The Bride Of The Proxy Billionaire

"Please, Lena. Don't ask questions. Just come."

The call had come ten minutes ago from Amara whose voice sounded shaky, nearly drowned out by the heavy downpour.It hadn't sounded like the poised heiress who had commissioned her portrait two weeks earlier. This voice was frightened,almost desperate. Midnight thunder tore the sky open as Lena's headlights carved a thin, trembling truth across the wet road.

Amara's voice still rattled in her ears-breathless, urgent, the kind of panicked whisper that made her stomach flip:

"If anything happens, tell Damon I had always wanted to tell him."

She had listened to the note three times at the café between orders, palms sticky with coffee and worry,and then when it was time to close, she packed up her rolled canvas into her knapsack and drove because what else could she do when someone you barely knew suddenly asks you for help.

Lena had never been raised for heroics nor did she know how to be one. She was an art-school dropout with paint-stained fingers, owned a secondhand car named Besty,and a brother who relied on her for rent and medicine.Her mornings usually began with two hours behind a counter pulling lattes and her nights ended with borrowed brushes and a cramped studio that smelled like linseed and laundry detergent. She could list every bill by memory and how much shit she has had to endure from people over the course of her years but she could not list a single person in her life who would answer a cry for help at midnight on a cliff.

The coastal road unfurled ahead as her car's heater rattled like an old throat. She had meant to change that.The headlights carved fleeting shapes from the darkness-wet asphalt, twisted trees, a stretch of metal guardrail glinting silver. The portrait they had both been working on over the past couple of weeks sat tucked behind the passenger seat, shifting with every turn as the ocean let out a distant hiss. Lightning shot out in the distance as the road narrowed. She slowed at the bend because that was what everyone with a pulse did in a storm. She should have called back. She should have told Amara she wouldn't come. But instead she drove faster, because urgency bred its own logic.

The cliffs above the Hale estate were usually quiet, but tonight when she got there,light flared where it shouldn't-headlights pooled on the wet road, illuminating Amara's pale figure beside her car. She wasn't wearing a coat. Rather her arms were wrapped around herself as if she were freezing from the inside out.

"Amara?" she whispered, though the wind swallowed the name. She pulled over, yanked the handbrake, and stepped into the storm. The cold rain soaked through her jacket in seconds. Her boots slipped on the slick pavement as she ran toward the car.

"Amara! What's wrong?" Amara turned sharply. Her eyes were wide, rimmed in mascara that had bled down her cheeks. "He lied to me," she said. "He's not who I thought he was?"

For all Lena knew during her sessions with Amara, they've only talked about a couple of things; Damon, money and how good her life was. She loved Damon.They were planning to get married,she had said.

"Who?"

Lightning split the sky again as the wind caught the edge of Amara's scarf tugging it like an accusation.

"I shouldn't have done it-" Her words cut off as another engine roared somewhere behind them. Lena's heart stuttered. "Someone's coming."

" I can't let him control me anymore-"

A black car tore through the curve, its tires shrieking against the overly wet tar. Headlights washed over them, blinding, sound swelling until it filled everything-then came a sickening screech of tires. Lena barely had time to think. She lunged forward, shoving Amara aside.

"Get back!" but the world turned white.

When she came back, it was to the antiseptic light of an ER room and a thin, clinical beeping which made her bones ache. Her head throbbed and her fingers felt raw with gravel. She glanced below her to where she'd felt the pain and found out her wrists had been restrained. She had just gotten into what happened to be the most traumatic accident she's been in. The only accident she's been in and the first thing they could do was restrain her. A police officer stood over her. He looked young and somewhat pale as if he had been made to watch over her unwillingly. Through the window, black-clad figures leaned around the premises, all chattering from one end to the other but she couldn't seem to hear anything. From somewhere outside, a rhythmic strobe of camera lights drummed against the glass like a second storm.

"Can you tell me what happened young lady?" the officer asked once he saw her conscious.

When she could find her voice, it came out cracked with a tinge of raspiness

"I-" she started, then saw the camera lens on the counter, the police badge, the way the nurse's face had turned almost eagerly, as if a story was about to be fed into it. "She called me," she said simply. "Amara called me.

A reporter's voice bled through the corridor as the first headline had already formed in the mouths of the pressmen and newscasters inside:

UNKNOWN ARTIST INVOLVED IN BILLIONAIRE GIRLFRIEND'S CRASH.

On the television screen,a clip repeated: a grainy frame of her and Amara over the edge of the estate repeated but the majority of the photos caught it at the wrong angle. It was always her pushing Amara, never her saving her.

"Do you have anyone we can call?" the officer asked this time. He placed a hand on the form before him and watched her like he was trying to develop some sort of foreign emotion like sympathy.

"My brother," she said finally."Call Eli"

He took down the information with clinical efficiency, as if the facts themselves were less important than the paperwork. Someone photographed her bandaged wrists, another noticed the paint under her fingernails and murmured theories when she tried to explain.

When the door opened, a man filled the frame-tall, the kind of tall that made the ceilings feel lower. He wore a suit that clung to him like armor.Rain droplets beaded off his shoulders but he appeared unfazed as he approached her slowly but confidently.She had only met Damon Hale through pictures and tabloids and she had come to a conclusion that they certainly did him no justice,he was an extremely gorgeous man but terribly unphotogenic.

"Miss Rowan," he said.

She wanted to tell him the truth-the ragged chain of events that had brought them both to the cliff, but her throat felt like it was closing in. She suddenly felt like a child being called before a principal.The officer cleared his throat awkwardly.

Lena tried to sit up.

"You should pray she never wakes up," Damon said before anyone could ask a question."Because when she does, I'll make sure you wish you hadn't."

She let out a breath that trembled. "It was an accident-"

"Was it?" His tone sliced through the air." "Witnesses say she met you in secret, that you were seen arguing before she crashed. Do you deny it?"

"We weren't arguing-she asked me to come-"

"And you expect me to believe you?"

"She called me. She asked me to meet her. She said she'd been threatened. She said-"

"You really expect me to buy your story Miss Rowan?" Damon asked,not unkindly, but with a cruelty that made her stomach churn. "There will be lawyers.There will be hearings."

Her voice cracked. "I had nothing to do with this.. If for anything, I am also a victim here"

He watched her like a man watching a map misfold. "Do you see what this means?" he said. "My company- all the years of work could be frozen. Investors could pull out. Imagine the vultures circling, Miss Rowan.You imagine what this does to a man?"

She pressed her hands over her face in hopes that all of this was all just one big horrid nightmare.She wanted to scream that they were wrong, that she wasn't the villain they made her to be but the sound wouldn't come.

The officer shifted in his seat unsure. Through the glass, beyond the yellow tape and the dark suits, Lena saw a tableau: flashbulbs like distant lightning, a chorus of voices talking in the distance. Her tongue tasted of copper and the metallic tang of fear.

Damon's lips thinned. He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a sleek brown envelope as if it hurt him to touch the papers. He set them on the tray beside her bed and flicked it open with a controlled impatience.

"Your name," he said quietly, "is going to matter a great deal in the coming hours."