The Finch family dining room was a monument to inherited certainty. A long, dark mahogany table, polished to a mirror shine, reflected the cold light of a crystal chandelier that hung like a silent, multi-faceted judge.
Each place setting was a fortress of silverware. Alistair felt less like he was sitting down for a meal and more like he was preparing for a surgical procedure for which he had not been properly anesthetized.
He sat ramrod straight, his napkin a crisp white square of dread in his lap. Across from him, Caleb lounged in his chair, a smirk playing on his lips as he swirled a blood-red wine in his glass.
He looked like a panther assessing a particularly clumsy gazelle. At the head of the table, Matilda Finch presided in stoic silence, her gaze sweeping over them all with the dispassionate air of a queen surveying her court.
And next to him was Chloe.
To his academic, analytical eye, she was a marvel of controlled variables. Her posture was relaxed yet elegant, her simple navy dress exuding a quiet confidence he’d never personally experienced.
She had met Matilda’s assessing gaze with a warm, respectful smile and had even managed a pleasantry with Caleb that didn’t sound like a prelude to battle.
She was, in short, performing flawlessly. And it was terrifying.
The first course arrived—a delicate consommé that Alistair was certain he would spill. The clink of spoons against porcelain was the only sound for a full minute before Caleb finally decided to pounce.
“So, Chloe,” he began, his voice smooth as velvet and just as suffocating. “Alistair has been characteristically quiet about you.
Almost suspiciously so. Tell us everything. What is it that you do, exactly?”
Alistair’s heart hammered against his ribs. This was it.
The interrogation. He mentally scrolled through the approved topics list in their contract, Clause 4, Section B: Acceptable Professional Backgrounds.
They had settled on event planning for a historical society—plausible, respectable, and adjacent enough to his own world to be believable.
Chloe didn’t miss a beat. She placed her spoon down gently and turned to Caleb, her smile radiating an effortless warmth that Alistair knew for a fact was costing her a significant amount of energy.
“I’m an event director for the Landon Historical Preservation Society,” she said. “Mostly fundraisers and galas.
It’s a lot of organizing, a little bit of historical trivia, and a whole lot of managing big personalities. It’s actually how we met.”
She turned her gaze to Alistair, and for a terrifying second, he forgot his lines. Her eyes, a warm hazel, were sparkling with a conviction that felt dangerously real.
He felt a phantom nudge, a prompter’s cue from the space between them.
“Ah, yes,” he managed, his voice a half-octave higher than usual.
“The gala. For the… the old maritime museum.”
Good, he thought. Stick to the script.
Caleb leaned forward, his interest feigned but his suspicion genuine. “The maritime museum?
Don’t they have that dreadful gala every spring? Awfully dull affair.
I can’t imagine you there, Alistair. You despise crowds.”
It was a direct hit. A fact.
A detail Alistair hadn’t thought to prep Chloe on. He felt his throat tighten.
This was a catastrophic failure in their preliminary data collection.
But Chloe laughed, a light, musical sound that seemed to absorb all the tension at the table. “Oh, he does. He spent the first hour hiding behind a truly atrocious ice sculpture of a schooner, pretending to read the donor plaque.”
She looked at Alistair again, this time with a playful, adoring expression that sent a jolt of pure, unadulterated panic through him.
“I was trying to rescue a rare manuscript that had been left on a canapé tray,” she continued, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper for the whole table to hear. “Some poor intern had mistaken it for a prop.
Alistair saw me and practically vaulted over a table of shrimp cocktails to help. He was so passionately horrified that anyone would treat a piece of history so carelessly.
I was charmed.”
Alistair stared at her. None of this was in the contract.
An ice sculpture? A manuscript on a canapé tray?
It was absurd, nonsensical, and utterly, maddeningly perfect. He could see it.
He could picture his own clumsy, frantic movements. She hadn’t just memorized their backstory; she had inhabited it, layering it with the kind of embarrassing, endearing detail that made it feel real.
She was improvising, adding flourishes that made their fabricated story breathe.
For the first time all evening, Matilda showed a flicker of interest. “Passion is a rare commodity these days,” she said, her voice dry as old parchment.
“Especially in this family.” She gave Caleb a pointed look.
Caleb’s smile tightened. He wasn’t done.
“Charming. So you fell for him over a shrimp cocktail rescue mission.
How… romantic. So, when was this fateful night?”
Chloe sipped her water. “Let’s see… it was mid-April.
A Tuesday, I believe. The rain was just dreadful.”
