Sweet Romance14 min read
A Contract, a Child, and a Very Persistent Billionaire
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I was supposed to be invisible.
"Airport news: Carmine Perrin, the globe-shaking business prodigy, will move his headquarters to town next month. Rumor says he's unmarried but has a son. The mother's identity remains a mystery—"
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the arrivals hall and let the broadcast drone on. My bag sat heavy at my feet. I had one mission: deliver the personnel file to the university office and be home before my daughter, Jaida Myers, finished her drawing.
He sat in the corner, a black coat like a silhouette, shades on like armor. Next to him, a tiny copy of that armor: a little boy in a miniature suit and matching sunglasses.
"Wow. Look at the dad. So handsome." "That kid's ridiculous." Girls whispered. Someone snapped a photo.
Carmine Perrin's eyes flicked only once in our direction, and I almost froze. I had already bumped his phone. My hands still smelled of coffee and nerves.
"Boss, the hacker we traced is on MK98," my assistant had said over the line. "We have the flight manifest."
I had the manifest, too. I was human resources at the university—mundane, tucked-in, safe. I was not supposed to mess up billion-dollar chases. But the stroller-bump—no, it had been an accident. I couldn't tell the man that his phone had been my fault.
"Papa, I need the bathroom." The little boy tugged at Carmine's sleeve. Carmine glanced at the arrival board. Twenty minutes.
"Let's go," Carmine said in that low cello voice.
He left his coat on the seat. I had coffee left in my hand and a crisp stack of bills in my wallet. I stared down at those minutes like they were a cliff. My legs moved. He strode toward security, toward the chaos. I shouldn't have acted. I still acted.
I collided with him as he turned. My wallet flew. His phone skidded across marble, a spider web of cracks blooming over the screen.
"I'm—" I bent, instinctive, and shoved my cash into his palm. "I am so sorry. Here—if it's not enough, call me."
I shoved a wrinkled business card at him. "University Personnel. Lin—" My breath thinned. My name felt suddenly silly. The man took the card like a blade had been slipped in.
His face went cold. He folded the money without looking. "You broke my phone."
"I am sorry." The words felt like a script. I turned and walked, heart a jackhammer.
"She's leaving!" a bully of a security man barked, and three suited men with shades bolted after me.
Panic is a peculiar thing. You run until your legs combust, until you find air. I found a corner in the garage and hid. Then a small figure stepped out from behind a car.
A boy. A tiny gentleman in a black suit and red bow tie, eyes wide as coins. "I—I'm not bad," he whispered.
I froze. He couldn't be more than four. His name, he told me through hiccuped breaths, was Brooks Cardenas.
"I lost my dad," he said. I felt the world tilt.
"Where did you last see him?" I crouched. He squinted, searching his memory like a tiny old man. "I was hungry," he said finally, expressive and childlike, and then, "I want a burger."
The rest of my day rearranged itself around that sentence. I had none of my own money left. I had just given every bill in my wallet away at the airport. The kid's eyes were pleading.
"Okay. Auntie will buy you a burger," I said, and he lit up like a lamp.
We rode the elevator. At the fast-food counter I fumbled with my phone—empty—but the cashier offered the QR payment. I felt like an idiot for forgetting such things. Brooks ate like a small starved wolf. I sat opposite him, hands around a cup that turned too quickly cold.
Carmine appeared like a thunderclap.
"Brooks—get over here."
He was thunder and frost made flesh. He resembled the man from the airport: tall, sculpted, a voice that made the room listen.
"Is he your son?" I asked, because there was no other question to ask in the presence of that silence.
"He is," Carmine said. He looked at the child, then at me. His eyes had that same quiet blade. "You are Lin—Susan?"
"Emersyn," I corrected, then froze. "Emersyn." A lie. I fumbled. He reached into my jacket, took my phone—my lifeline—and held it like evidence.
"You're accusing me of kidnapping?" My heartbeat sounded loud, foolish. "I only helped him find you."
"You took his hand," Carmine said to Brooks, his voice calm but dangerous like water under ice. "Come."
