Page 22 of Inconvenient Marriage
And I think I’m going to hurl from nerves. “Thank you. I… I’ll see you later.”
“I look forward to it… Annaliese.”
As the phone disconnects, I shudder in place. Annaliese… the way he said my name, so warmly, so possessively… oh, this is a bad idea. A really fucking a bad idea.
But you know what? I’m going to do it anyway.
Once I have a draft for our marital agreement ready for him to go over, that is.
SIX
MARRIAGE AGREEMENT
SEBASTIEN
Ispent the entire day at home, halfway convinced that Annaliese talked herself out of choosing me to be her ‘fake’ husband. That she would’ve done some kind of recon, taken my name and asked around Harmony Heights before being likenopeand backing out.
That’s what I did—minus the backing out part, of course.
I didn’t even have to try that hard. One call to Adrian and, twenty minutes later, I had the deets. Annaliese Crawford. Twenty-five as of February 21st so she’s four years younger than me. She graduated from Harmony Heights High that many years after I did which meant that we never crossed paths in school since I was done the year before she started.
She has a younger sister. Miranda Jane Crawford. Seventeen. That caught my interest. Seventeen and an Offering… she’ll be eighteen in July, and due up for her first Claiming ceremony in August just like Dallas said. No wonder Annaliese said she was looking for a husband for her sister’s sake. She probably didn’t want the fact that she went unClaimed to affect her sister’s future in the Order.
The one thing that Adrian couldn’t find out? Was why no one has already Claimed Annaliese. Dallas mentioned that there were rumors that a member of the old guard had his eye on her, but if they did, they fucked up by not making her theirs when they had the chance.
I already fucked her. In the Order, that’s enough to earn her a brand on her neck if she’s an Offering. Marrying her is the least I can do when my carelessness means that one night with this woman was enough to make her one of the Used.
There’s some confusion about that, too. According to Adrian, rumors run that she’s been blacklisted. While she hasn’t been moved to the Court formally—and, staring at her neck, I can still see she hasn’t been branded—it’s clear that she won’t be attending next August’s Claiming ceremony. If she wants an Owed for a husband, being Bait was her only shot.
Thank fucking God I went out for drinks with Dallas last night so I could be the lucky prick to swoop her up before some other bastard did…
I didn’t know she had once been an Offering. I’ve met my fair share of the pristine princesses that are groomed to end up as a Stepford wife to the men who sell their souls to the Order of the Owed. Virginal and obedient, meek and quiet… none of that describes the woman who took my hand, leading me to that bathroom, fucking me in a stall.
But it was her. The moment I looked into her face, the flash of recognition telling me that she knew who I was—her nameless lover, not Sebastien Reynolds—I was sure she was the one who walked away from me. The woman I haven’t been able to get out of my head for months now, and she was desperate enough to come crawling to the Court to do what so many women in Harmony Heights do: offer herself up to the men who rule it.
I would’ve killed any of them to be the one she chose. I didn’t even give my would-be rivals the chance to take her forthemselves. She went from Bait in my mind tobridethe second our eyes met, and though she refused to come home with me last night—again—she called my number this morning, shaky voice requesting an address where we could meet to lay out our terms in the early evening.
Terms? Fuck that. She can tell me what she wants, I’ll say whatever I have to to have a second chance with the ghost who’s haunted me since that night in the Last Prayer, and nothing will stop this marriage from happening.
Oh, I’m sure there are plenty of those who would insist I slam the brakes if they knew about it. Alexandre, for one. My folks. Dallas would shit a brick if he heard I’d shut down the Bait last night by being the one who got caught by the pretty lure, snagged on her hook. Adrian… okay. Adrian would probably find it highly amusing that the one of us who swore up and down he’d never give in to the Order’s pressures was entering into a secret society-arranged marriage like so many others.
But that’s the thing. It wasn’t arranged by the old guard, the council… even if Dallas tried to force me to get hitched, I’d slap the King upside the back of his head, then tell him to suck my dick first if he wanted to fuck me over. I’d have my fun with the Used, maybe settle down with a townie who was kept out of the Order, or just take my bike up to the mountains and become a hermit before I took a Barbie doll bride and started popping out Reynoldses to grow up into the same insanity that I did.
And then a woman with a determined glint in her eyes and the lushest lips I ever stole a kiss from walked into the King’s Court with an offer I couldn’t refuse and, well, here we are.
Annaliese sits stiffly on the edge of my couch, her arms wrapped tightly around the binder she’s clutching to her chest; the matching one is perched on my thigh. Her legs are crossed demurely at the ankle, a far cry from the woman I fucked in a seedy bar bathroom. Today, she’s wearing another dress thatscreams Offering: soft pink, fitted waist, clean lines. She looks like everything I shouldn’t touch.
I want nothing more in this moment than to touch her anyway. To muss up her perfect updo, to trail my finger down the slender column of her throat, to pluck the pristine fabric to the side and press a kiss to the top of her tit before working my way south…
Down, Bas. Control yourself. If she had any idea how bad I want this… how bad I wanther… she’d take that binder and her offer and run for the door. I have to lock her down first, then do whatever it takes to keep her.
I lean back into my chair across from her, spreading my knees wide, watching her in a way that’s not half as predatory as I feel. I smile, she gulps, and I lazily glance down at the open binder in my lap.
Thank fuck it’s not in legalese. My parents have a lawyer that they assigned to me for whenever I screw up, but the thought of going to old Jerry with this… nah. This is between my future wife and me, just the way I like it. Besides, I’d put money down that this isn’t a legit contract so much as a list of rules and conditions that Annaliese is laying out so that we both know what we’re getting into.
I tap the top page with my fingertip. “So. Marriage agreement. One year.”
“Yes,” she says firmly. She wears an icy expression like armor, swallowing her nerves, her binder a shield as she forces herself to meet my obvious stare. “Then you can walk away. I know the Order doesn’t do divorce, not really, but there are plenty of couples who live separate lives. I just need to have it appear like I’m under your protection until after my sister is Claimed and established. After that, I can take care of myself.”
