Page 7 of Marrying the Pakhan

She follows without hesitation, which either means she’s braver than she looks or that she has no idea which building she’s in.

Either way, I’m intrigued now.

The hallway’s quieter, just the muffled thump of the bass through the wall and the hum of the ice machine. She stops by the wall, arms crossed loosely, working up to whatever she came here to say, and I use the pause to actually look at her.

She’s younger than I first thought, maybe late twenties, with an exhausted, wired energy, like someone who hasn’t slept properly in weeks.

Her eyes are a warm brown, tired at the edges, and there’s a tension in her shoulders that hasn’t let up since she walked in.

I notice her mouth before I mean to. I notice the line of her throat when she swallows, working up her nerve.

None of this is helping me figure out what she wants.

“I’m Harper Wilcox,” she says finally, holding out her hand as if this were a job interview.

“Viktor.” I take her hand. Her grip is firmer than I expect, and warmer.

“Okay. Viktor.” She exhales like she’s talked herself into something. “I have kind of a strange offer, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you say no.”

“I’m listening.”

“I need a husband. Not forever. Just for a few months, maybe six at most.” She says it fast, like ripping off a bandage is easier than peeling it slowly. “I’m fighting a custody case for my niece. Her grandparents are arguing I’m unstable, unmarried, not enough. If I’m married, that argument mostly falls apart.”

I stare at her. Somewhere behind me, through the wall, a song changes and the crowd cheers for absolutely no reason I can identify.

“You’re proposing to me.”

“I’m proposing a contract.” Color rises in her face, but she doesn’t look away from me. “Money, obviously. I’ve got a trust from my grandparents I can’t touch until I’m married, so once we sign, that’s real money, not a promise. We do it at the courthouse, quick, nothing dramatic, and once the case is settled, we file for divorce, and you never have to think about me again.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you look older than everyone else working the floor tonight, which honestly is a plus, and I know you didn’t laugh in my face in the first ten seconds, which most men would have.” A ghost of a smile crosses her mouth, gone fast. “I’m not asking you to fall in love with me. I’m asking you to sign a piece of paper and stand next to me in front of a judge a few times.”

I should tell her who I am. That I don’t dance for anyone, that the men on that stage work for me, that agreeing to anything with a stranger who walked in off the street could get men in my business killed.

I don’t say any of that.

What I say is, “What’s in it for me, beyond the money?”

“Nothing,” she says, blunt enough that it startles a short laugh out of me. “I’m not going to pretend this is anything but what it is. You’d be doing me a favor I can’t repay any other way.”

I look at her for a long moment, longer than I need to, and she holds still and lets me, which tells me more about her than anything she’s said so far.

There’s no reason to say yes. I don’t need her money. I don’t need the complication of a stranger’s name tied to mine on a legal document, not in my life, not with the people who’d notice.

But there’s a flat honesty in her, the way she laid the whole thing out without dressing it up as anything softer than a transaction, that I haven’t run into in years. Everyone who wants something from me wraps it in flattery first. She didn’t bother.

“All right,” I say.

Harper blinks. “All right?”

“I’ll marry you.”

“Just like that?”

“You said it yourself. It’s a contract.” I hold out my hand again, and after a beat, she takes it. “We’ll work out the terms. Bring a lawyer if you want one.”

“I have one.”