 of Jack’s latest single before it drops. It’s amazing, and I’m not just saying that to get in his pants,” she giggled.

Marj felt a stab of jealousy. Britt and Jack were totally in love and happy together. They’d been through a lot and come out the other side stronger as a couple. Not, say, divorced after six months were up. She wanted her settlement. That was it. She wasn’t going to whine about how her new husband worked late. She was going to enjoy her new and improved lifestyle and be herself like Brandon had encouraged her to be, and then she’d blow the hatch and cash her nice, fat check.

She listened to Britt enthuse over her exciting life on tour with Jack’s band and her general bliss for a while. Then she begged off to get some sleep for work the next day. Britt was too polite to demand to know why Marj hadn’t quit her job yet.

Marj lay awake, scrolling through her Twitter feed and checking out her friends’ Instagram posts...food, mostly, to tell the truth. Frustrated by sleeplessness, she stretched out on the floor and did some abs work. It had been nearly a week since she’d been to the gym. Tomorrow she’d have to check out the home gym Brandon had boasted of. At last, she heard his step in the hall, his knock at her door. She vaulted out of the bed and scampered, actually scampered, to the door and threw it open.

He looked tired. Hot, obviously, but tired as well. She wanted to hug him, but she didn’t. They were in this deal together, like business partners...with benefits. She wasn’t really sure how to act around him yet. And as usual when she was uncertain or felt embarrassed, she brazened it out and told him so.

“Brandon, I don’t know my way around this arrangement yet. I’m glad you came to my door. I was, I guess, waiting up for you. Have a seat,” she said, sitting cross-legged on her four-poster bed and patting the mattress beside her.

“I had a long Skype.”

“Hong Kong?” she ventured.

“No, Sydney. Why?”

“No reason. The thing is, I get that you have a ton of work to do. I’ve got work tomorrow too. I just want to know up front what we can expect from each other.”

“How so? I’ll come home when I’m done at work. If you need me, obviously call me. If there’s an event, we go together. I wasn’t aware you were going to continue working.”

“This is a temporary arrangement for me, and I’m not ready to get out of marketing totally. I need to keep my hand in, so I’m working at Power Regions, unless you want me to look for a job elsewhere.”

“The wives of most of my colleagues don’t work outside the home,” he said. “They do charity work, host fundraisers, that sort of thing. The demands of being a corporate wife—the events and the travel—tend to be time-consuming.”

“I fully appreciate that, and if this were a long-term role for me, I would determine if adjustments to my schedule were necessary to meet all the expectations of a CEO’s spouse. But since it’s a six-month gig, I don’t see calling in rich to work and bowing out of all my accounts.”

“Perhaps consulting work would be more complementary to your—you know, if you want to work at Power Regions, work there. I’m not going to try and tell you not to work. We decided we were going to support each other during this...association. So whatever works for us is what we should do. You don’t have to be like anyone but yourself. Just like I don’t play golf, despite my late father’s repeated insistence that the real deals get made on the golf courses, not in the boardroom. I hate golf, won’t play it. So I don’t do what the other CEOs do either. As for what to expect, we’ll have to make it up as we go along.”

“Will you come home? I mean, most nights, when do you get in?”

“Sometimes midnight, sometimes later. I don’t want to bother you if you have to get up for work the next morning. That wouldn’t be very supportive. I suppose we could work out a schedule...” he suggested.

“A schedule? How about you come home and we have mind-blowing sex? Is that a schedule that works for you?”

“Unless it’s been a really long day or you have an early meeting or—”

“Look, that’s the schedule. Okay?” she said mischievously, and he finally cracked a smile. “I love it when you smile,” she said. “It’s the second best thing you can do with your lips.”

He laughed and shot her a flirty glance.

Brandon pulled out his phone and tapped something into the notes he kept there, probably the positives and negatives she had listed for him about how to be in a relationship.

“I appreciate you sticking it out at the dinner as long as you did. I’ve dealt with these people so long that they don’t seem strange to me. I know my stepmother will be rude, and the food will be terrible, and she’ll have some random business associates there for the ‘family’ dinner.” He shrugged.

“Speaking of family dinner, is this like a mob thing? Because I got to thinking when Lena called Randolph and the other one...What’s his name?”

“Simon,” Brandon supplied.

“Yeah, Simon, when she called them family, I thought maybe it was Family. Like the mafia.”

