The Lawless Man With A Thousand Chains

003 The Woman in Red

The wine came down on the table hard enough to slop over the rim.

"You have the wrong person. I didn't place any ad, and if I had, I wouldn't have a stranger announce it to me in a public bar."

"The woman on the phone said red dress, front window."

Damon didn't move.

"You match. If it isn't you, I'll go."

But the woman was past being offended, and she was looking at him properly now.

He was still sitting there with both hands on the table, as comfortable as a man in his own kitchen. Any other man caught like this would already be out on the pavement inventing a reason.

Vanessa Quinn had come here tonight to meet a man her best friend had promised to deliver. Somebody presentable enough to play a husband for two weeks.

The friend's candidate had stopped answering his phone an hour ago.

And this one had walked in off the street and said the most humiliating sentence in the language without blinking.

She priced him in four seconds. Broke, nobody, and nothing left to lose.

That was the whole job description.

"You need money," she said. "Badly, and soon. Am I right?"

"Yes."

"Then I have a different proposition for you. It's short, it's legal, and it pays well."

"Tell me."

"I'll pay you to marry me tonight. We make it look real for my family for a week, maybe two, and then we file for a clean divorce.

"Five thousand dollars up front. The same again when it's done."

"A fake marriage. Why?"

Vanessa looked around the lounge and lowered her voice.

"Two days ago my grandfather told me he signed a marriage contract in my name when I was a child. Some old debt of his, and I'm the payment. He expects me to honor it."

She turned her glass a quarter turn on the table.

"I'm not being handed to a stranger. He's probably some recluse off a mountain with one set of clothes and no idea what a woman is."

Damon's own contract named the granddaughter of a billionaire, a man rich enough that Periander Fox had owed him a favor.

This woman was hiring a stranger off a lounge floor for ten thousand dollars, and paying it in two installments.

Billionaires' granddaughters didn't haggle in wine bars, and half the old families in this country had a contract rotting in a drawer somewhere.

He couldn't check his own name until the bag turned up anyway.

He decided it was a coincidence and stopped thinking about it.

"What do I have to do?"

"Tomorrow is my grandfather's seventieth birthday. You come with me, and you behave like a man who can't keep his hands off his own wife. Every person in that house has to believe this marriage is real and revoltingly happy."

She smiled with her mouth and nothing else.

"If the contract man shows up, he sees I'm taken and he goes home. Then you take your money and we never speak again."

"I can sell that."

Damon put one hand flat on the table.

"One condition. Don't fall in love with me, and don't come looking for me afterward."

Vanessa's face went completely blank.

In eleven years of men, not one of them had ever asked her for that. She had spent most of those years fending off the opposite.

Then she laughed, one short delighted breath.

"That," she said, "will not be difficult."

Damon didn't smile.

He had made that rule in a year he didn't talk about, long before he ever heard of her. He let her enjoy the joke.

Dorne City Hall processed them in eleven minutes.

In the cab she gave him the essentials. Her grandfather was Elias Quinn, and the old man believed the entire family fortune depended on honoring that contract.

Marcus Quinn thought his father was losing his mind. Vanessa just wanted her life back.

The clerk didn't look up from his forms.

"Names."

"Damon Huntley and Vanessa Quinn."

"Reason for marriage."

"Love at first sight."

The clerk snorted, stamped the papers, and woke the witness who slept by the door for exactly this kind of appointment.

There was no music, no rings, and no kiss. Both of them preferred it that way.

Outside, under the streetlights, Vanessa handed him a debit card.

"Five thousand on that, ready to spend, and the rest when we file. Now, my rules."

Vanessa counted them off on her fingers.

"One. If anybody bothers me, you handle it like a husband would."

"Two. This marriage is on paper and nowhere else. Don't get ideas about rights."

"Three. When it's over, you take the money and you disappear. No calls, no letters, nothing."

"Understood," Damon said. "Clean and simple."

Vanessa looked at him a second longer than she needed to, then turned for her car.

"Ten o'clock tomorrow. I'll pick you up. And wear a jacket that doesn't look like it came out of a prison yard."

Damon stood on the curb with a marriage certificate in his pocket and a stranger's debit card in his hand.

He had crossed the world to honor one marriage contract. Inside six hours he had signed a different one entirely.

The woman who wrote it planned to burn it the moment it stopped being useful.

His thumb found the iron ring. Still there.

The flip phone buzzed against his leg.

"I'm so sorry. I couldn't get to the Rameses in time."

The warm voice from earlier, faster now.

"Come to the Meridian Grand Hotel instead. Room 256. I'll be waiting."

Damon closed the phone and did the arithmetic on the way to the curb.

Five thousand dollars was two months of an honest man's wages. In a city like this it would be gone inside a week.

He had never planned to earn the ad money the ad's way. He had something more profitable in mind.

The Meridian Grand's lobby smelled of marble polish and cut flowers. Room 256 sat at the end of a quiet hallway.

He knocked twice, and the door opened on a woman in her late twenties. Dark hair loose over bare shoulders, a thin-strapped top, black stockings edged with lace.

She stepped aside to let him in.

"Finally," she said. "Come in, handsome. Let's begin."