Page 16 of My Big Fat Vampire Wedding
Nope.
She couldn’t let her mind go there.
“I am very serious,” she told him. “I need my inheritance. My parents aren’t budging. And I am single. I really can’t think of any other way to handle this.”
Victor sat with that a second, his gaze moving past her, staring at the back wall, giving Pandora the opportunity to gaze at him without being seen as a complete creep.
She could see the gears turning in his mind, could picture him trying to sift through all of the reasons this was a terrible idea. He didn’t know her. She could be lying to him. He might waste precious time of his life all for nothing.
But she thought she could see the moment when he latched on to the possibility of this arrangement.
Going back to uni. Finishing his PhD. Which, in turn, would likely mean he would be able to work toward his dream job, whatever that was.
Nothaving to go back and live with his parents.Notbeing stuck in a dead-end job.Nothaving all his dreams shatter down at his feet.
His green eyes cut back to hers.
“What is the catch?”
“There is no catch. Well, I mean, obviously, there are, you know, things we would need to iron out.”
“Such as?”
“Getting to know each other. This has to be convincing. My mum is really good at sniffing out lies. We have to have some ‘getting to know each other’ dates, so we can stand up to any sort of questioning.”
“That makes sense,” he said. “What else?”
“We would have to go through all of the wedding planning together. Decor, cakes, engagement parties, the whole thing.”
“OK. What then? We fake a relationship, convince your family, what then?”
“Then we get married,” she said, watching something flash across his eyes, but it was gone too quickly to pin down just what it had been. “For a set period of time. A year seems … fair. Long enough to convince my family we gave it a real chance. Short enough that it doesn’t feel like we’re losing a chunk of our lives.”
To her utter amazement, Victor just nodded at that. He wasn’t laughing in her face. Or, worse yet, running out of there while telling her how bizarre she was.
“But how long would the engagement charade go on beforehand?”
“That’s probably the best, or worst – depending on how you look at it – part,” Pandora told him. “My birthday is in three months. I have to be marriedbeforethen.”
“How are you going to convince your parents that you went from single to ready to be married in such a short period of time, though?”
“Well, they’re sort of … romantics,” she said. “They got engaged on their first date.” She left out the fact that they’d stayed engaged for fifty years before they’d finally made things official. And that they’d needed to postpone the wedding because the witch trials had been sweeping through Europe and it had been too risky to have so many vampires and succubi gather in one place at one time.
“My parents are … less so,” Victor said. “They sort of run their marriage like a business,” he added, the distaste clear in his voice.
There she was, asking him to do the same thing.
“I understand if that is not something you want.”
“But it’s not a real marriage. It’s just, like you said, an arrangement.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Though I’ll be honest and say I didn’t consider the fact that you would also need to lie to your family and friends. I can see that being a dealbreaker.”
“It’s really just my mum and dad,” he told her. “We don’t have much family. And my best friend. That’s it. It wouldn’t be that bad.”
He seemed to genuinely be considering it.
Pandora felt hope surge but tried to tell herself not to let it run away with her.
