The Billionaire's Contract Wife

Chapter One

Marry Me

The night Ethan Carter ended seven years in four sentences, I sat on the floor of our bathroom and counted the tiles.

Forty-two. White. Cold.

Not our bathroom anymore. His bathroom. The apartment I'd helped choose, the towels I'd bought in Paris, the life I'd spent seven years carefully, stupidly building — all of it dissolved in a phone call while I stood with a bag of takeout going cold in my hand.

He'd found someone else. He was sorry. He hoped I'd understand.

I didn't throw anything. I didn't scream. I just sat on the floor and counted tiles until my body remembered how to be a body again.

It was past midnight when I finally left. I took nothing except my coat and my portfolio case — the one with six months of designs I'd been working on, because apparently some instinct in me understood that my work was the only thing in that apartment that had ever truly belonged to me.

The city outside was indifferent and alive. I walked without direction. The February air was sharp enough to be useful — something to feel that wasn't the particular humiliation of realizing you'd loved someone who had been quietly making an exit for months while you drew wedding dress sketches in the margins of your notebooks.

I ended up at a bar I'd never been to. Dark wood. Low light. The kind of place that doesn't ask questions.

I ordered scotch. I didn't even like scotch. I ordered it because it seemed like the kind of drink a woman orders when she is not falling apart.

I was absolutely falling apart.

I'd been sitting there for twenty minutes, the glass untouched, when someone slid into the seat across from me.

I looked up.

Lucas Lancaster didn't look like a man who found himself in ordinary bars. He was exactly what the tabloids said he was — tall, dark-suited, impossibly composed, the kind of handsome that operates less like beauty and more like a warning. His jaw was cut clean. His eyes were a dark gray I'd noticed exactly once before, at a charity event two years ago, across a crowded room.

He'd looked at me then the same way he was looking at me now.

Like he was calculating something.

"Sophia Bennett," he said. Not a question.

"Lucas Lancaster." I matched his tone. "This is a strange coincidence."

"It isn't one."

I set down my untouched glass. Of course it wasn't. "How did you know where I was?"

"Your doorman. I went to your apartment first." A pause. "I heard about Ethan."

"Did you." It came out flat. "I'm going to need you to get to the point, because I've had a very long night and I'm not in the mood for—"

"Marry me."

The bar noise continued around us. Someone laughed at a table nearby. A glass clinked.

I stared at him.

Lucas Lancaster — the most powerful bachelor in the city, the man every socialite had been circling for a decade, the CEO who'd been called cold-blooded by three separate business magazines — was sitting across from me in a quiet bar on the worst night of my life, looking at me with those calculating gray eyes.

"Marry me," he said again. Calm. Certain. Like he was proposing a clause in a contract, not the rest of someone's life.

My mouth opened. Nothing came out.

For the first time in four hours, I forgot to count tiles.