She Interviewed 100 Women to Marry the Billionaire – Then He Asked, “Why Aren’t You My Bride?”
She Interviewed 100 Women To Marry The Billionaire—But He Asked Why She Wasn’t A Candidate
The list was a hundred names long, and not one of them was hers.
Ren Halloway smoothed the printed pages against the marble counter and read the header again, because the header was the whole absurd job in six words. *Candidate Interviews: 100 Brides.* Below it, alphabetized, ran a column of women any magazine would have called eligible. An heiress. A concert cellist. Two attorneys. A woman who owned three vineyards before thirty.
And she — Ren — was the person hired to sit across a table from every one of them and decide, on behalf of a man she had met exactly twice, which of them might be persuaded to marry him.
“You’re certain the number is a hundred,” she said. “Not ninety. Not a comfortable human number like twelve.”
“Mr. Vale prefers round figures.” The woman beside her did not look up. Priya Anand ran the household the way a lighthouse ran a coast — steady, unhurried, missing nothing. She set a glass of iced lemon water at Ren’s elbow, and the ice cracked as it settled, a small bright sound in the huge, quiet kitchen. “He also prefers the interviews finished before the season ends.”
Outside the tall windows, the July morning lay across the estate in flat gold. Heat already shimmered off the stone terrace. The lawns rolled down toward a lake that threw the light back in pieces, and somewhere below, a gardener’s shears clipped a slow rhythm through the boxwood.
Two weeks ago, she had been arranging folding chairs in a church basement in Arsley for a wedding of ninety guests and a budget of nothing. Now she was here.
“Priya.” Ren turned the pages face down. “Can I ask you something, and you tell me the truth? Not the house version.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Why me? Vale Holdings could hire any matchmaking firm on the Eastern Seaboard. Firms with chandeliers in the lobby. I plan community center weddings. My office is above a dry cleaner.”
For the first time, Priya looked at her directly, and something in the older woman’s dark eyes was almost amused. Almost sorry.
“Maybe that is the reason,” she said. “You may find, Miss Halloway, that a man drowning in chandeliers is very tired of chandeliers.” She straightened a stack of linen napkins that did not need straightening. “He will see you at eleven. Don’t be early. He hates being watched while he decides how to begin.”
Ren had said yes because of the number on the check, if she was honest, and she tried to be honest with herself even when it was unflattering. Her mother’s care facility had raised its rates in the spring. The good one. The one with the garden her mother could still name the flowers in on her clear days.
At eleven, she followed Priya out onto the upper terrace, where the heat wrapped around her like a held breath. A striped awning threw a wedge of shade over a table, and at the table, in shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm, sat Adrien Vale.
She had forgotten in two weeks how still he was. Not calm — still the way a held cup of water is still. The way something is still when it is spending all its effort not to spill.
“Miss Halloway.” He said her name as though checking it against a document. “Sit. You’ll want to be out of the sun.”
“I’ve survived sun before.”
“Not this terrace’s.” A muscle moved near his mouth that might, in a more generous man, have become a smile.
She sat. A pitcher sweated on the table between them. He poured for her without asking, which she noticed, and handed her the glass, which she noticed more.
“You’ve read the list,” he said.
“I’ve read the list. It’s a hundred women who don’t know they’re being auctioned.”
“You’ll want that phrased more delicately for them.”
“I’ll phrase it delicately. But I’d rather not phrase it delicately to you, if that’s all the same. You’re paying me too much for me to be one more person who tells you the polite version.”
The stillness in him shifted — not broke, shifted, the way lake ice shifts a long moment before you hear it. He turned from the water and looked at her fully for the first time, and his eyes were a gray so pale they seemed to have had the color argued out of them.
“Priya warned me you’d do that.”
“Priya seems wise.”
