“Do not look at me as though I have lost my reason,” I murmured, sliding onto the bench beside a woman I had never met. “For the next quarter of an hour, I need you to act as though you are mine.”

Part 1

I did not turn around when the double doors of the ballroom swung open.

The sudden hush in the room told me exactly who had just arrived.

Megan Foster was the kind of woman who commanded attention like a tax collector demanding payment.

Three years ago, she left me standing at the altar.

She had sent a text message from the backseat of a billionaire’s limousine.

Last winter, he left her a very wealthy widow.

Tonight, she was hunting again.

I had seen the smug little note she mailed to my office yesterday.

“I hear you’ve never recovered,” she wrote in her elegant scrawl.

“I shall come and see for myself.”

My company, the company, was worth billions, but high society still looked at me with pity.

I needed a shield.

I needed someone the room would not question.

My gaze swept the glittering crowd and stopped in the darkest corner of the hall.

Sitting alone behind a massive potted fern, she wore a gray dress that was at least two seasons out of fashion.

Her hands were folded quietly in her lap, presenting the picture of a woman who had made absolute peace with being invisible.

Crossing the length of the ballroom, I approached her with the flat calculation of a man used to weighing people in a single glance.

Craig Morrison, the stone-cold CEO who spoke to no one, was on the move.

I slid onto the velvet bench beside the stranger.

“Do not look at me as though I have lost my reason,” I murmured.

I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead.

“For the next quarter of an hour, I need you to act as though you are mine.”

She did not gasp or drop her champagne glass.

She turned her head slowly and studied me with steady hazel eyes.

There was a quiet, grave amusement in them.

It was the look you might give a large, dangerous dog that had just laid its head in your lap.

“Yours,” she repeated calmly.

“That is a great deal to ask of a stranger you have not troubled to greet.”

“I am greeting you now,” I said.

“You are commandeering me,” she countered.

She did not rise or call for security.

I felt the first thin thread of relief loosen in my chest.

“There is a woman by the door in green silk,” I said quietly.

“Do not turn to see her.

She believes I have spent three years pining after her.

I intend to disabuse her of that belief tonight, and I have no one to help me do it.”

I turned my head slightly, catching the stranger’s gaze.

“Sit near me.

Laugh once or twice as though I have said something worth laughing at.”

The young woman was silent for a long moment.

She smoothed the fabric of her worn gray glove.

Then, astonishingly, she laughed.

It was a low, warm, entirely natural laugh.

It was so well done that I nearly laughed myself out of sheer surprise.

“There,” she said smoothly.

“Was that convincing?”

“Alarmingly so,” I muttered.

“I will help you, but not because you commanded it,” she noted.

“I will do it because I know that woman by her reputation, and I find I would enjoy watching her lose.

” She extended a gloved hand.

“My name is Brenda Simmons.”

“Craig,” I said, testing the syllables in my mouth.

“Then, Craig, offer me your arm,” she instructed softly.

“Take me somewhere we can be seen.”

I rose and offered her my arm.

Brenda Simmons placed her hand upon my sleeve, and we walked out from behind the ferns.

We made a slow circuit of the room.

Tonight, the whispers held a new note of pure confusion.

The CEO who had turned to stone was walking the room with a plain girl on his arm.

What she said was remarkably worth hearing.

She simply saw people the way a person who has spent years against the wall learns to see them.

I had always believed myself the most watchful man in any room, but I found myself entirely outmatched.

Then, Megan Foster crossed our path.

“Craig, darling,” Megan said, her voice dripping with artificial sympathy.

“How thin you look.

” Her eyes went to Brenda and dismissed her in the exact same motion one dismisses a lost waitress.

“And who is this?”

“May I present Brenda?

” I said, my voice level and cold.

“Simmons?

” Megan smiled thinly.

“I don’t believe I know the family.”

“You would not,” Brenda agreed pleasantly.

“We are very small and very happy.

It tends to keep one out of the larger conversations.”

Brenda smiled up at me.

“I have been trying all evening to persuade Craig that he owes the room at least one dance,” Brenda said.

“He will not be moved.

He says he dances only when it means something.”

It was perfectly executed.

It screamed that whatever Megan had come here to reclaim was already spoken for.

I watched the smile on Megan’s face freeze at the edges.

I felt a savage, silent satisfaction that surprised me with its intense sweetness.

“How charming,” Megan said stiffly before turning on her heel.

We walked to the far end of the room in silence.

“She hurt you a great deal,” Brenda said very softly.

“I don’t believe iron laughs the way you nearly did when I laughed at nothing.

You may keep your secrets, Craig, but I only wanted you to know they are in the hands of someone who will not use them.”

I stared down at her.

“Dance with me,” I heard myself say.

I held out my hand.

“Let it mean something then.

Let it mean I am grateful.”

When the song ended, I did not release her hand.

I knew the performance was over.

I also knew I absolutely did not want her to leave.

“Perhaps I could call on your aunt Barbara?

” I asked abruptly.

“To thank her for the introduction.”

Brenda stepped back.

“You do not have to manufacture a reason to be kind to me.

You are a very great man, and I am a girl who will go home in a rideshare and mend this gown.

By tomorrow, you will have forgotten my name.”

I watched her pull her shawl tight.

“I have not forgotten it,” I said, my voice hardening with sudden resolve.

“And I find I do not intend to.”

For the next two months, I breached my own walls every Thursday afternoon.

I drove my sports car to her shabby townhouse.

I sat by the window and watched Brenda mend her clothes.

I brought her rare books.

She wrote me three-page letters tearing apart my favorite chapters.

Then, yesterday, I arrived for our Thursday visit and found her chair empty.

aunt Barbara was wringing her hands in the hallway.

“She packed her bag and left,” Barbara stammered.

“Megan Foster came by this morning for tea.

They spoke privately, and then Brenda was just… gone.”

There was a folded letter sitting on the bare windowsill where she usually sat.

I tore it open.

“Craig,” it read.

“Megan told me the truth about why you picked me that night.

You needed a prop, and I was conveniently sitting there.

I cannot fault you, but I will not stay to watch your kindness turn into pity or obligation.

I have gone to take a teaching post upstate.

Do not follow me.”

I crushed the letter in my fist.

Megan had poisoned the only real thing in my life.

But as I stood in that empty room, looking at the crumbs on the windowsill, I realized exactly what I had to do next.