The Finch family garden party was an exercise in understated opulence. Fairy lights dripped from the ancient oaks like captured stars, their glow glinting off the crystal flutes of champagne.
A string quartet played something classical and elegant from a white-gilt gazebo, the music a gentle current in the river of polite conversation. To Alistair, it felt less like a party and more like a beautifully orchestrated public trial.
Every smile was an assessment, every handshake a cross-examination.
Chloe, naturally, was thriving. She moved through the crowd of investors and family friends with an effortless grace that made Alistair’s own social awkwardness feel like a physical deformity.
She was a master of the art form, her laughter perfectly pitched, her anecdotes about their “meet-cute” at a rare book auction both charming and utterly fictitious.
Her hand rested on the small of his back, a constant, warm pressure that was meant to be a reassuring gesture for the public, but for Alistair, it was a brand, a point of heat that drew all his focus.
“That’s Mr. Abernathy,” she murmured, her breath ghosting against his ear as she guided him towards a portly man with a booming laugh.
“He’s on the board of the city’s largest historical preservation fund. Be brilliant.”
“Right,” Alistair mumbled, straightening his tie. “Brilliant.”
He managed to hold his own for a solid ten minutes, discussing the structural needs of the Blackwood Library with genuine passion. But all the while, he was acutely aware of Chloe beside him, her presence a silent endorsement.
She’d occasionally add a fond comment—”Alistair can talk about flying buttresses for hours, isn’t it wonderful?”—that somehow made his academic ramblings sound like romantic poetry.
He had spent the day after her business call stewing in a state of cognitive dissonance. She was a professional.
Her warmth was a service. The genuine connection he’d felt in the library was likely a well-honed skill, deployed to make the client feel at ease.
It was a logical conclusion. Yet, logic did nothing to quell the irrational sting of disappointment.
And it did nothing to explain the electric current that hummed between them now, under the canopy of lights and scrutiny.
He watched her now, laughing with Matilda’s oldest friend. The light caught the amber flecks in her eyes and the curve of her smile, and something in his chest tightened.
It was an illogical, unscientific, and deeply inconvenient sensation.
The string quartet transitioned from a lively allegro to a slow, sweeping waltz. Couples began to drift towards the manicured lawn that served as a dance floor.
Alistair’s blood ran cold.
“Oh, lovely,” Chloe said, turning to him with a brilliant smile that was pure performance. “Our song.”
Alistair blinked. “We have a song?”
“Of course we do,” she whispered, her eyes twinkling with mischief as she took his hand. “Pretend it’s Debussy.”
He let her lead him onto the lawn, his movements as stiff as the starched collar of his shirt. He was a man of books and theories, not of rhythm and motion.
The croquet match had been proof enough of his profound lack of coordination.
“Just follow my lead,” Chloe instructed softly as he placed a trembling hand on her waist. Her other hand settled on his shoulder, and the five points of contact between them felt like conductors for a dangerous voltage.
“One, two, three. One, two, three. Look at me, not your feet.”
He forced his gaze up from his clumsy Oxfords to her face. Up close, he could see the faint dusting of freckles across her nose he hadn’t noticed before.
Her scent—something clean and bright, like verbena and citrus—filled his senses, overriding the cloying perfume of the garden’s night-blooming jasmine.
“See? You’re not hopeless,” she encouraged, her voice a low murmur just for him.
They began to move, a hesitant orbit that slowly found its grace.
For the first few rotations, Alistair was hyper-aware of everything: of Caleb watching them from the terrace with a predatory stillness, of Matilda’s observant gaze from a wrought-iron bench, of the weight of their deception.
He was performing. This was Clause 7b of their contract: “Public displays of affection, including but not limited to hand-holding and formal dancing, to maintain the verisimilitude of the arrangement.”
But then, something shifted.
Perhaps it was the hypnotic melody, or the gentle spin of the world around them. Or perhaps it was the simple, undeniable reality of Chloe in his arms.
Her body was warm and alive against his. The silk of her dress was cool beneath his palm.
He could feel the soft rhythm of her breathing, and with every turn, his own rigid posture began to soften. The contract, the library, the inheritance—it all began to fade into a muted background hum.
Chloe felt the change in him instantly. The tension in his shoulders eased, and his hand on her waist, once a formal placeholder, now seemed to find its natural curve.
He was still looking at her, but his expression was no longer one of panicked concentration. It was something deeper, more focused.