“No. I’m not sure what gave you that idea. We’re pretty...WASP, actually, and I’ve never once shot anyone or said anything in Italian beyond the names of pasta on a menu. Interesting take on my stepmother as a mafia moll, though. Could explain some of her more flamboyant choices, I suppose.”

“I’m from Jersey, Brandon.”

“Ah. I heard you tell Lena that you grew up near the museums and—”

“Yeah, that was total bullshit. I mean, I’m sure that you can get to the Met from where I grew up, but I never went there. My family wasn’t really into the cultural field trips.”

“Did you take long road trips to the national parks or something?”

“Sometimes we went to see my grandpa in jail. Other times, like when our car wasn’t running, my brother or I would ride on the back of the mower when my mom drove it to the liquor store to get booze.”

“Don’t kid like that, Marj,” he said, clearly astonished. “It’s horrific.”

“No. I’m not. It’s just life for a lot of people, Brandon. Horrific is stepping on a landmine or genocide. Horrific isn’t having drunk parents who don’t have money. I got out. I mean, clearly. I’m living in what’s basically a castle. So, yeah. It’s okay. Don’t start raising money for my people on a telethon or anything.”

“I know I had a very privileged upbringing. I just never imagined that people rode lawn mowers to liquor stores.”

“How else are they gonna get their booze if the car’s broken down or they lost their license? Once they’ve sweated out yesterday’s, it’s time for more to drink,” she said.

“That still sounds appalling to me.”

“You’re so cute. Did you think that I was raised by fluffy bunnies out in the Disney movie forest where birds curled my hair for me?”

“No. I just thought you had a normal family. That you lived in a house and maybe you didn’t have Wi-Fi or something, but you had vacations and Christmases and that sort of thing.”

“We had Christmases, all right. Sometimes better ones than others. There was the time Dad pawned my brother’s new Xbox. That was a shitty New Year,” she said.

“I’m going to have to ask you not to tell me any bedtime stories if this is your idea of a fun walk down memory lane,” Brandon said.

“Oh, come on. It’s your turn. What was it like spending Christmas with Rich Dad and the Wicked Queen?”

“I wouldn’t know. I stayed at school or went home with a friend for holidays.”

“That’s harsh. I figured you had to eat kidney pie and mincemeat pie and any other repulsive pie that Lena could come up with, and that you probably got wool socks from her for presents.”

“She and my father spent holidays on St. Barth’s, for the most part. I hear it’s very beautiful there,” he said.

“Well, there goes any ambition I ever had to go to St. Barth’s. Apparently it’s where the evil bitches have their meetings. I’ll pass.”

“Don’t blame the island. It wasn’t even Lena’s fault. I didn’t want to spend time at that house after she moved in. There were a lot of changes, and I didn’t like giving up the way things had always been since my mom passed away.”

“What was your mom like? Is it okay for me to ask?”

“You have to ask, because it’s important to know some things about me, and that’s good. It makes our case stronger as far as establishing the veracity of our union.”

“Just, off the record, do you seriously think anyone believes this marriage is real? I mean, timed the way it was to get you your inheritance, people would have to be completely stupid and naïve to even consider the possibility.”

“People believe what they want to believe. Haven’t you found that to be true?”

“Usually, yeah.”

“So, we can make them want to believe in us. By seeming close and like we know each other well.”

“Okay, tell me about your mom.”

“She was a lovely woman. She got sick, and nothing doctors could do could save her. She died when I was ten. Just like that, the world ended. My life as I knew it was over.” Brandon rubbed his hands over his face, and she tried hard not to gather him into her arms.

“Was your dad there for you? I mean, did he—was he—I don’t know what I mean. Did he step up and build a closer relationship with you or anything?”

“Not really. He was always very absorbed in his work, and he built a vast portfolio of holdings in addition to the company. My mother had always been the parent. When she got sick, he hired a nanny, so I got picked up from school, taken to practice, that sort of thing...and a nurse for her. He made sure we had what we needed. It went on for months, and I got to where I was used to it, to coming home and her not being able to get out of bed. But she would want me to sit down and tell her all about my day, and at first, we’d eat dinner together right on her bed on a tray. She made it fun, like we were being fancy or having a picnic...” He trailed off, and she had heard the sadness in his voice.

Marj’s eyes teared up, and she choked down the lump in her throat. She could feel in the pit of her stomach the hollow hopelessness of a woman trying to make her weakening, her dying, into something normal, something with fun parts for her child. Because they were in it together and, of course, her thoughts would have been for him. She laid a hand on his shoulder and felt the tremor there.

