My question makes Arthur smile with one corner of his mouth, like fully committing to grinning is too exhausting. Unfortunately, it’s slightly attractive. Blame the absent birth father, mostly absent birth mother of it all, but there’s just something about a tired man. My worst, most basic primal instincts scream that he’s worn out from taking care of a large family and/or farm.
And… no. That’s not a real thought I just had. I’m just not used to people—men, Arthur—coming to me for help. It gave me a minor contact high.
“I need you to give it to me straight, Graywood,” he continues. “What’s the thing that gets me out of the contract, without a doubt?”
My heart isn’t beating faster. It isn’t. “Shouldn’t you ask Delaney or Cameron or—or Sarah?”
“The granddaughter of my uncle’s best friend and the manager of my public image?”
“Right, forgot everyone’s related.”
He laughs quietly. “That’s your power. You’re an outsider.”
Lovely. Outsider is code fortemporary. Disposable. As Dad would say:They’re not from around here.At the same time, though, Arthur isn’t wrong, and I worry my lip as I go to stand next to him below the restaurant’s cream awning. “Okay, so clearly, you need to get fired. That makes it so Leone doesn’t have to pay anything, and with Holmes being your uncle, there’s got to be a way to piss him off that wouldn’t endanger your professional reputation. Something personal. That way, if Leone does hear about it, they wouldn’t care. You could… crash your yacht? Tell him you’re not having kids? What makes him mad?”
Arthur actually smiles, all the way. “Besides me not doing what he wants?” He tilts his chin into his hand, thinking. After a moment, his eyes find mine, and a tiny thrill shoots across my collarbones at the way he focuses on me. “We could play our ace.”
“I, uh.” Great. Stammering. “What’s our ace?”
He takes a breath. “I believe you called it ‘fake dating.’?”
Thankfully, nobody else has wandered outside, so when I make an extremely weird gasp, only Arthur hears it. “No.” The shock flooding my system drags the word out into five unique syllables. “Sorry, but… I, that would be—no.”
“I get it. You hate me.” As Arthur talks, his gaze shifts to myhand. I’ve pressed a palm against the restaurant for stability. “And you don’t want to play into my reputation.”
“Play into me being a poor, younger woman and you being a rich, famous man, so of course, we have to be falling in love.”
“It’s a narrative, and the narrative would work for our plan.”
“You’re forgetting that they’d fireme. Not you.” I stare at him, more than incredulous. “And there’d be nothing you could do about it.”
“Only if we aren’t careful,” Arthur says, leaning to put his hand on the wall, too. But unlike me, he’s confident and clear, eyes bright, and I realize with startling clarity that he’s put thought into this plan. “Holmes needs Black & Graywood’s documentary to come out. You told me that a documentarian and a movie star—”
“Subject matter—”
“—can’t date. So we don’t date in a way he can prove until you’ve finished filmingyourmovie. It won’t be fake dating, more like… fake courtship. Things they can cover up and scrub off the internet, which they will, because this film is a cornerstone of the marketing budget for the next five years. Everything’s riding on it. The new circuit, new fans. And they hired Black & Graywood specifically because of how you spun that congressman’s image. They want me, but they need you, too.” Arthur looks at his hand. Mine. Ours, inches apart. “And Holmes would fire me for being with you. He’s always had a plan for how I’m to live my life, and that—it doesn’t include a scandal.”
It’s a nice way to phrase it. A painful truth, but nice. Wewouldbe a scandal. Arthur has a reputation for dating beautiful, rich, famous women, many of them, and if I were his fan or sponsor or overbearing uncle, would I really want to see him pick a broke camera fiend from Kentucky, who was hired to watch himbut never touch? No. Things like Formula 1 work because they’re closed off from the rest of the world. Self-sustaining ecosystems, like glass terrariums or Hollywood. As badly as us common folk may think we can break into their glamorous world, we can’t. It has to remain elusive. If anyone normal pierces the veil, it ruins the illusion that these people are special, inaccessible, important.
Arthur and I are from two different worlds. He’s fast, I’m slow. He’s rich, I’m not. There’s no happily ever after here, even for the most optimistic dreamer. That’s the point.
He’s destined for a Delaney or a Sarah or whoever he was talking about on the radio.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” I say carefully. “Our movie was going to be great—I really felt that today. But this is real, scary money, and I don’t know if I can trust that gossip about us won’t leave the F1 containment zone. It’s unethical to help you andreallyunethical to date you and… if anyone in my industry found out, either way, no one would take me seriously anymore.”
Arthur’s face falls. Fast, like the houses of cards I’d make at my kitchen table as a kid while the adults played poker in the other room, kings and queens and aces fluttering to the floor. Then it’s gone. “Sure,” he says. “Your reputation is more serious.”
“And after what happened with Max…”
How can I trust Arthur Bianco? He’s infinitely more dangerous than Max. More dominant, more taboo, more aware of exactly how to get under my skin. And he’s chasing his own dream—one that doesn’t include me, like Max’s used to. Formula 1 seems to be an exceptionally expensive game of musical chairs, and I’ve seen what happens when I stop being useful to my partner. Who’s to say that the second the music stops, Arthur won’t pull out my chair from under me, so that he can sit with Leone?
Arthur pushes off the wall to stand, and I almost expect him toleave me here, now that I’ve shot him down. Then he sucks in one cheek and says, “Sleep on it. Don’t make a decision until the race. I know this must be hard.”
“Hard?”
“I’m sure you were in love with him. Max.”
I blink.
