Page 19 of Inconvenient Marriage
“Sebastien.”
I try out the sound of his name on my tongue. I don’t think I said it half as well as he did, but the way he whispered in my ear how he doesn’t fuck his friends… yeah. I don’t think I can bring myself to call him Bas if that’s all I am.
He’s Sebastien, and if this actually happens, he’ll be my husband.
Yikes.
I wakeup the next morning with a gasp, heart pounding, sheets twisted around my legs as if I spent the whole night fighting them.
Know what? I might have.
My sleep was a mess of half-dreams—Sebastiens’s voice, Eric’s threats, my sister’s face—everything blurred together like a warning I don’t understand. And that’s a lie. I know exactly why they haunted my consciousness, just like I know what I’ll have to do to make them go away…
Sitting up, I reach around my messy bed for my phone. I find the charging cord first, yanking it toward me. Tugging my phone off of it, I peer down at the screen.
I shudder out a breath.
Okay. It could’ve been worse. Six missed calls—all from Miranda, all before eight—as well as four texts. Three are from Eric, one from Miranda.
I look at hers first.
Randa
Are you awake? Call me.
I glance at the time. It’s ten o’clock, later than I usually sleep. It’s also Thursday. Miranda will be in school. I could call her and she’d totally answer, but I don’t want to get her in trouble. She has lunch at eleven-forty. I’ll just wait to call her then.
Without the excuse to avoid the other three texts, I brace myself and tap on Eric’s name.
EW
We need to talk.
Don’t ignore me.
You owe me a response, Annaliese. Stop this.
No, thanks.
My hands are shaking as I go through the motions that finally block him. If I really do get married, he’ll probably be one of the first to hear about it. I just need to get this done as soon as possible so that Eric doesn’t interfere.
I know him. He’ll expect me to ignore him, get pissed that I am, doing exactly what he accused me of doing—namelysulk—and then reach out again when he feels like it. Sure, there’s a chance someone saw me at the Court and ran right to him, buthere’s hoping that I’m lucky enough that my half an hour visit was missed by Eric’s spies.
That’s the best part of a marriage of convenience. All I have to do is spend an hour or so getting a marriage license with my husband-to-be, sign it, and Eric can fuck off. There’s no need for a wedding. No big to-do. I just want the protection that comes with marrying one of the Owed, and if Sebastien honestly will go along with it, we can be married by tomorrow.
It could be today, but even I’m not that hasty. I spent three years working with Eric. I’d be a fool to marry a stranger—even one as sexy and good-looking and, well,blessedas Sebastien Reynolds—without some sort of protection.
And I don’t mean condoms this time.
I want a contract. A marriage agreement. A set of rules that we can both live by, including the one-year time limit that I’m insisting on. After that, we can go our separate ways. He can be Eric, I can be Cicely, and as long as we stay discreet, we can have our own lives while Miranda and Colton start out theirs.
Of course, that’s assuming that Sebastienwillmarry me. That I want to marryhim.
That depends on what Miranda found out from her friends in the Order. Me… I never had any. By the time I was eighteen, I’d already caught Eric’s eye. I had no idea that he’d basically Claimed me without Claiming me. He was just always there, being sweet, being kind, helping me with Mom’s event planning business before he swooped me away, getting me to work for him.
And once I did? That wasn’t all he wanted from me.
I was his in every way that counted except for in the eyes of the Order. But because he coddled me, protected me, kept me hidden…groomedme, I don’t have the same contacts that my sister does. Something tells me I should know who Sebastien Reynolds is, but I don’t, and I only hope she does.
