The billionaire’s Lavender Wife

I heard them before I saw them.

A sound like a wave,growing, building, crashing, just outside the café door. Then the door didn't open. It exploded.

They poured in like a flood that had been waiting for a crack in the wall. Reporters with cameras already raised. Fans, if that was even the right word, with phones out, flashes firing. Strangers,dozens of them, pushing, shoving, screaming over each other in a noise so sudden and so total that for a full three seconds I stood completely still behind the counter and thought, there must be someone famous outside.

There wasn't.

They were looking at me.

“Rose Carter!” A microphone appeared in my face from nowhere. “Is it true you're marrying Arthur Blackwood?”

I blinked. “I'm sorry…what?”

“How long have you been together?” Another voice,another camera. Closer now.

“I don't… I think you have the wrong…”

“Gold digger!” someone screamed from the back of the crowd.

Then the tray was gone.

Someone knocked it clean out of my hands, I didn't even see who, just felt the impact, heard the crash, felt hot coffee spray across my forearm as cups hit the floor and shattered. A customer screamed. Another one scrambled back from their table. The café had gone from its usual Tuesday morning quiet to something that felt like a riot in under sixty seconds and I still had absolutely no idea why.

“Please..” I held my hands up. “I don't know what's happening, I think there's been some kind of mistake…”

The slap came from my left.

I didn't see the hand. I felt it, sharp and sudden across my right cheek, the kind of contact that snaps your head sideways and leaves a ringing in your ear that takes a moment to settle. I grabbed the counter. The cameras went wild.

“Home-wrecker!”

“She's nobody! Why would he pick her?!”

My cheek burned. My eyes were watering, not crying, just the automatic response of a face that had just been hit, which I told myself very firmly as I pressed my lips together and tried to find something stable to focus on in a room that had gone completely insane.

That was when Mr. Henderson appeared.

My manager. Pushing through the crowd with his face red and his mouth already forming words I recognized before he'd said them, the specific shape of a decision that had been made long before this moment and had simply been waiting for the right excuse to announce itself.

“That's enough.” He grabbed my arm. Not gently, just rough. “Rose. You're done.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“You're fired.” His voice was loud. Loud enough for every camera in the room to catch it. Loud enough for the crowd to go momentarily quiet, that specific silence of people who have witnessed something and are deciding whether to cheer or gasp.

They cheered, then someone threw an egg.

It hit the counter six inches from my hand and I flinched back, and the cameras caught that too, Rose Carter flinching in a café she'd worked in for eight months while strangers threw things at her and her manager fired her on camera in front of all of London.

I don't remember deciding to move. I just moved.

Through the kitchen. Past the startled face of Danny on the fryer who called my name as I passed. Through the back door, into the alley.

Cold air,grey sky. The specific silence of a London alley that existed in a completely different universe from the noise I'd just come from.

I leaned against the wall. Pressed both palms flat against the cold brick. Breathed.

My cheek was still burning.

I pulled out my phone with hands that were not shaking, I refused to let them shake and opened the first notification.

Then the second, at some point, I stopped counting.

BILLIONAIRE HEIR ARTHUR BLACKWOOD ANNOUNCES SUDDEN MARRIAGE…BRIDE IDENTIFIED AS ROSE CARTER.

I read it three times.

My name,my photograph, taken from somewhere I couldn't identify, already circulating to millions of people. Arthur Blackwood's name beside mine like we were a fact of the world rather than whatever this actually was, which was the single most confusing moment of my twenty-five years of existence.

I had never spoken to Arthur Blackwood in my life.

I pressed my back against the wall and looked up at the grey London sky and thought, Kevin. I need to get to Kevin.

I pushed off the wall and started walking.

Behind me, through the café's back wall, I could still hear them, so I increased my pace.

My heart pounded, as I kept thinking of countless possibilities. I wondered if they were sent by depth collectors or even worse.

I hadn’t offered anyone, none that I could think of.

All I knew was that my cheek burned, my name was everywhere, and somewhere across London a man I had never met had apparently decided we were getting married.

What I didn't know, what I couldn't have known, walking through London in a coffee stained uniform with a burning cheek and forty-three pounds to my name, was that the chaos behind me was only the beginning.

And across the city, someone was already planning their next move.You could see, if you knew where to look, a figure at the very back of the crowd.

Standing still while everyone else pushed forward.Watching,smiling and then, just before the egg hit the counter, turning and walking out through the door.Not running,walking.

Like someone who had exactly where they needed to be next.