“Priya is the only wise thing I own.” He leaned back. “Here is what you are being paid too much to do, Miss Halloway. In eleven weeks, I am required — not choosing, required — to be married. My grandfather built Vale Holdings out of a single quarry and a great deal of stubbornness, and when he set up the family trust, he wrote in a condition that would embarrass a Victorian. The controlling shares pass to me on my thirty-fifth birthday only if I am, on that day, a married man. If I am not, they pass to the board — men who would sell the quarries, the mills, the towns those mills hold up, and be at lunch by one.” His jaw tightened. “Eleven weeks. My birthday is in September.”
Ren was quiet a moment. “It sounds,” she said carefully, “like your grandfather didn’t trust you to choose your own life.”
Something crossed his face so fast she almost missed it, and it was not anger. It was the look of a man who has had a bruise pressed by accident, by a stranger, in exactly the place he keeps covered.
“My grandfather trusted very few people. He had reasons.” He reached for the pages, squared them, did not read them. “I don’t need love, Miss Halloway. I’ve watched what people do to each other in its name. I need a competent, dignified woman who understands that this is a contract, who will stand beside me at the events the shareholders attend, and who will otherwise keep her own life. In return, she’ll want for nothing. Your job is to find her.”
“I checked you out too,” she said. “I sat in the back of a wedding you planned in June. The Alvarez wedding, that hall with the water stain shaped like Florida on the ceiling.” For a fraction of a second, the gray eyes warmed, and it changed his whole face. “You spent the reception moving a grandmother’s chair three separate times so she’d never once have her back to the dancing. Nobody asked you to. Nobody noticed but me. I decided then I’d rather have that eye choosing than any firm with a chandelier.”
Ren felt the compliment land somewhere under her ribs, and did not entirely trust it. Still — he had seen the chair. Almost no one saw the chair.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll find her. But I want three things clear first.”
“Naturally you do.”
“One. I interview them alone. No cameras, no assistant, no you behind a curtain. Two. The moment I think one of them is being hurt by this — thinking it’s a love story when it’s a spreadsheet — I take her out of the running, and you don’t argue. And three—” She stopped.
“Three,” he prompted.
“I’ll want to know why. Not now. But before I hand you a name, I’ll want to know why a man who could have anyone decided the safest thing to do with his one life was to marry a stranger from a list. Because I can’t help you choose well if I don’t know what you’re actually afraid of. And you are afraid of something, Mr. Vale. Competent, dignified women don’t frighten anybody. So you’re not really shopping for a wife. You’re shopping for a wall.”
PART 2
The shears down in the boxwood had stopped. The whole terrace held its heat and its silence, and Adrien Vale looked at her for long enough that she began to think she’d priced herself out of the strangest job of her life in under ten minutes.
Then he laughed. Short and rusty — a sound that seemed to surprise him more than her.
“A wall,” he said. “God. Priya, wherever you’re listening — you’ve hired me a demolition expert.”
“I heard nothing,” came Priya’s serene voice from just inside, and Ren bit down on a smile.
“Very well, Miss Halloway.” He stood at last, taller than the stillness had let her guess. “Your three things. Agreed. The first interview is Monday. You’ll work from the East Library. It locks — which women who are telling the truth apparently require.” He paused. “And you’ll live here for the eleven weeks. It’s a hundred conversations. You can’t do that from above a dry cleaner. I know your mother’s rates went up in April. I checked that too. The facility is forty minutes closer to this house than to your apartment. I’m not offering it as a leash, Miss Halloway. I’m offering it as forty minutes. Take it or don’t.”
She should have been furious. Part of her was. But under the fury was the arithmetic of forty minutes of Sunday afternoons in a garden full of delphinium, and he had known she would do the arithmetic, and she resented him for being right and could not afford to.
“I’ll take the library,” she said. “And the forty minutes. Not the leash.”
“Understood.” He gathered the pages and held them out to her. A hundred names — a whole summer of other women’s hopes.
“Welcome to the strangest job of your life.”
“You’ve no idea,” she said, taking them, “how right you are.”