Brooks clung to my leg and whimpered, "Mommy, don't go." The word lodged in time. I had never been called "mommy" by a boy who wasn't mine and felt so much like gravity.
"Sir—" I tried to stand. Carmine had already signaled security. Handcuffs and harsh eyes turned my offering into accusation. I watched, helpless, as the police cuffed me and led me away.
"This is a misunderstanding!" I cried. "I didn't steal him!"
It took hours. It took tear-soaked pleadings and questions and a man named Carlo Hall—my father—arriving, bland and precise to bail me out. He sat like a judge. His second wife, Susanne Rodriguez, hovered behind him like perfume.
"You owe me appearances," he said on the ride home. His voice announced that I belonged in a ledger, not a life.
I hung my head. I had left Jaida, my daughter, sleeping under a nightlight. I clutched a small crayon drawing in my pocket and whispered to the seat belt, "I'm sorry." I was twenty-eight and still apologizing for being human.
Later, at home, Susanne and her daughter Marcella Bailey—my half-sister—found obscene pleasure in belittling me. "You are a liability," Susanne said, thin as glass. "We can't be embarrassed."
"You're barely one of us," Marcella cooed. "You were raised in the wrong places, the wrong people. How could you think we'd accept you?"
"Enough," Carlo said, but he didn't mean it. He was itching for an alliance. He wanted to trade me again like a card, and this time he wanted a better face forward.
"Tomorrow, you go on the set-up dinner. You will play along with Mr. Perrin. You will not make trouble." His tone was ledger-ink.
My heart sank. A deal. A marriage to someone I hadn't even known an hour ago. The only thing I knew was that Jaida needed me. My choices were small and sharp.
The next morning I cleaned holes from my mouth and dressed in things that could be called presentable. My father's arrangements were fast and brutal. They wanted to pair our family with the wealthy—an attempt to climb.
The date was a restaurant that smelled of candles and expectations. I arrived and froze. Across from me was Evan Ferrell—sleazy, self-adoring, the sort who thinks scars make stories. He made a face like he'd seen a ghost and then tried to charm me. I played a role because I had to. When his hand drifted, I pulled a mask—an exaggerated prosthetic skin—over my chin and feigned the horror of it.
Evan's color lost any pretense. He fled like a coward. I desk-patted my victory and slipped out laughing.
From a corner, like a storm's calm, Carmine watched. He adjusted his cuff.
That night, the phone call came. Carlo's voice barked: "Return. There's someone here." My stomach dropped. I returned to find Carmine sitting in our drawing room, and the guest of honor was his grandfather—Fredrik Kozlov—a man who wanted a daughter-in-law who would clean the house and double as an ally.
"You are Emersyn?" Fredrik asked in a trembling curiosity.
I bowed my head, feeling the wood under me like a boat plank. Carmine gripped my hand until the color faded from my fingers.
"I want you to be my son's wife," Fredrik said, trivial like dessert. "When will the wedding be?"
My mouth forgot all its lies. Susanne's mouth split with triumph. Marcella looked like a fox with a found hen.
"I will not marry him," I said aloud, and the words sounded like a stone splashing. "I don't know him."
Carmine's hand tightened until pain bloomed. "You will."
He had me over a gameboard I had never chosen. His terms were cold and clever: a marriage of convenience to silence both families, to protect me from worse trades. To be his public wife—only a name on paper—if I agreed, my father's contracts would be saved, Jaida would be safe, and the men chasing me from my past would be kept at bay.
"And if I refuse?" I asked through the ache in my chest.
"You don't have another plan," he said simply.
My life had been a series of small terrors and quieter rescue. For Jaida, for the thin, human thing that was my family, I signed papers I had no desire to sign.
"I will accept," I whispered.
"Good." He smiled like a blade.
We rehearsed a narrative. For the cameras, for the society pages, for Fredrik. We created scenes: a kiss in the lobby, a photo, the invented romance that would seal my position as Mrs. Perrin. "You will not touch me," I told him. "We keep our distance."
He looked amused. "I don't want anything I can't control."
"You are not in charge of me," I whispered.
"Not yet," he said.
