Chapter 1: Clause Nine
CLAUSE NINE. The Parties acknowledge that this arrangement is a matter of mutual convenience. Neither Party shall develop, express or act upon romantic feelings toward the other for the duration of the Term. Breach of this clause shall be grounds for immediate dissolution.
You read it three times in the back seat of the Rolls on the way up the hill to Wayne Manor, and on the third pass you laughed out loud, and the driver, who was also the butler, who was also apparently the author, met your eyes in the rearview mirror.
"Something amusing, madam?"
"Who writes a clause like this?"
"I do, madam. On instruction." Alfred Pennyworth turned the car through a pair of iron gates taller than your apartment building. "Master Bruce was very particular about Clause Nine."
"Was he."
"He was," Alfred said, and his tone was so perfectly neutral that it went all the way around neutral and came out the other side as commentary.
It had started, like most disasters in Gotham, at a party.
The Wayne Foundation's December gala was the biggest booking Hollis & Vine had ever landed, and the last one it was likely to land, given that your former business partner had left in October with your client list, the company account, and four hundred and twelve thousand dollars in loans he'd taken out with your forged signature. You'd done two hundred centerpieces in white amaryllis and black-dyed eucalyptus with your last line of credit. You'd done them beautifully. You were going to do them beautifully if it killed you, and then you were going to go home and look at the letter from the bank again.
Around ten, you were in the service corridor behind the ballroom with a box of spare stems, fixing an arrangement a senator's wife had knocked over, when a door at the end of the hall opened and Bruce Wayne walked out of it.
Not swaggered. You'd seen him swagger all night, champagne in hand, laughing too loudly at things that weren't funny, kissing the hands of women who'd been married longer than he'd been alive. This was different. He came out of the door with his tie already loose and his face completely empty of that big golden-retriever grin, and he walked fast and silent toward the loading dock with his phone to his ear.
"How many?" he said, very low. A voice like gravel under a tire. "Where? No. I'll be there in twelve."
Then he saw you.
For half a second neither of you moved. You were holding a fistful of amaryllis. He was holding a phone that he lowered, slowly, and you watched him decide what to be. You actually watched it. The empty face filled up again, like somebody pouring wine into a glass, and the grin came back, crooked and boyish and a little drunk.
"Hey," said Bruce Wayne. "Lost. Very lost. Big house."
"It's your house."
"Is it? They all look the same after midnight."
"It's ten fifteen."
Footsteps at the other end of the corridor. Voices. Somebody calling, "Mr. Wayne? Mr. Wayne, the board's waiting for the toast." And on his face, just for an instant, under the grin, something so tired it made your chest hurt.
You didn't think. That would be your excuse later; you didn't think. You grabbed his loosened tie in your free hand, opened the door of the catering walk-in beside you, and pulled Gotham's most eligible bachelor into a refrigerator full of shrimp.
The door swung shut on its hinge. It was very cold and very bright and smelled like lemons and ice. He stood absolutely still with your hand on his tie and his phone in his hand and looked at you like a man who'd been ambushed by a lot of things in his life but never by a florist.
"What—"
"Shh."
Outside, the footsteps came, slowed. Somebody said, "Did he come this way?" Somebody else said, "Try the loading dock."
You took a breath. You mussed your own hair with both hands, hard. You dragged a fingertip across your lipstick to smudge it. Then you opened the walk-in door about six inches and stuck your head out at two very startled event coordinators and a man in a tuxedo with a tan that was frankly unreasonable for Gotham in December.
"Sorry," you said, breathless, mortified, and not entirely acting. "We're. Sorry. He'll be right out."
The tanned man's eyebrows went up into his silver hair. Over your shoulder, Bruce Wayne, without missing a beat, called out in a voice of tremendous satisfaction, "Two minutes, Gerald!"
You shut the door.
He was looking at you. The grin was gone again. In the white light of the refrigerator his eyes were very blue and very sharp and very, very sober.
"Loading dock is through the kitchen and left," you said. "Nobody's back there but the dishwashers and they don't care. You've got twelve minutes, right?"
He said nothing for a long moment.
"Thank you," he said finally, in the gravel voice, the real one. Then he was gone through the far door of the walk-in, which you hadn't even known was there, and you were alone with the shrimp.
The photo ran on the front page of the Gotham Gazette's society section the next morning. Some caterer with a phone. You, with your smudged lipstick and your hair like a bird's nest, coming out of a walk-in refrigerator. Behind you, out of focus, a tall figure straightening his tie. The headline was WAYNE'S COLD FEET? and the subhead was MYSTERY FLORIST CAUGHT IN COOLER WITH BILLIONAIRE.
By noon your shop phone had rung sixty times. By two you'd unplugged it. By four, a silver-haired man in a black three-piece suit was standing in the doorway of Hollis & Vine, looking at the dead hydrangeas and the eviction notice taped to the register with an expression of polite, bottomless sympathy.
