She walked into his apartment and found a stranger's bra draped over his sofa, right out in the open. Like whoever left it there wanted her to see it. Nora Bennett had spent 6 months pretending to be Julian Cole's fiance. Careful, professional, never once crossing the line into anything real. Now she stood in his living room holding a coffee mug she couldn't remember picking up, staring at black lace that wasn't hers.
And when he walked through that door still in his coat, still stunned to see her a day early, she didn't scream. She didn't cry. She just looked at him and asked the one question he had no answer for. Nora Bennett had a rule about Tuesdays. She didn't fall for men on Tuesdays.
Mondays were for regret, Wednesdays were for work, and by Thursday she was usually too tired to feel much of anything. But Tuesdays were dangerous because Tuesdays were when Julian Cole opened his own door instead of letting the doorman do it for him. And something about a 6'2" man in a wrinkled dress shirt holding a grocery bag made her forget every reason she had for staying careful. "You're early," he said, stepping back to let her in. "You said 7:00. " "I meant 7:30. " "I always mean 7:30. " "Then say 7:30. " He gave her the look he gave her most Tuesdays, half amused, half like he was working out a math problem he didn't want to solve too fast.
And Nora walked past him into the loft before her face could do anything embarrassing. The place still didn't feel like a home to her, even after 4 months of Tuesdays. It felt like a hotel suite that had given up trying to impress anyone. Polished concrete floors, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over Tribeca, a kitchen island the size of her studio apartment. The only thing that looked lived in was the stack of paperback thrillers on the side table, spines cracked, and the reading glasses he pretended he didn't need.
"How was the office? " she asked, because that was the script. Ask about his day. Let him ask about hers. Cook something together. Practice being a couple for an hour.
Because in 9 days they had to stand in front of 300 people at the Cole Hospitality Gala and be one. "Long," Julian said. "My father called four times before noon about the gala, about the merger he wants to announce at the gala. " He set the grocery bag down harder than he needed to. "He's decided Whitfield Group would look good standing next to us in a press photo. He's decided a lot of things lately, and none of them involve asking me first. " Nora knew enough not to push on that particular bruise.
Richard Cole had been trying to fold his son's company into a bigger, safer, blander empire for 2 years, ever since the funeral. And every time Julian resisted, his father brought out the same six words like a crowbar. "Your mother would want this. " It wasn't fair, using a dead woman's name that way, but fair had never been Richard's strong suit. And Nora had learned not to ask for details, because the details always ended with Julian staring at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. "You've got 9 days," she said instead.
"The board sees a united front. They see a fiance standing next to you at that gala, smiling, real as anything, and the whole conversation about who you should marry to save the company just goes away. That's the idea. " "Then let's stop talking about your father and start cooking. " He almost smiled at that. Almost. They'd met the way two desperate people meet, which was to say badly, at a fundraiser neither of them wanted to be at, both hiding behind the same potted fig tree because it was the only spot in the ballroom out of Richard Cole's sightline.
Julian needed a fiance who could survive 6 months of scrutiny without falling apart or falling for his money. Nora needed $40,000 to keep her design studio from going under and to stop her mother's medical bills from eating through the last of her savings. He'd made the offer over a glass of bad champagne. Dead serious, no smile on it at all, and she'd said yes before her brain caught up with her mouth. Six months.
A number on paper. No touching that wasn't required for cameras. That had been the deal in September. It was February now, and the rule had gotten harder to enforce than either of them expected. They cooked pasta because it was the one thing they could both make without a recipe.
Julian handling the garlic like it owed him money. Nora correcting his knife grip without being asked. And somewhere between the onions and the second glass of wine, they'd fallen into the kind of easy back and forth that didn't feel like a performance at all. He asked about a client who wanted her to redesign a brownstone kitchen around a chandelier the size of a compact car. She asked whether his father had actually used the word merger, or whether Julian was translating something worse into something he could stomach saying out loud.
He used the word alliance, Julian admitted. Which is worse? Alliance means somebody's about to lose their name off the building, probably mine. She was still laughing about that when his phone buzzed against the counter, screen lighting up face down. He glanced at it the way you glance at something you already know you don't want to see.
And something in his jaw changed. Small. If Nora hadn't spent four months studying his face like a language she was trying to learn, she would have missed it completely. Work? She asked.
Yeah. He picked up the phone, thumb hovering over the screen without unlocking it. Give me a second. He carried it out onto the terrace, sliding the glass door shut behind him, which he never did. Not even in January when the wind off the river could cut a person in half.
Nora stood at the stove stirring a sauce that didn't need stirring anymore, and watched him through the glass. His shoulders were tight. One hand dragged through his hair the way he did when he was choosing his words carefully, weighing them before he let them out. She couldn't hear anything through the glass. She could see his mouth moving fast, then slow, then fast again, like he was arguing two sides of something with himself.
At one point he pressed his palm flat against his forehead and stayed like that for a few seconds, like the call had cost him something physical. When he came back in, his face had smoothed itself into something ordinary, practiced, the same face he probably wore into board meetings. "Everything okay? " she asked. "Fine. Just my father being my father. " He wanted to say, "That didn't look like your father.
Your father calls and you roll your eyes. This looked like something you were trying to keep off your own face. " Tuesday Rule, Nora, smiled instead and said, "Pass the Parmesan. " And the moment closed over like water settling after a stone. The lobby doorman, a broad-shouldered man named Enzo who'd worked the building longer than Julian had lived in it, caught Nora on her way out that night, holding the door with one hand and a clipboard with the other. "Tell Mr. Cole his sister stopped by earlier," he said. "Around 4:00.
Said she forgot something upstairs, but Mr. Cole wasn't in, so she didn't stay long. " Nora paused halfway through the door. "His sister? " "That's what she said. " Enzo shrugged, already looking past her toward the next resident coming through. "Pretty, dark hair, in a hurry, in and out in 10 minutes. " Nora didn't correct him. She didn't know enough to correct him. In 4 months of Tuesdays, Julian had never once mentioned his sister, not at Thanksgiving, not at the gala committee dinners where he complained about every other branch of his family tree, not even the one night he'd had too much scotch and told her more about his mother's death than she suspected he'd told anyone in years.
No sister had come up, not once. She filed it away the way she filed away most things that didn't fit, a loose thread. Probably nothing, the kind of detail you only remember later, after it stops being nothing. Cass had opinions about the loose thread. Cass had opinions about most things, which was why Nora had been friends with her since college, and why she found herself repeating the the story 2 days later over coffee, the shut glass door and the phone call and the woman Enzo called a sister that Julian had never mentioned.
He shut the door, Cass said, sliding a mug across the table. The glass door. That he never shuts. It's not a big deal. You brought it up unprompted, Nora.