More real.
Her professional composure, her iron-clad shield, began to melt. This wasn’t a client anymore.
This was Alistair. The man who spoke of fourteenth-century manuscripts with a fire in his eyes.
The man whose vulnerability she’d seen and, to her own surprise, fiercely wanted to protect. The fight with her business partner, the desperate need for money—it all felt a million miles away.
Here, under the stars, there was only the music and the startling intimacy of his gaze. The line between Chloe Jones, bridesmaid-for-hire, and Chloe, the woman dancing with Alistair Finch, blurred until it ceased to exist at all.
The song swelled to its crescendo and then softened, the final notes hanging in the air like dust motes in a sunbeam. For a beat, they remained still, locked in their embrace, the space between them charged with a silent, terrifying truth.
The applause of the other guests was what finally broke the spell.
Alistair blinked, as if waking from a dream. The noise and the lights of the party crashed back in, loud and jarring.
He looked around at the smiling faces, the circulating waiters, the entire fragile artifice they had constructed, and felt a sudden, desperate need to escape.
He couldn’t think here. He couldn’t breathe.
Acting on an impulse that bypassed every logical circuit in his brain, he kept hold of her hand. “Come with me,” he said, his voice husky.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He led her off the dance floor, past the curious glances, away from the warm glow of the party.
He pulled her along a flagstone path that wound deeper into the gardens, into the shadows where the fairy lights didn’t reach. The music faded, replaced by the chirping of crickets and the soft whisper of the breeze through a weeping willow.
He stopped beside a small, stone fountain, its trickling water the only sound in the sudden quiet. The moon cast a silver light over them, stripping away the party’s artifice and leaving them in stark, simple relief.
Chloe’s heart was hammering against her ribs. This wasn’t in the contract.
This wasn’t part of the show. Her hand was still in his, his grip firm, almost desperate.
She could feel the frantic pulse in his wrist.
“Alistair?” she whispered, her voice barely audible.
He turned to face her fully. In the moonlight, his features were etched with a raw, unfamiliar emotion.
The carefully constructed walls of the academic, the historian, the man who lived by footnotes and citations, had crumbled. All that was left was a vulnerability that mirrored her own.
“I can’t…” he began, his voice rough. He swallowed, shaking his head slightly as if trying to clear it.
“I can’t tell what’s real anymore, Chloe.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “I know,” she admitted softly.
He lifted his free hand, his fingers hesitating for a fraction of a second before they came to rest on her cheek. His touch was feather-light, tentative, as if he were handling a priceless, fragile manuscript.
His thumb traced the line of her jaw, and a shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with the cool night air.
The world narrowed to this single point in time. The contract was a distant memory.
The money, the lies, the performance—it was all meaningless ash. There was only the sound of the fountain, the silver moonlight, and the undeniable truth in the way he was looking at her.
He leaned in, closing the small space between them. It wasn’t a calculated move; it was an act of surrender.
And when his lips met hers, it was nothing like a performance.
It was a revelation.
The kiss was not gentle or exploratory. It was breathtaking and deep, a release of all the tension and unspoken feelings that had been simmering between them all weekend.
It was the library confession and the croquet-field camaraderie, the shared panic and the unexpected sparks of connection, all compressed into one searing, irrefutable moment.
His intellectual curiosity was there, a desperate need to understand this new, terrifying data point, but it was overwhelmed by a raw, possessive hunger that stunned them both.
Chloe’s hands came up to clutch at his lapels, anchoring herself as her world tilted on its axis. She kissed him back with an equal, startling fervor, a silent admission that her professional detachment had been a lie she was telling herself.
This was real. Frighteningly, dangerously, beautifully real.
When they finally broke apart, they were both breathless, their chests rising and falling in ragged unison. They stared at each other, the space between them now crackling with the aftershock.
The comfortable fiction of their arrangement had been incinerated. In its place was a terrifying, exhilarating reality they had no idea how to navigate.
Alistair looked utterly poleaxed, his eyes wide with a mixture of wonder and pure, undiluted panic. Chloe felt a tremor of fear run through her.
They had just breached the most fundamental clause of their agreement, the unspoken one: don’t let it get real.
The kiss lingered in the air between them—a turning point, a catastrophic mistake, and the most honest thing either of them had done all weekend. And in the silent, moonlit garden, they were both left stunned, and utterly terrified of what came next.