The day my boss asked me to become his wife for money, I thought humiliation was the worst thing that could happen to me. I was wrong. The real danger was that somewhere between the signatures, the staged photographs, and the lie we agreed to live, I might begin wishing the marriage were real.
Chapter 1
I was sorting vendor invoices when Adrian Reyes knocked sharply on the glass wall beside my desk. He was forty-one, wealthy enough to own half the office building, and controlled enough that I had never once seen him raise his voice. “Maria,” he said, “could you come into my office?”
My stomach tightened before I even stood. Adrian owned Reyes Development, the real-estate firm where I worked in accounts payable, and people did not get private invitations from him unless something important had happened. I followed him past the conference room and into his corner office, where he closed the door and drew the blinds.
He did not offer me a chair. Instead, he stood at the window with one hand in his pocket and said, “I have a proposition.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I need a wife.”
I stared at him.
He turned, perfectly serious. “Not in the traditional sense.”
“That does not make it better.”
For the first time, something almost like embarrassment crossed his face. He explained that the company was entering negotiations with conservative investors who cared more about appearances than they should. Stability mattered to them. Family mattered. A settled man with a wife and child looked safer than a bachelor whose private life inspired questions.
“So you want me to pretend to date you?”
“No. I want you to marry me.”
I actually laughed.
Adrian did not.
“For two years,” he continued. “A legal marriage governed by a private agreement. We would attend business functions together, appear publicly as a family, and maintain separate personal lives. Your son would live with us.”
That stopped me.
Everyone in the office knew I had a little boy, although Adrian had never asked much about him. Noah was almost two, with dark curls, enormous brown eyes, and a habit of hugging my leg whenever strangers came too close.
“What does Noah have to do with this?”
“Nothing, except that he comes with you.”
I folded my arms. “And what do I get?”
Adrian named a sum of money large enough to make my mouth go dry.
It would pay my mother’s overdue mortgage. It would clear the hospital bills left after my father died. It would give Noah a college fund and me something I had not felt in years.
Room to breathe.
“This is insane,” I whispered.
“Probably.”
“Why me?”
He studied me for several seconds. “Because you are intelligent, discreet, and you do not flatter me. Also, people would believe it.”
I stood so abruptly the chair behind me scraped the floor.
“I’m not for sale.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You just put a price on being your wife.”
His jaw tightened. “I’m offering you a contract. You are free to refuse.”
I reached the door.
“I’ll need an answer tomorrow,” he said.
That night, I lay awake in the small bedroom I shared with Noah whenever he woke frightened. His crib stood three feet away, and through the baby monitor I could hear the soft rhythm of his breathing. On the kitchen counter waited two collection notices, an electric bill with a red warning stamp, and a grocery list I had already cut in half.
Money had a sound when you did not have enough of it.
It sounded like a refrigerator humming at two in the morning while you calculated which bill could wait.
It sounded like your mother saying she was not hungry when you knew she was saving food for you.
It sounded like remembering the father who had once told you, “We’ll figure it out,” and realizing he was no longer alive to help you do it.
My father had said those words when I was nineteen and pregnant.
The man who got me pregnant had said something very different.
Evan Parker had been twenty-four then, handsome in a careless way that made young women forgive too much. When I told him I was expecting, he stared at me as though I had committed a crime.
“You did this on purpose.”
I remember the disbelief more than the anger.
“No.”
“You wanted to trap me.”
“I missed one pill after I was sick. Evan, you know that.”
He opened his wallet, placed two hundred-dollar bills on the kitchen counter, and pushed them toward me.
“Handle it.”
I can still remember staring at that money.
“What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“This is your baby too.”
“Not if I don’t want it to be.”
I begged him not to leave. That is the part I hated remembering most. I was nineteen, terrified, and foolish enough to believe love could be argued back into existence.
It could not.
Evan walked away before my pregnancy began to show.
My father discovered the truth three months later when the smell of fried fish sent me running to the bathroom. When I finally confessed, I collapsed against his work shirt and apologized until I could hardly breathe.
He held me.
“Don’t apologize for being scared, sweetheart,” he whispered. “You’re not alone.”
My mother, Elena, reacted differently. She cried, lectured me, and asked how I could have been so careless. Then she made chicken soup when I could not eat and rubbed my back during the worst nights of morning sickness.
That was my mother.
Love delivered with sharp edges.
Noah was born in October.
My father cried when the nurse put him in my arms.
Three months later, Dad suffered a heart attack during his shift at the warehouse and died before we reached the hospital.
After that, adulthood came all at once.
So when morning arrived after Adrian Reyes offered to buy two years of my life, I looked at my sleeping son, looked at the stack of bills, and understood something I did not want to admit.
Principles are easier to defend when your child’s future is not standing beside an empty formula can.
The next afternoon, I entered Adrian’s office.
“I’ll do it.”
He merely nodded. “There will be conditions.”
“I have mine first.”
That got his attention.
“No physical relationship. No expectation of affection when we’re alone. Noah stays with me. My mother does not learn this is an arrangement. And if at any point you treat my son as an inconvenience, I leave.”
Adrian held my gaze.
“Agreed.”
The civil ceremony took place the following Friday.
No flowers. No music. No family.
Two signatures, a judge, Adrian’s attorney, and a marriage certificate.
Afterward, Adrian handed me the first payment.
I stared at the check.
“You’ll move Monday,” he said. “The house is prepared.”
I looked at my new husband, a man I barely knew.
“What exactly have I done?”
His expression softened for the briefest moment.
“The same thing I have,” he said. “Made a bargain.”
But three months later, standing alone on his balcony while my son slept peacefully in a nursery Adrian had quietly filled with everything we needed, I realized the bargain had already begun changing.
Because Adrian Reyes had stopped feeling like a stranger.
And I was no longer certain he was pretending either.