"Madam," he said. "My employer would like to make you an offer."
Wayne Manor's library had a fireplace you could have parked a car in, two storeys of books, a ladder on rails, and in the middle of it, behind a desk the size of a lifeboat, Bruce Wayne in a grey sweater with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
Not the gala Bruce Wayne. Not the morning-show Bruce Wayne who crashed sports cars into fountains and bought yachts on a dare. This one stood up when you came in. This one had a copy of the contract in front of him, annotated in two colors of ink.
"Thank you for coming," he said. "Sit. Please. Can Alfred get you anything?"
"An explanation."
"Tea, then," said Alfred, and withdrew.
Bruce sat back down. He folded his hands on the desk. There was a healing cut on the back of the left one, fresh, angry, that hadn't been there at the gala.
"My board," he said, "is trying to have me declared unfit to vote my shares."
"Are you?"
"Probably." He didn't smile. "A man named Gerald Kessler, who you met last night outside the shrimp, has spent two years building a case that I'm reckless, unstable and incapable of running my father's company. He's not entirely wrong. In March there's a vote. If he wins, Wayne Enterprises gets broken up and sold to people I wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stand."
"And you need a fiancée because?"
"Because Lucius," he said, with deep weariness, "is a genius, and Lucius thinks the board will find it a great deal harder to call me unstable if I'm publicly settled down with a sensible woman who owns a small business and is visibly not a supermodel. No offense."
"Some taken."
"And because, as of this morning, every newspaper in Gotham thinks I'm sleeping with you," he went on, "and the board meeting yesterday was the first time in five years Kessler looked rattled." He slid the contract across the desk. "One season. Through the March vote. Public appearances, a ring, a few interviews. You'd have your own suite here, your own car, a clothing account. And upon completion, Wayne Enterprises' legal team makes your former partner's debt disappear."
"All four hundred thousand?"
"Four hundred and twelve thousand, three hundred and six dollars. And we find him." His eyes were steady on yours. "That part's not in the contract. That part's free."
You picked up the contract. You flipped to the back, then to the front, then to page four.
"Clause Nine," you said.
"Clause Nine."
"No feelings."
"It seemed prudent," Bruce Wayne said, "to be clear." There was something in the way he said it, careful and flat, a door closing quietly in a long hallway.
You looked at him over the paper. At the cut on his hand, at the shadows under his eyes that his public self never seemed to have, at the slight stiffness in how he sat, favoring his right side, as if his ribs hurt.
"What were you going to do in twelve minutes?" you asked.
His face didn't change. That was what you'd remember: it didn't change at all. "Leave a boring party."
"You looked like someone had called to tell you a building was on fire."
"I have a lot of buildings."
"Uh-huh." You put the contract down. You picked up a pen from his desk, an absurd fountain pen that probably cost more than your van, and in the margin of page four, in neat block capitals, you wrote:
CLAUSE NINE (A). Party B will not ask where Party A goes at night. Party A will come back.
You turned it around and pushed it across to him.
He read it. He read it again. Something moved in his jaw. When he looked up at you, the blue of his eyes was very dark in the firelight, and for a second you thought you'd gone too far.
"Why would you care whether I come back?" he asked quietly.
"Because I'm not going to be the first fake fiancée in history to get widowed," you said. "Bad for my business. People would talk."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not the gala grin. Something much smaller, rustier, like a door that hadn't been opened in a long time.
He initialed the margin.
You signed on the last page. He signed under you. Alfred came in with the tea at exactly that moment, which you would later decide could not possibly have been a coincidence, and set the tray down, and then, from his inside pocket, produced a small, worn box of dark red leather and placed it in front of Bruce.
Bruce looked at it for a long moment without touching it.
"Alfred."
"Sir. It will be photographed. Every jeweler in Gotham will be asked to identify it. A new one would be traced to its purchase within the hour, and the papers would say you bought it the morning after a photograph in a refrigerator." Alfred's voice was mild as milk. "This one is beyond reproach."
Bruce opened the box.
It was a ring, very old, a single pearl set in a narrow band of gold and ringed with tiny diamonds, and the moment you saw it you understood that you were not looking at a prop. You were looking at something that had been kept in a drawer, wrapped in cloth, for a very long time.
"It was my mother's," said Bruce Wayne.
The fire popped. Nobody breathed.
He held it out to you across the desk, on his palm, not on one knee. Just held it out, his face perfectly composed, while something underneath the composure was very much not.
"It's only for the season," he said.
You took it. It fit, which was unfair. You looked at it on your hand, and you looked at the contract beside it, at Clause Nine in Alfred's beautiful typeface.
"This," you said, "is going to be a problem."
Alfred picked up the tea tray again, apparently having forgotten to pour.
"Yes, madam," he said serenely, on his way to the door. "I rather hoped it would."