Page 2 of Ruthless Claim

Cillian Brennan looms at the end of the aisle. I hate him so much.

He’s standing at the altar, looking like he’s made his peace with an unpleasant situation and is simply waiting for it to be over.

Those ice-blue eyes find me the second the doors open and he watches my approach, completely devoid of anything resembling feeling.

He looks good, which is deeply, cosmically unfair, and I am logging a formal complaint with the universe about it at the earliest opportunity.

The auburn hair, the sharp jaw, the broad shoulders filling out a very well-cut tuxedo.

He’s truly a handsome man, which is fifty shades of bullshit.

The scar on his cheek catches the candlelight, and I know from the photographs in his file that it creases into something that looks almost like a dimple when he nearly smiles, which is the kind of detail that should be illegal on someone so insufferable.

Cillian Brennan was interesting to me once.

And only from a purely physical aspect.

He’s good looking and I have eyes.

I found him interesting for maybe sixty seconds before he handed me a cream envelope and opened his big fucking mouth.

Then, that interest died a very painful death.

Leo’s arm is solid under my hand the entire walk down the aisle. I keep my eyes on the altar and my smile serene, my steps measured, and I think about all the things I’m going to do once this is over.

Not to Cillian. Just…all the ways I’m going to make the best of this. I am a Santoro and Santoros survive everything, including apparently this.

We reach the altar. Leo squeezes my arm once. Are you sure?

I squeeze back. Do I have a choice?

He doesn’t have a response for that, because we both already know the answer, so he does the thing I’ve been quietly dreading since the moment this was arranged.

He places my hand in Cillian’s with the solemnity of a man completing a transaction he hates but understands the necessity of.

I feel Cillian’s fingers close around mine and I think: there it is. Done. No going back now.

His hand is rough, his fingers having calluses that denote a lifetime of doing things that leave marks. Board-room men don’t have hands like this. I know exactly what his hands have done.

His thumb presses briefly against my pulse point just for a second, then it’s gone. I tell myself it was involuntary, but I’m not so sure I believe it.

Up close he smells like expensive soap and something woodsy underneath it, and I am not noticing that. I am not noticing any of this.

The priest begins speaking.

It’s something in Latin first, then English, about the sacred covenant of marriage and love and honor and cherishing one another, and I stand here in my four-thousand-dollar shoes and I do what I always do during speeches I cannot bear.

I alphabetize things in my head.

Today I’m going through the last twenty years of Hermes purses—of which I have multiple—and it’s getting me through this with some semblance of dignity.

“Do you, Valentina Isabelle Santoro, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband⁠—”

“I do,” I say coldly before he’s finished the sentence. Cillian’s jaw tightens minutely at the tone, and I feel a flicker of something I’m choosing to call satisfaction.

“Do you, Cillian James Brennan, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife⁠—”

“I do.” His brogue coats the words and somehow makes them sound like a challenge. Or a warning. With him, I’m learning, those are probably the same thing.