Alistair’s blood ran cold. It was a trap.
Caleb was a lawyer; he lived for dates and details.
Caleb’s smirk widened into a triumphant grin.
“The third Tuesday in April? That’s fascinating.
Because I happen to know Alistair was the keynote speaker at a medieval literature symposium in Brussels that entire week. I remember because Father was so annoyed he missed the quarterly board meeting.”
Checkmate.
Alistair felt the blood drain from his face. It was over.
The whole elaborate, contractual charade was about to come crashing down around them, all because of a scheduling conflict he’d failed to cross-reference. He opened his mouth to attempt some sort of blustering, academic correction, but Chloe’s hand found his under the table.
Her touch was a small, firm point of pressure, a silent command: Stay quiet. I’ve got this.
She tilted her head at Caleb, her expression one of amused confusion.
“Brussels? Goodness, was that the same week?”
She then turned to Alistair, her face softening into a fond, teasing pout. “Alistair, you fibber.
You told me you had to fly to a ‘manuscript emergency’ in Belgium. Are you telling me you flew across the Atlantic and back in 24 hours just to see me again?”
She squeezed his hand. The move was pure genius.
It didn’t challenge Caleb’s fact; it reframed it. It transformed Alistair’s logistical impossibility into a grand, romantic gesture.
It made him look not like a liar, but like a man ridiculously in love.
He was so stunned by the audacity of her save that he could only stare at her, his mind a blank slate.
“Well?” she prompted, her eyes dancing. “Did you?”
He had to say something. The entire table was waiting.
He swallowed, the lie feeling thick and foreign in his throat. “Of course,” he mumbled, the words feeling like they belonged to someone else.
“It was… imperative.”
Caleb’s face clouded over, his victory snatched away. He had presented evidence, and Chloe had spun it into a love story.
He leaned back in his chair, momentarily defeated.
The rest of the meal passed in a tense, but less overtly hostile, haze. Chloe deftly steered the conversation toward neutral topics—the estate’s gardens, a recent art exhibition, the lamentable state of modern publishing.
She was a master conversationalist, drawing Matilda out with thoughtful questions and even getting Alistair to speak for a full minute about the degradation of vellum in humid climates, a topic he was shocked to find anyone at this table feigning interest in.
By the time dessert—a panna cotta that quivered like Alistair’s nerves—was cleared, he felt as though he’d run a marathon.
He and Chloe had survived. They had passed the test.
After a final, stilted goodnight, they escaped upstairs to the guest wing where their adjoining rooms were located. The moment Chloe’s door clicked shut behind her, Alistair followed her in, closing it quietly.
The transformation was immediate. The warm, effervescent woman from dinner vanished.
Chloe kicked off her heels with a sigh, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. The confident smile was gone, replaced by a mask of pure exhaustion.
“Well,” she breathed, her voice raspy. “That was… bracing.”
“Bracing?” Alistair whispered, his own adrenaline finally crashing.
“That was a public vivisection. Caleb had a scalpel.
How did you do that?”
“It’s my job, Alistair,” she said, her voice flat. She walked over to the window and stared out at the dark, manicured lawns.
“I read the room. Caleb wants to win.
Your grandmother wants to be convinced. You just want to survive.
I play the part everyone needs me to play.”
He was still reeling from her performance. The ice sculpture.
The trans-Atlantic flight. It was a level of creative fabrication he could barely comprehend.
“The Brussels save… that was…”
“A desperate gamble,” she finished, turning to face him. Her face was pale in the soft lamplight.
“He had you, and he knew it. The only way out was to make the lie bigger, more romantic.
He can’t call you a liar without looking like a jealous cynic.”
Alistair could only shake his head, a wave of grudging admiration washing over him. She wasn’t just following a script; she was a master strategist, anticipating attacks and turning them to her advantage.
She had protected him. She had protected their deal.
“Thank you,” he said, the words feeling inadequate.
She gave him a weary, lopsided smile. “Don’t thank me yet.
We bought ourselves another day, that’s all. He’ll be back tomorrow, and he’ll be looking for a different weakness.”
The strain of the evening settled between them, a heavy, shared weight. The flawless performance had come at a cost, leaving them both raw and on edge.
They had passed the first test, but the victory felt hollow. It was just a brief reprieve in a long, taxing battle.
And looking at Chloe’s exhausted face, Alistair felt a flicker of something uncomfortable and new—not just gratitude, but a strange, protective urge. The contract stipulated a partnership, but for one brief, terrifying moment downstairs, it had felt disturbingly real.