Soon the engagement was announced. The city hummed. The tabloids cackled. My name was splashed beside his, and photos of Fredrik smiling made my stomach sick with vertigo.
I tried to live the small life—work at the university, nights with Jaida, the tiny ordinary rituals that made us safe. But being in Carmine's orbit was like wearing a magnet.
I visited Axel Blair, my friend from childhood—now a young computer science professor who understood code the way some people read poetry. Axel worried about me. "He has reach," he warned. "Carmine's company can swallow things whole."
"I know what I'm doing," I lied. I had said the same thing when I first boarded a plane with one bag and a child's drawing.
Axel said nothing then. Later Carmine cornered Axel in his office and asked him to help trace a hacker. "Can you find the server?" Carmine asked. "It cost us millions."
Axel blinked at the enormity. Carmine's voice was soft but absolute. "Five minutes," Carmine said. "You will help me."
Axel nodded, the lights from his screens reflecting in his glasses. He was human and terrified. That night he dropped breadcrumbs and lines of code into a well and waited for a signal.
We staged our public devotion. In front of Fredrik, Carmine kissed me on the cheek for the cameras, and I felt safer and sick all at once. Brooks took to me like a duck to water; he held my hand and whispered secrets like, "You smell like my favorite cookie." I loved him despite the contract. I loved Jaida until everything else felt like sediment.
But families with loose hands make powerful enemies. Susanne and Marcella could not stand me. They had intended Marcella to be the bride. The humiliation of seeing Carmine choose me—someone they deemed 'market trash'—twisted Susanne into venom.
When the engagement party was announced, they saw an opportunity. Marcella planted rumors. Susanne fed a photographer a grain of scandal. They whispered to a circle of influential women that Emersyn had a hidden past. They suggested I was hiding things, that Jaida was a distraction, that my history could shatter the negotiation. They smiled like honey.
I had expected gossip. I had not expected that my own relatives would march into a ballroom to try to bury me.
The night of the engagement was a room of crystal and polite smiles. Fredrik sat proud at the head of the table. Carmine looked at me as if calculating wind on a sail.
"Emersyn," Susanne purred, a snake in a silk dress, and then she said, loud and fragile, "We should explain the truth. Some people deserve the light."
"What truth?" Carmine asked.
Susanne lifted a small tablet, playing a short, edited video. "She has lied. She is not of us. She is a woman who—" she smirked— "has a child and—"
"—has a scandalous past," Marcella finished, like a chorus. They had rehearsed this.
The room shifted. Glass clinked. Fredrik's eyes narrowed like coins. Carmine's face did not change color, but the air around him turned black.
I wanted to shrink into the carpet and die. I wanted to scream. Jaida sat on the lap of a nanny nearby, and the nanny's expression was a blade.
"Is this true?" someone whispered.
Carmine stood. He walked to the front and took the tablet from Susanne's trembling hands. He swiped. He found, among their snares, a recording of Susanne coaching a gossip blogger with staged cries. He found receipts of payments to a tabloid. He found texts to Marcella instructing her to lie about a 'tumor' I pretended in the restaurant to scare a man. Susanne's smile cracked.
"You set me up," I said, voice raw. "Why?"
Susanne smiled—too bright—then her face changed when Carmine's coldness turned to a weapon. "To protect the family name," she said.
Carmine took a breath and began to act with the slow, perfect cruelty of someone who had spent a lifetime in boardrooms. He stood and addressed the ballroom as if making a merger announcement.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "It has been an... enlightening evening."
He pressed a button on the tablet. A larger screen lit with receipts and recordings projected for all to see.
"Ms. Rodriguez," Carmine said and his voice now carried a legal calm. "You attempted to manipulate a family alliance by manufacturing evidence and soliciting a tabloid to publish falsehoods. You funded a smear campaign with corporate contacts. You conspired to extort a business advantage with intentional deceit."
"How dare you," Susanne screamed. Her parasol of composure collapsed.
"Everyone here has copies." Carmine's tone was cool, judicial. "There are contracts, messages, transfers. Your phone records suggest payments crossing paths with the tabloids. Marcella Bailey—your daughter—was complicit."
