The CEO'S Wrong Sister (The Black Sheep Bride)

The Morning After

Nora didn't sleep, she told herself it was the coffee she'd had at dinner the one she hadn't even wanted but had accepted because accepting small things was easier than explaining why you didn't want them. She told herself it was the noise of the house settling, the way old houses did, groaning quietly to themselves in the dark like they were working something out.

She did not tell herself it was Xavier Holt.

She lay on her back in her childhood bedroom the one that still had the shelf of books she'd read in secondary school, the one with the window that looked out onto the garden her mother had redesigned three times but never actually spent time in and stared at the ceiling and thought about absolutely nothing related to dark grey eyes or charcoal suits or the specific way a man's voice could be low enough to rearrange something in your chest without your permission.

Nothing like that at all.

Her phone said 2:47am.

She picked up her reading app. She was three quarters of the way through a romance novel she'd been rationing for a week because she always read too fast, and then had nothing left and the next book in the series wasn't out until March. The hero had just told the heroine something true about herself that she hadn't told him something he'd figured out on his own from paying attention.

Nora read the line twice.

She put her phone face down on the mattress.

She picked it back up.

She thought about six plants in an apartment with almost no direct sunlight and every single one of them is alive.

She put her phone down again.

"Stop it," she told the ceiling.

The ceiling had nothing useful to offer but she couldn't help it.

By morning she had made a list.

This was how Nora operated when things became too large to hold in her head, she made them into lists, broke them into pieces, gave them edges and order until they became manageable rather than enormous. It was a skill her family had never appreciated and several of her ex-boyfriends had found unromantic and she had decided somewhere around age twenty three was simply part of being her, and anyone who didn't like it was welcome to manage their own chaos.

The list had two columns.

The first column was titled Reasons To Say No and it was long. It included things like: I don't know this man. He had someone watch me. This is my life not a business transaction. Then Madison. The way he looked at me like he was reading something I hadn't written yet which is not a normal way for a person to look at another person, and I don't know what to do with it.

The second column was titled Reasons To Say Yes and it had three items.

The first was: the debt is real.

The second was: my family will lose everything.

The third was, and she stared at this one for a long time before she wrote it, and then she wrote it in smaller letters than everything else, like she could make it less true by making it smaller:

He said wrong sister is their assessment, not mine. And somehow it meant something to her.

She folded the list in half. Then in half again. Then she put it inside her most re-read romance novel on the shelf, the one with the broken spine and the dog-eared pages and the ending she had read so many times she could recite it from memory, and she got dressed.

Madison was in the kitchen when she came downstairs.

This was not unusual. What was unusual was the way Madison looked up when Nora walked in, it was quick, assessing, a flicker of something behind her eyes that was gone before Nora could name it. Then the smile came, warm and seamless and so perfectly constructed that someone who hadn't spent twenty six years studying it might have believed it entirely.

"Morning," Madison said.

"Morning."

Nora went to the kettle. She filled it. She stood with her back to her sister, and listened to the particular quality of the silence behind her the silence of someone who wanted to ask something and was deciding how.

"How are you feeling?" Madison asked.

"Fine."

"About last night."

"Also fine."

A pause. "Nora."

"Madison."

Another pause. Longer this time, Nora turned the kettle on, and got a mug from the cabinet, and got the teabag and did all the small mechanical things that filled the space while she waited for her sister to say what she actually wanted to say.

"You don't have to do this," Madison said finally.

Nora turned around.

Her sister was looking at her with an expression she had calibrated perfectly concern, warmth, the specific softness of someone saying something hard because they love you. It was a masterpiece. It really was. Twenty six years of practice and Madison had never once let the seams show to anyone who wasn't looking for them.

Nora was always looking for them.

"Is that right," she said.

"I mean it. If you're not comfortable, of this isn't what you want, you don't have to say yes just because Dad..."

"What would happen," Nora said carefully, "if I said no?"

Madison blinked. "Sorry?"

"If I said no. To Xavier Holt. What happens to the family?"

"We'd find another way. There's always another..."

"There isn't," Nora said simply. "You know there isn't. You knew before any of us, I could see it at that table last night. You've known about the debt for a while, haven't you?"

Madison's expression did something very small and very fast. "Dad told me some things, yes. He was worried and he needed..."

"He needed someone to talk to," Nora said. "And he came to you."

"He always comes to me, Nora, that's not..."

"I know," Nora said.

Not bitterly. Just factually. The way you state things that have always been true and have long since stopped surprising you. Her father came to Madison. Her mother called Madison's name like a prayer. The room had reached for Madison's hand in the dark.

These were simply the facts of her life.

She turned back to her tea.

"I'm going to call Xavier Holt this morning," she said. "I'm going to tell him I have more conditions. And then I'm going to see a lawyer."

Behind her the silence changed shape.

"So you're saying yes," Madison said.

"I'm saying I'm gathering information," Nora said. "There's a difference."

She picked up her tea, then picked up her romance novel from the counter where she'd left it last night the one with the list folded inside it, the one with the broken spine and the ending she knew by heart.

She looked at her sister one more time.

Madison was smiling. That smile, the warm seamless one, if only.

"I just want what's best for you," Madison said.

"I know," Nora said.

She went upstairs to make her phone call.

She thought about what was best for her the whole way up. She thought about it the way she thought about the ending of her favorite novel with the specific ache of someone who knows exactly how the story is supposed to go and is just waiting, impatiently, to get there.

She found Xavier Holt's number in the card he'd left on the dining table last night.

She looked at it for exactly thirty seconds.

She called.

He picked up on the second ring.

"I have more conditions," she said, without saying hello.

A pause. Brief. Then: "I expected you would."

"You're not going to like all of them."

"Probably not," he said. And she could hear it in his voice that almost-smile, the ghost of one, the one she had absolutely not been thinking about at 2:47 in the morning. "Tell me anyway."

Nora opened her romance novel to the folded list.

She told him.