“You’re allowed to smile. This is a benefit gala, not a funeral.”

Bellamy, who is absolutely stunning in a red gown that Brian’s team approved the moment I called him with the news, contorts her face into the most hideous fake grin I’ve ever seen.

“I was wrong. The funeral frown is a better look.”

She scowls. “This is so uncomfortable.”

I take her hand and put it through the crook of my elbow. She sat as far away from me as possible on the car ride over, and she’s stiff as a board right now. “You have got to relax if you’re going to convince anyone. It’s not against the rules to have a good time.” I could show her one, if she’d let me; if she’d give herself over, just once.

“I’m still trying to convince myself that this shouldn’t be, I don’t know, some kind of crime.”

“You think we’re the first people to fake a relationship for the greater good?”

“Does it count as the greater good if it’s our own asses we’re saving?”

“Not so loud,” I murmur into her ear. “This is bigger than us.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that.” I steer us from the Hall of States into the Grand Foyer of the Kennedy Center. It’s breathtaking—rich red carpet, towering chandeliers—but I have the feeling that the decor isn’t what has Bellamy struggling, taking one deep breath after another. “There has to be another way.”

“This is what we agreed on.” We pass by another couple—the man, tall and viciously handsome in an expensive tuxedo, and the woman regal, in a light-blue gossamer cloud of a ball gown. I met them at the inauguration, and I’d know them anywhere. “You didn’t want to be introduced to the former President and First Lady?”

Bellamy whips her head around. “That was him? Jesus Christ. My lips are going numb.”

I laugh out loud.

“What is funny?” she hisses.

“This is a performance.” I pat at her hand, lean in close.

Bellamy stiffens. “The play doesn’t start for another forty minutes. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do until then.”

I put two fingers underneath her chin and tilt her face upward, so she has no choice but to look at me. I keep the smile on my face, letting it soften into something indulgent and admiring. A strange compassion squeezes at my chest in spite of myself. “We are a performance, Bellamy. All we need to do is put on a show.”

She breathes out through pursed lips, and her shoulders relax. “It’s a lie.”

“Not when you look like an animal trapped in a cage. You’re broadcasting the truth to everyone here. And look. Seriously. Look.” Bellamy turns her head, eyes scanning the crowd that moves and seethes and swirls around us. “These are the people we need to convince.”

She narrows her eyes. “I don’t see any journalists.”

“They know where their place is at events like this. There will be photos later. But more importantly, there will be rumors first.”

“We’re trying to avoid rumors.”

“We’re trying to start new rumors to cover the threatening ones.” Bellamy trembles. I didn’t see it before, when we stepped out of the car, but now I do. “You’re doing the right thing.”

“Arguable.”

“It’s not up for debate. Now, would you rather make this convincing or waste the opportunity?”

She drags her eyes back to mine. “Convincing.”

I take my hand away from her chin and offer her my elbow. This time, she takes it, and her hand feels warm and alive. “Happiness. Try to project an aura of happiness.”

“What does that even look like?” We move into the crowd, and I go on autopilot. The campaign trail was a meditation on smiling and nodding and giving the impression that you care about every person who passes by you at a thousand identical events.

“Start with a smile.”

Bellamy bites her lip. “I’d argue that—”

“You don’t always have to argue, you know.”

“I do, though.” She takes a glass of champagne from a tray held up by a uniformed waiter and drains half of it in one long sip. “You don’t get anything without a fight.”

“This isn’t a fight. This is a business arrangement.”

Bellamy gives someone to our right a genuine smile, her shoulders relaxing. “I’d call it a political arrangement.”

“Semantics.”

“Accuracy.”

I’m not supposed to care about Bellamy Leighton. I’m not supposed to care about anything other than our objective, which is to save my brother from some nameless doom. But the woman won’t stop talking about accuracy. And she was very specific about the boundaries she named. She was relentlessly specific, and yet, a pretty little blush spread from her cheeks to her cleavage when she named them.

I want to know more. “Why do you have such an accuracy fetish?”

This makes her laugh, and the sound is startlingly delicious. “I’m not sexually fixated on accuracy.”

“What are you sexually fixated on?”

“None of your business.”

“I disagree.”

“No sex. That’s one of the rules.”

I take us up to one of the cash bars and get us both a glass of wine. White—because Bellamy insists that’s the best kind. “So, we can’t even discuss it?” That same blush appears beneath her makeup and moves downward to the plunging neckline of her dress.

“I don’t know why we would.”

“We don’t know how long this will last.” We step away from the stream of people and Bellamy lifts her wine to her lips. “Shouldn’t we get to know each other?”

She licks her bottom lip, and the sight of her pink tongue sends a charge from the center of my chest to my cock. “The wine is going to my head.”

“Pull yourself together, Ms. Leighton. We have a performance to put on.” To underscore the point, I lean down and press a kiss to her cheek. It’s chaste. It breaks no rules.

When I straighten up again, Bellamy is the same color as her dress. “I’m—” She shakes her head a little. “What were we talking about?”

“Why you’re obsessive about accuracy. What made you that way?”

“Nothing we need to discuss for the purposes of—”

I drain the rest of the wine and curve an arm around her waist. There’s only so long we can stay here, enclosed in this little circle of two. We need to be seen. “I know what it’s like to get fucked over by a bad deal.”

“I doubt it.”

That makes me laugh. “Because I have money? Is that it? You think that makes me invincible?”

“I think it makes you...” Her voice trails off. “I think you must have everything.”

Innocent Bellamy Leighton’s face is wide open, hopeful and afraid, and the sight of her is like waking up after a long dream. “You should know by now, sweetness. Money can’t buy everything.

“No,” she whispers. “You’re right about that.”