Chapter 2

After more than twenty years of living in this world, I had encountered a great many people who confused volume with authority. Saira Stein was simply the latest in a long line.

I looked at her for a moment with what I hoped was a thoughtful expression, tilting my head slightly to one side.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't quite catch that the first time."

Something sharp moved behind her eyes. She repeated it, slower, with the deliberate enunciation of someone who wanted every syllable to land. "Get on your knees. Say it. 'I am a useless nobody.' Three times, loud enough for everyone to hear you." The smile she wore was the kind that expected total surrender. "Then maybe I'll let you leave with whatever's left of your dignity."

I considered this for exactly one second.

Then I laughed.

It came out genuine — the kind of laugh that arrives before you can decide whether it's appropriate — because I had just spent a year in rural Montana sitting with people through the worst moments of their lives, and I had come back to New York to deal with this. The universe had a real sense of humor.

"Now I heard you perfectly," I said, and my voice had gone very calm in the way it sometimes did when something needed to be said clearly. "Here's my answer. You are standing in my way. Step aside and go back to wherever you're supposed to be, because you're blocking my path."

The amusement on Saira's face evaporated completely.

For a moment the atelier was absolutely silent. Then her expression shifted into something harder and uglier than anything she'd shown me yet, and she moved.

She came at me fast, one hand already raised and reaching for my face — nails first, going for skin — and I could see in the reckless momentum of it that she had never once in her life been in a situation where the other person didn't flinch.

I stepped to the side.

It was a small movement, precise and unhurried, the kind of thing you learn when you spend a year in a small town with nothing to do in the evenings except train. She had been moving with all her weight forward and there was nothing to meet her, and the forward force of her attack carried her straight past me. She hit the full-length mirror with both hands and her whole upper body, and the impact rattled the frame and sent a display of veils cascading to the floor.

The room erupted.

Saira pushed herself off the mirror and straightened up, gold hair falling across her face, the contempt in her expression sharpening into something beyond fury — the specific humiliation of someone who had expected an easy victory and received the opposite in front of an audience.

"Miss Stein, are you—"

"She's going to regret this when Aaron hears about—"

I had already turned back to the consultation table.

I reached into my bag and set my card on the glass surface. Matte white, no logo, no bank name — the kind of card that didn't need to announce itself. The senior stylist's eyes dropped to it and stayed there for a beat too long. Something changed in his posture, a subtle recalibration, the kind that happens when a person realizes they have fundamentally misread a situation.

"I'll be purchasing the gown," I said. "Please proceed."

He moved to do so without hesitation this time.

Saira had recovered enough to plant herself between me and the exit, her red heels back on solid ground and her chin lifted. There was a smear of mascara cutting through her foundation that she didn't seem to know was there. "You're not going anywhere," she said, and her voice had taken on a raw, cracking quality that hadn't been there before.

But whatever she intended to say next never arrived.

The atelier door opened.

It didn't announce itself dramatically — it simply opened, and the man who walked through it brought the entire room to a standstill with nothing more than his presence. Every conversation died. The stylists who had been moving toward Saira stopped where they stood. Even the ambient noise of the atelier pulled back, as though the space itself was quietly rearranging to accommodate him.

I looked up from the table.

He was well over six feet, dark-suited, with the kind of build that suggested the suit had been made specifically for him. Sharp jaw, dark eyes that moved across the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who processed environments as a professional habit. He carried no particular expression as he walked in, which somehow made him more commanding rather than less — a man so accustomed to being the most significant person in any given room that he had long since stopped needing to perform it.

*Damn,* I thought, with the private honesty of someone whose inner voice at least still belonged to her. *No wonder Willie thought I'd agree without asking questions.*

Saira's transformation was instantaneous. Whatever raw emotion had been written across her face a moment ago was gone, replaced by the practiced fragility of someone who knew exactly how to deploy tears for maximum effect. She crossed the room and reached him, her voice coming out broken and breathless.

"Aaron — she attacked me. She took the gown I wanted and when I confronted her she shoved me into the mirror, sent everything flying. I have never been treated like this." She pressed close to him, her hand curling around his arm. "She even called your private number somehow. She's been making a scene this whole time."

Aaron's gaze moved across the room — the scattered veils on the floor, the watching clients, Saira — and then it settled on me.

He didn't recognize me. I set down my bag and looked back at him with the calm of someone who had decided, somewhere around the third insult, that she was done being rattled.

"I'm Lynn Lune," I said. "Your fiancée. It's a pleasure to finally meet you in person."

The silence that followed had a particular quality to it.

Something behind Aaron's eyes recalibrated — a recognition that the terrain was not what he had assumed. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he spoke with the flat certainty of someone who expected to be obeyed without discussion.

"Do yourself a favor. Tell your brother to cancel whatever arrangement my father made. That contract was his decision, not mine. I never agreed to any of it." He held my gaze without apology. "I don't know who you are, and I don't need to."

Saira's grip on his arm tightened visibly, and she turned back toward me with her confidence fully restored. "You heard him," she said. "He doesn't want you. He has never wanted you." She let her gaze travel over me with theatrical pity, taking her time. "Did you really come all the way back from that little dirt-road town in Montana thinking someone like Aaron Scott was going to choose someone like you? Go back to your hiking trails and your small-town therapy sessions." Her voice dropped into something colder. "New York has no use for people who were raised in the middle of nowhere and have nothing to show for it."

The clients around us began to murmur.

"She actually thought she could just walk in here—"

"Nobody with any real standing has ever heard of her—"

"She doesn't belong anywhere near him and anyone can see it—"

I let the room talk. I had grown up listening to people who said things like this, and I had learned a long time ago that the ones who needed an audience to feel powerful were exactly as fragile as they appeared.

I looked at Aaron for one long, final moment — the impeccable suit, the controlled authority, the face that gave very little away, and the arm that hadn't moved to put any distance between himself and Saira.

I shook my head slowly.

"Do me a favor," I said, and my voice came out clear and even, carrying across the room without any effort at all. "Tell your father to cancel the engagement."

I picked up my bag from the table and turned toward the door.

"You're not worthy of me."