Chapter 3 The Wedding

The wedding was beautiful, which somehow made it worse.Twenty-six days after the will was read, the Cross family estate had been transformed into something out of a fairy tale. White roses climbed the stone arches of the garden. Hundreds of candles burned in brass lanterns along the aisle, though it was not yet dark. A string quartet tuned somewhere behind the hedges. The sky above the old oaks had turned the color of honey and violet, as if someone had ordered it for the occasion.In the bridal suite on the second floor, Zara sat very still while a stylist pinned the last curl into place."You look like a movie star," Tasha whispered, standing behind her with both hands pressed to her mouth. Her best friend had been crying since nine that morning and showed no signs of stopping. "Zara. Look at you."She looked.The woman in the mirror wore an off-the-shoulder gown of ivory lace, delicate as frost on a windowpane. A silver tiara glittered in her dark curls. A cathedral veil spilled behind her like a held breath. Her lips were a soft rose, her eyes lined in gold, her skin glowing against the white. She looked like every little girl's dream of a bride.She looked like a stranger."It's a costume," Zara said quietly."It's a beautiful costume.""It's still a costume."There was a knock at the door, and Eli stepped in, awkward in a rented black tuxedo he had clearly fought with. He stopped in the doorway. For a moment, he said nothing at all."Wow," he finally managed. Then, smaller: "Mom would've lost it."The words went straight through her. Zara pressed her lips together hard and looked at the ceiling until her eyes cleared. "Don't you dare make me cry. This mascara cost more than my rent."He crossed the room and put his arms around her, careful of the veil. He was taller than she remembered. When had that happened? "You don't have to do this," he whispered into her hair. "I'll get a job. We'll figure it out. I'll skip college.""Absolutely not." She pulled back and held his face in both hands. "You're going to walk into that university in the fall and you're going to make me insufferably proud. That's the deal. Okay?""Okay.""Say it like you mean it."He gave a shaky laugh. "Okay, Zara."From the garden below, the quartet began a slow, sweeping piece. Tasha squeezed her hand. Eli offered his arm with all the dignity of a seventeen-year-old pretending he wasn't scared out of his mind.It was time.* * *Damien stood at the altar with his hands clasped in front of him and his sunglasses firmly on.He had told himself he would feel nothing. He had prepared for it, the way he prepared for every hostile negotiation: study the terms, anticipate the weak points, guard the exits. Marriage was a transaction, and he did not let transactions touch him.The guests rustled in their white chairs, three hundred of them, every one chosen by Marcus. Business partners, board members, society columnists. Not a single person who loved him. Not a single person he had chosen. Beside him, his best man, a distant cousin named Julian, shifted nervously and kept glancing at his watch."Relax," Damien murmured."Easy for you to say," Julian muttered. "You're the one who has to marry her.""She's a contract.""She's about to come down that aisle in front of the whole city. Try to look like a man who's not at his own funeral."Damien didn't answer. The quartet's melody swelled, and three hundred heads turned toward the arch of white roses at the end of the garden.And then she stepped through it.He had seen her once, in a borrowed navy dress and a stubborn expression. He had thought her handsome, in a plain, unguarded way. He had not thought about her since. He was certain of that.But the woman walking toward him now in a cloud of lace and gold light was not plain, and was not unguarded. Her arm rested lightly on her brother's sleeve. Her chin was lifted. Her eyes stayed forward, bright and steady, fixed on him with an expression he could not name. Not fear. Not hope. Something fiercer. Something that looked, impossibly, like grace.The evening wind caught her veil and lifted it behind her like a banner. The last light of the sun lit her from the side, turning her skin to burnished bronze and the lace to something spun from sugar and gold. She passed the lanterns one by one, and he realized, with a distant sense of alarm, that he had stopped breathing.Careful, he told himself. It's a performance. She's paid to look like this.She reached the altar. Her brother kissed her cheek, shook Damien's hand with a grip just a little too firm, and gave him a long look that said, very clearly, If you hurt her, I will find a way. Then he stepped back, and Zara stood alone beside him.Close up, he could see her pulse beating at the base of her throat. He could see that her fingers were trembling around the stems of her bouquet, though her face gave nothing away. She smelled like jasmine and vanilla. She did not look at him."Dearly beloved," the officiant began.* * *Zara heard almost none of the ceremony.It came to her in fragments. The officiant's warm baritone, speaking of love and commitment and the sacred union of two hearts. A bird singing in the oak above them. The soft crackle of a candle flame. Beside her, a man with a face like carved stone, so close that his sleeve brushed hers and her whole arm prickled with awareness she did not want.This is what a dream looks like, she thought, when it's leased."Do you, Damien Alexander Cross, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?"A pause. The garden waited."I do."His voice was low and perfectly steady. It was the voice of a man signing a check. But as the words left him, Zara felt something strange: a tiny hitch in the middle of them, so brief she might have imagined it."And do you, Zara Elise Monroe, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?"The words were enormous. They were meant for someone else, for a woman who had chosen this, who had walked toward a man she loved with her whole heart. Zara thought of the bakery. She thought of the sign that said Monroe & Sons. She thought of a little boy in a school uniform, holding her hand at their parents' funeral.One year, she told herself. I can survive one year."I do," she said, and her voice rang out clear over the garden, and she was proud of it."Then by the power vested in me, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride."For the first time since the ceremony began, Zara looked at him.He had finally turned to face her. Behind the dark lenses, she could not see his eyes. But she could see the muscle jumping in his jaw, and the faint, unreadable tension in his shoulders, and the way his hand hovered in the air a moment before he raised it to lift the edge of her veil.His lips brushed hers. That was all. Cold, quick, correct, the kiss of a man filling out a form. It was over before it had started.The garden erupted in applause. Camera flashes burst like lightning. Somewhere, a woman wept happily into a silk handkerchief. Zara smiled for the cameras, bright and brilliant and utterly empty, and felt something small and foolish quietly break in her chest.She had been kissed at her own wedding, and she had felt nothing at all.At least, that was what she told herself.* * *The reception passed in a blur of champagne, handshakes, and polite, searching smiles. Zara danced one waltz with her husband, his hand a proper, impersonal distance from her waist, and then another with Eli, who spun her in clumsy circles and made her laugh for the first time all day. She cut a cake that, she noted privately, was far too dry. She answered a hundred questions she did not hear.By midnight, the black car was waiting at the foot of the garden steps, its engine purring in the cool dark. Damien held the door for her. She gathered her skirts and slid inside, and he followed, and the chauffeur closed the door on the glittering night.Silence. The kind of silence that has a texture.The city glided past the tinted windows in streaks of gold and amber. Zara pulled off her veil, one pin at a time, and laid it across her lap. Damien stared out the opposite window, his profile cut sharp against the passing lights. He had still not removed his sunglasses."Don't get comfortable," he said at last, without turning.Zara looked at him. She was tired, her feet hurt, and her face ached from smiling. But she had spent six years learning not to be diminished by people who thought they were bigger than she was."Don't worry," she said, tugging the last pin from her hair and letting the curls fall loose. "I never unpack in hotels."For the first time that day, Damien Cross turned his head and looked at her.She could not see his eyes. But she saw the corner of his mouth move, just barely. Not a smile. The ghost of one. A crack in a locked door.Then it was gone, and he turned back to the window. And the car carried them both, married and strangers, up into the glittering heart of the city.