No. A house? Anywhere you want, fully owned? No. A position at Blackwood Meridian, director of infrastructure. You would be the most qualified man in the building. No." She stared at him, genuinely confused.
The way a brilliant mathematician stares at an equation that refuses to balance. Then what do you want? Elas rested his forearms on the table and looked at her for a long time. I'll agree, he said finally on one condition. This marriage doesn't turn me into one of your possessions.
I'm not a line on your balance sheet. I'm not a prop at your parties. I'm a man. You treat me like one or you find someone else. Viven did not answer right away.
Around her every day of her life. Men had flattered her, feared her, negotiated with her, or tried to buy her. Not one of them had ever simply spoken to her as an equal. It was strange how much it shook her. "Agreed," she said.
She held out a pen. Elas took it, signed his name at the bottom of the last page, and slid the contract back across the table. Vivien looked at the signature for a moment. Then she said very quietly, "There is one thing I haven't told you." He looked up.
"My father didn't want me to marry a rich man," she said. In the letter he left me, he said he wanted me to marry the man who saved my life. Elias went completely still because that could only mean one thing. Harrison Blackwood had known exactly who he was. They were married 4 days later on the 28th of December in a judge's chambers downtown.
No flowers, no guests. Only Viven's attorney, a silver-haired woman named Margaret Hail, who served as the witness and said nothing at all. Afterward, Viven's driver took them north out of the city along a road lined with frozen pines until the iron gates of the Blackwood estate rose out of the snow. The house was enormous and silent. Marble floors, tall, dark windows, paintings of men in old suits staring down from the walls.
It did not feel like a home. It felt like a museum that had forgotten to close. Elias followed Vivienne down a long hallway into a library that smelled of leather and cold ashes. And there, on the mantle above the fireplace, he saw a photograph. It was old and slightly faded.
A muddy mountain road, flood lights, a group of exhausted rescue workers in hard hats, and in the middle of them, a tall gray-haired man in an expensive coat. Shaking hands with a young engineer whose face was black with cold dust. Elias stepped closer. The young engineer was him. Harlland Ridge, he whispered.
West Virginia. 15 years ago, Viven came to stand beside him. "My father funded that rescue," she said. "The mining company refused to pay for the equipment. He paid for all of it himself.