SLOANE POV
The wedding is twelve minutes long and I take notes on all of it. The registrar's careful neutrality. The staff arranged at precise distances, present enough to witness, far enough to disappear.
The triplets on the staircase in matching coats, Emmet still faintly damp-faced, Jasper watching everything, Rowe looking at me with the same flat assessment he gave me in the doorway this morning.
I look back but he doesn't look away.
Caelan Maddox: six foot two, dark hair, a face built for controlled communication, and not once during the entire twelve minutes does he look at me. Not when the registrar begins, not when I sign. Not even at the end, that small reflexive moment most people can't avoid, the instinct to check the face of the person you've just bound yourself to.
I note this, A man who will not look at me during the wedding ceremony is a man I can work around. It also means one of two things: either he's disciplined enough to treat this as pure transaction, which I can respect, or he's ashamed of it, which I can use. I haven't decided which yet.
The reception dinner is just the two of us across a table wide enough. I eat the dessert — it's excellent, I've been in this body for less than eight hours and I've already discovered it has better taste than I do and I watch Caelan Maddox in my peripheral vision the way I used to watch difficult clients.
He has extraordinary self-control and he is absolutely furious about something.
Then he sets down his fork and looks at me properly for the first time all day.
"There are terms," he says, "beyond what's in the contract."
I put my fork down too. "Alright."
"You don't speak to the press without Carla's approval, you don't enter my office without an invitation, you don't discuss anything you see or hear in this house outside of it." He holds my gaze. "The library on the east wing is private. The staff in this house report to me."
I let him finish. Then I say, "The library clause."
He pauses. "What about it."
"It's not in the contract."
"The contract," I continue, "says I have access to all common areas of the estate unless otherwise specified in writing, the library wasn't specified." I pick my fork back up. "So technically it's available to me."
The room is very quiet.
"You've read the contract," he says.
"I read everything carefully."
He looks at me. "I'll have Carla amend it."
"Of course," I say pleasantly.
We went back to eating. After a while he says, without looking up, "The triplets, keep your distance."
I look at him. "They're six."
"They've been through enough disruption."
"I'm not a disruption."
"You're a twelve month contract," he says. "Getting attached to you would be a disruption."
I think about Emmet crying in the doorway this morning, Jasper's careful diplomat face, Rowe handed Gerald to me.
"I'll bear that in mind," I say.
He nods once and goes back to his food, apparently satisfied while I say nothing else.
But when I get back to my room that night I take out the contract, flip to section six, and read it slowly.
Nothing in section six prohibits interaction with minors residing in the estate.
I underline it, close the contract and put it back on the nightstand. He should have had his lawyers be more thorough.
I'm almost asleep when I hear it. Footsteps in the corridor, too small and too slow to be staff. Stopping outside my door. Then nothing.
I wait.
A small piece of paper slides under the gap.
I get up and pick it up. It's a crayon drawing, a house — or possibly a very large sandwich. Hard to tell. In the corner, in careful handwriting: gerald says goodnight
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at it for a long moment. Keep your distance, Caelan said.
I fold the drawing carefully and put it in the nightstand drawer, such a fat chance.
********
I sit down at the piano bench, lift the lid, and look at the keys. Vivienne played within a hundred chapters, she played the piano at least three times. I place my fingers on the keys the way I've seen people do it in films and press down.
The sound that comes out makes me wince. I try again, slower, picking out what I think is a melody. It isn't. It's just noise.
I tried a third time. Somewhere deep in the house, footsteps start approaching. Mrs. Albright appears in the doorway slightly out of breath, one hand on her chest, staring at me.
We look at each other.
"How bad was that?" I ask.
She takes a careful breath. "Were you perhaps thinking of a different instrument, Mrs. Maddox?"
"She plays piano in the" I stop. "I've been told I used to play."
"Yes." Very gently. "You did. Rather well."
"And now I don't."
"No." She looks at the piano, then back at me. "Now you don't."
I close the lid. From somewhere above us, small footsteps cross the ceiling. Then whispering, then what sounds like very poorly suppressed giggling as I look up. Then at Mrs. Albright.
"They heard that," I say.
"The whole house heard that," she says kindly.
Vivienne, it turns out, is not entirely transferable. I have her hands and her hair and her excellent taste in dessert, but whatever she held in her muscle memory has apparently not made its way to me.