“I’m so sorry, Brandon. I can’t imagine how terrible it was to go through that, to lose her.”

“I wished so many nights. I’d lie awake and wish it was my dad and not her,” he said. “I’ve never—told anyone that. Except the therapist. My dad got me a psychiatrist after she died. I told the doctor that, and he said it was normal to want to keep the person who was more important to you. Then he said a bunch of crap about how maybe my closeness with my mother had been a barrier to having a better relationship with my dad. And that was bullshit because he was all about his work. I went to boarding school that fall and I never really came back. I had the summers at home, with the nanny mostly and whatever lessons and camps I could be sent to. Then he married Lena. I was old enough by then that I just wanted to not have to deal with her, much less see her in my mom’s place.”

“I bet that was hard. And by hard, I mean I bet you wanted to kill her.”

“I didn’t want to kill her so much as I wanted to see her vaporized by a swarm of bees or wasps, mainly. I can understand now how it must have been hard for her, being really closer to my age than her own husband’s, and to have to deal with a teenager who missed his mother and didn’t want anything to do with new family traditions or anything being different.”

“You’d had a terrible loss. It doesn’t sound to me like anyone was loving you or comforting you.”

“I had a therapist, I told you.”

“Right. That’s the same,” she said ruefully.

“I was sixteen by that time and didn’t want someone to talk to me about my feelings and my dead mother. I thought my dad looked ridiculous for pursuing this, this woman who was young enough to be his kid. It was embarrassing.”

“Did it make you miss your mom even more?” she asked.

“Of course it did. Everything—hell, winter made me miss her more because she always used to drag me out of bed super early the first snowfall and we’d go mess up the kitchen making homemade marshmallows for hot cocoa. Gelatin would get everywhere, everything would get sticky...” He stopped, and Marj engulfed him in her arms, hugging him hard.

“I’m so sorry,” she said into his shoulder, holding him.

Brandon’s arms went around her, and he hugged her for a minute before letting her go.

“Thanks. It’s been, you know, twenty years almost. So I’m doing well. I think you always carry some sadness when there’s a significant loss in childhood and—”

“This just got real, Brandon. Now you’re not just the hot rich guy I married as a favor. You have emotional pain. You had a childhood. This is not simple anymore. Hearing your stories makes me get attached to you. Maybe we shouldn’t get so personal.”

I’d prefer not to fall in love with you, and get my heart trashed yet again. So the next time I insist on getting personal, tell me to shut up. Because we can’t go super personal like this and still not have feelings for each other. It’s going to happen organically from all the sharing.

Of course Marj didn’t say that.

“We have to get to know each other so it looks real,” he said. “And I have to sleep in here. Despite the fact that my staff is well compensated, there is always the risk that Lena and her camp could find a way to blackmail or bribe one of them to disclose our sleeping arrangements. I hope you don’t find that too intrusive.”

“Dude, I married you. I plan to spend plenty of time naked with you. You can totally sleep here. I hog the covers, though, fair warning.”

“So do I,” he said.

“Well, here goes our first fight as a married couple. The covers are mine, all mine,” she laughed.

“And tonight you are mine,” he said, his voice low and not laughing one bit.

A chill went through her of the best sort, and she reached for him. Brandon was already upon her, stroking her neck, her cheek, her jaw. His lips against her collarbone sent more shivers along her skin, and she twined her limbs with his. This was different from the other times they’d been together. This was gentler, more vulnerable somehow, as if by sharing painful memories from their lives they had become both more intimate and more careful with one another.

She had asked him to stop getting personal, but there was nothing more personal than this. The way he peeled aside her pajama top and trailed his hands along her stomach and down her sides. The way she felt so alive, so emboldened after hours of lonesome boredom without him. There was a fire in her blood, a desperation to hold him closer, to mate with him in a primal way, to claim him.

Brandon was gorgeous, muscular and powerful. His arms were heavily muscled, the biceps bigger than she’d ever seen and somehow juicy and appealing. She wanted to grip them while he pounded into her, wanted to dig her nails in and hold on. She licked one instinctively, her mouth on his bare arm, his shirt still in her hands. When she did, her bare breasts brushed against his forearm, and she felt her nipples bead at the casual contact. His big hands came up to cup her breasts and stroke them.

