Ethan’s pov
My father built an empire with his hands.
I never imagined I would inherit it through a marriage contract.
People assume my life is simple because it’s comfortable.
They see the car, the name on the building downtown, and they think that’s the whole story.
What they don’t see is the weight underneath it.
Every mistake I make becomes a headline by morning and a shareholder lawsuit by afternoon.
My father used to say that money doesn’t buy freedom, it buys responsibility with better furniture.
I used to think he was being dramatic.
I don’t think that anymore.
I was still thinking about the woman from the lounge three days later, which annoyed me more than I wanted to admit.
I didn’t know her last name and hadn’t asked for a number.
I told myself it was better that way, cleaner, the kind of thing that stays a good memory instead of becoming a complication.
Then my phone rang at six in the morning, “Sir, rush down here, your father has collapsed in the middle of a shareholders’ briefing,” my father’s assistant screamed down the line as I picked.”He’s being rushed to the hospital now.”
I drove down to the hospital as fast as I could, rushing down to his room.
“Your father suffered a significant stroke,” the doctor explained.
“He’s stable, but the damage to his speech center is extensive. We don’t yet know how much will return.”
I stood there, staring through a window at the man who had never once in thirty-one years shown me what it looked like to be afraid, and now he was lying in a bed with tubes running into his arm, “Dad.”
I sat in the hallway for an hour asking questions nobody could answer, Instead they kept saying it was bad luck and blood pressure.
I didn’t believe in bad luck.
My father didn’t raise me to believe in bad luck.
He raised me to believe that things happen because someone, somewhere, made them happen, and your job is to find out who.
The company didn’t pause to grieve with me.
Three days after the stroke, our head of legal, Gerald Whitfield, called an emergency meeting in the boardroom.
“There’s a clause,” he said, sliding a thick folder across the table, “in the family trust agreement governing controlling interest in Vance Shipping.”
“I’ve read the trust,” I said.
“I helped draft half of it.”
“Not this section.” He turned to a tabbed page and pushed his glasses up his nose.
“It was added eighteen months ago.
Your father’s signature is on it.
It states that in the event the CEO becomes incapacitated, the named successor,” he looked at me, “must be legally married within six weeks of the event, or controlling interest transfers to a board-appointed trustee until a court determines permanent succession.”
I laughed, “That’s absurd. My father would never write something like that into a legal document.”
“His signature says otherwise.”
“Then his signature is wrong.
Or someone got to him.” I stood up, “Six weeks?
To get married?
Who wrote this, some board member with a grudge and a law degree?”
“The clock started the morning of the stroke,” Gerald said quietly.
“You have five weeks and four days left.”
I spent the next two hours on the phone with three different attorneys, each of them confirming what I refused to accept.
The clause was real.
It was airtight.
The next morning, they had this too-careful sympathy on their faces, “Do you need to take some time, we just want to make sure the company is in steady hands during this difficult transition, Ethan.” Victor Ashford said that last part directly to my face, folding his hands on the table.
Victor had been on the board since before I was born, my father’s oldest friend in the business.
I’d never once questioned his loyalty, I was starting to wonder if that had been a mistake.
“I appreciate the concern,” I told him.
“I’m handling it.”
“Of course you are,” Victor said, smiling.
“We just want what’s best for the company your father built.”
I left that meeting understanding two things with total clarity.
First, that someone wanted me distracted, gone, and they’d chosen the exact moment my father couldn’t defend me to make their move.
Second, that I had five weeks to find a wife, and I was not going to lose my father’s company to a boardroom full of vultures because of a legal technicality.
Daniel found me in my office that evening.
We’d known each other since university, and he had a talent for showing up exactly when I needed someone who wasn’t billing me by the hour.
“Heard about the clause,” he said, dropping into the chair across from my desk.
“Whole floor’s talking about it.”
“Wonderful. My personal crisis as office gossip.”
“You look like you haven’t slept.”
“I haven’t.” I rubbed a hand over my face.
“Six weeks, Daniel. A wife in six weeks or I lose everything my father built.”
“So don’t lose it.” He shrugged like it was simple.
“Marry someone. Doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself.”
“Then believe yourself for once.” He raised his glass slightly, “You’ll figure it out, you always do.”
What I needed was a transaction.
A contract with an expiration date, clean terms, no complications, no risk of some woman deciding six weeks in that she actually wanted a real marriage, or worse, deciding she wanted my money more than she wanted to leave when it ended.
My assistant found the agency.
The Wickford Group specialized in exactly this.
“You understand the terms,” their director said to me over the phone, “Full compensation, all debts cleared, a generous settlement at the conclusion of the arrangement. In exchange, complete discretion and a convincing public appearance of marriage for the agreed period.”
“I understand the terms,” I said.
“Find someone who can handle the scrutiny. I don’t have time to train someone through a crash course in high society.”
“We have an excellent candidate. She’ll meet you tomorrow, ten a.m., the downtown office. I think you’ll find her very capable.”
I told myself it didn’t matter who walked through that door.
I arrived early the next morning, coffee in hand, rehearsing the terms I intended to lay out before either of us said a single unnecessary word.
The door opened at exactly ten and every rehearsed word I had died in my throat.
Because standing in the doorway, wearing an expression that told me she was having exactly the same impossible moment I was, was the woman I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since the night I walked out of that hotel room without asking her name.
“Zara.”