Page 223 of The Billionaires

Now things are crystal clear.

I am to have a marriage of convenience… with a rake.

CHAPTER 8

ADRIAN

It’s official. Emotions on Jane’s face are harder to discern than those on the Mona Lisa’s.

Suddenly feeling stupid about the knee, I get back into my chair and do my best to enjoy a piece of bluefin tuna as Jane gathers her thoughts.

“Look,” she says, her chopsticks hovering just above an ahi piece. “I think it’s admirable that you want to be in your daughter’s life?—”

“But?” I say with a sigh.

“But why would you want to marry me?” She closes the chopsticks over the piece of sushi and sets it on her plate. “Wouldn’t some famous model be more realistic in such a role? Don’t your kind of people have something like a marriage mart?”

Marriage mart? Sounds like Walmart’s nuptial-obsessed brother.

“When I saw you wearing that suit at the boutique, I pictured you in the courtroom and thought you’d be perfect,” I say earnestly. “There’s something respectable about you. Something proper. Something that wouldn’t scream ‘she’s just with him for his money.’”

“Thank you?” she says. “I think.”

Did I put my foot in my mouth again? “It was totally a compliment,” I reassure her. “You’re the kind of woman I’ve never been with before, so selling people on the idea that I settled down with you should be easier than in the case of a model or an actress.”

“Again, that doesn’t fully sound like a compliment.” She mindlessly separates the fish on her sushi from the rice, and I hope the chef doesn’t see the sacrilege, or else he might just ban me.

“Again, I assure you,” I say. “I mean it all as a compliment. I swear.”

“Fine.” She chews on her lip. “I don’t mean to sound indelicate, given that your daughter’s custody is on the line, to which I’m sympathetic and all, but… why would I fake-marry you?” she asks and finally sticks the ahi she’s tortured into her mouth.

All right. Now we’re on my turf. “You’ll marry me because I’ll pay you ten million dollars.”

I thought people only did spit takes in movies, but she does a major one, the chewed-up fish dropping back onto her plate.

If the chef saw that, he might actually commit seppuku with his sharpest yanagiba.

“Sorry about that,” she mumbles. She sticks the food back into her mouth and swallows it without chewing further. “You caught me off guard with that obscene number.”

I shrug. “I know I’m asking you to do something crazy, something that would also take three years to resolve.”

“Oh,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Three years where you can’t date.”

“Oh.” She grabs her water and takes a sip.

“Which is why, if you want to name a higher number, I’m okay with that.”

I can see she almost does another spit take but stops herself in time. “That number will be sufficient,” she says. “Assuming we agree on what you mean by ‘pretending’ in the context of this marriage.”

Dare I hope she’s considering this? “As I tried to say earlier, no intimacy would be involved,” I say quickly. “Apart from, perhaps, some occasional PDA to create a digital trail.”

Shit. She’s blushing again. I probably should’ve left that PDA bit for later, after she says yes.

“We’d have to agree ahead of time on what we do or don’t do,” she says.

Whew. “Of course. I’m thinking we will have two contracts between us. A secret one, which will outline things like the PDA, and a standard prenup the world can know about, which will state that if we were to get divorced after three years of marriage, you’d walk away with ten million dollars. The reason for our divorce will be in our secret contract—something that would sound plausible, like, say, different values when it comes to parenting or something like that.”

---