The tease of his touch made her wriggle and writhe. She nipped at his neck, hands in his hair until he rolled her onto her back and stretched out at full length above her. He stroked her face, kissed her hair, her forehead, and her eyelids. Their lips met and their tongues mated, setting sparks all through her body. His tender touch, the deep intimacy of his kiss seemed to move her somehow, tears burning her eyes. She sank into his kiss, gathering him in her arms, wanting all of him, the weight of him above her, his hands and mouth and everything.

“Please,” she said into his mouth, “please, Brandon.”

This time, he didn’t move away from her, didn’t grope in his pocket for a condom. Instead, he kicked away his pants and she felt him heavy and bare between her thighs. She shivered, panting with want, her nipples pressed against his hard chest, her hands on those huge biceps as he rose up and plunged into her, wet and slick. She cried out at his penetration because it felt so—so much. It was all him, raw and within her, his flesh, the velvet hardness of him driving thick into her passage. The sensation was sharper, the jolts of pleasure fiercer.

Marj hadn’t had sex without a condom since her high school boyfriend when she’d been on the pill and they’d both been virgins back then. This was different, closer, more connected than the sex she had had with dates, with guys from clubs, with Luke even. There had been a distance, a barrier both physical and emotional from them. So even after years of dating and hooking up with men, Marj felt strangely like she was having sex for the first time now. It was freer, messier, and steamier than anything she remembered. He kept kissing her again and again and calling her his wife. His voice was tender, his movements unrelenting, drawing jots of ecstasy from her as he built their climax.

Her pulse beat in her throat, her whole body flushed and ready. Marj loved being beneath him, loved his warm hands on her skin, loved the needy, powerful feeling where they were joined. She gripped his face in her hands and kissed him until he came. She felt every thrust, every jerk of his cock so fully, the hot rush as he emptied into her. It was that, the strange, alien feel of him shooting out inside her, that took her over the edge.

“Wife,” he said, “you’re all mine.”

The narrow intensity of his gaze, the dark caress of his voice seemed to lick her as tremors still rippled through her sensitive skin. He dragged the duvet over her as her skin began to chill. He hauled her body against his, the smooth skin slick with sweat from the exertion. She burrowed into his warmth, hiding her face in his shoulder to keep him from seeing the sheen of tears in her eyes. It was the only way she could conceal the flood of emotion she had experienced just now. The depth of trust and the connection.

Thankfully, he didn’t try to look in her face, didn’t lift her chin to make her meet his gaze. He was perhaps just as comfortable keeping something hidden. So it was that the most personal, most intimate experience of Marj’s life concluded with the embrace of strangers, strangely diffident and separate.

When he rolled over to go to sleep, Marj hurried to the bathroom. She took a long shower, scrubbing every inch of her body with the floral body wash the housekeeper had supplied. When she was scoured clean and wrapped in a thick robe, she returned to bed, scrabbled some covers away from Brandon, and wished heartily that he would sleep in another room. Being close to him while he was asleep and totally vulnerable was another layer of intimacy she could have done without. After the shatteringly good sex, she could have used some space.

She refused to roll over and gaze at him. The mere thought made her roll her eyes reflexively. Despite her weakness for Titanic, she wasn’t one of those girls who thought everything was romantic. This was convenient, that’s what it was—a short-term marriage to a rich guy to score several million dollars and have great sex in the meantime. It would make waiting for the money to come through a lot less boring. And that was what she already thought—that without the hot sex, being married to a billionaire was boring. He had to work all the time, which was where the money came from, but it meant a great deal of sitting around and waiting. For a woman who’d spent her adult life hustling to make ends meet, the lifestyle was hardly a natural fit.

So maybe she wasn’t cut out for this, for being a rich man’s wife. He was wealthy and powerful and more than reasonably desirable. She should spend her time working out and doing juice fasts and ordering ruinously expensive handbags online. It sounded really, really dull to Marj. Except for the sex part, obviously. Dull was not a word she could use to describe sex with Brandon Cates, who was more than adequate in that department.

She’d get used to sleeping beside him. She wouldn’t pine and yearn for him. She’d keep herself busy, show up dressed in designer labels when they had an event to attend, and in a few months, she’d collect her jackpot and move on. It was the only practical method of getting through a situation that seemed to come with loads of thorny complications. Move forward, ignoring anything that made her uncomfortable like those damn feelings she kept having, and do extra sit-ups in the morning. With that resolution in mind, Marj went to sleep just as she’d planned.