A hundred expectant faces leaned forward. Champagne glasses froze.
"Forgive me," Marcella said with practiced innocence. "We only—"
"You offered to arrange a fake tumor," Carmine continued sharply. "You coached a man to react. You paid a paparazzo to tail a rival. All recorded."
There it was: the slow collision of their faces. Susanne's smile fell into a bare, animal scream. Marcella's mascara ran like defeat. The crowd buzzed: whispers like bees.
"Is this true?" someone in the room asked.
"Yes," Marcella said, but first she tried to laugh, then she tried to deny, then she flailed between them like wind and rope. "It was—just—" Her bravado buckled.
Carmine didn't yell. He didn't need to. He stepped closer and spoke to the room in measured sentences.
"People here thought my family might be vulnerable to manipulation. I can handle business problems. I cannot tolerate cruelty toward a woman trying to protect her child. Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. Bailey attempted to manufacture a scandal and extort my family."
Around the room, faces hardened into a thing more dangerous than hostility: disgust. Phones came out; live streams blinked to life. The cameras pivoted like wolves.
"We will settle this differently," Carmine declared. "Legal charges will follow. But first, listen to what happens when manipulation is unveiled."
He asked the maître d' to bring a microphone. He guided Susanne and Marcella to stand up, both trembling.
"Tell everyone," he said. "Tell them why you thought you could destroy someone's life for a deal."
The ballroom watched. The lights felt like an interrogation lamp.
Susanne's voice spit, then shrank: "To secure my daughter's future—" she began.
"No. Tell them you wanted power." Carmine's voice was soft steel. "Tell them you thought you could buy reputation."
"I—" Susanne began and collapsed into shuddering tears.
Marcella's face crumpled like paper. People recorded, whispered, judged. They took pictures of Susanne's trembling hands and of Marcella's pale cheeks. Somebody clapped. Another hissed.
"Look," Carmine said, and he held them with the patience of a man administering final exams. "This is not loud enough. The people you've used—your vendors, tabloid contacts—are here tonight too."
He had them call the vendors, play the recorded hire agreements to keepers of reputations. He had the ex-employee of a gossip outlet detail the payment chain. One by one, witnesses spoke and confirmed how Susanne had paid for the smear. Marcella's face shifted from arrogance to denial to terror.
"Do you see the cost?" Carmine asked the crowd. "She threatened the life of a mother and the safety of a child to secure a trade."
A murmur rose like a tide. People took out phones and streamed, and the public—hungrier than the room—ate it all.
By the time the speeches ended, Susanne sat surrounded by journalists. Marcella was tearful and raw, rehearsed lies shattered. They had miscalculated my presence, my unwillingness to be erased.
They begged. They pleaded. They offered apologies in small paper packages. They tried to wriggle toward lawyers and quiet settlements. I watched the theater unfold and felt a strange wash of relief and sorrow. I did not dance on their ruin, but the public unwrapping of their lies felt like a purge.
"You tried to ruin a mother trying to keep her child," Carmine said finally, face hard. "Now you will face the consequences."
The crowd's judgment was immediate and complete. People scorned. Some recorded the scene to share and haunt them later. Corporate partners wrote polite but damning messages. The social pages that Marcella had hoped to cozy up to instead printed her confessions in black and white.
The punishment was not only legal. It was reputational, social, and public. They were ostracized from charity boards. Invitations stopped. The board of an affiliate company quietly removed Susanne's name from donor lists. Marcella watched her social life evaporate like a conjured mist.
Carmine stepped back and looked at me. "This is over," he said.
"Publicly," I replied. My voice was small. "Privately, I still have to breathe."
He smiled almost gently, and that made me wary.
"Then breathe," he said. "We have a wedding to sign up for the cameras. But your child—Jaida—will stay with you."
That was the bargain. We returned to the quiet work of our agreement: staged appearances, shared dinners that were acts, joint charity work that served the interests of both houses. Carmine kept the world at bay with an efficiency I had never seen. He was not warm often, but he was precise and relentless.
Days folded into weeks. Brooks started calling me "Aunt Em." Jaida learned to say "Mr. Perrin" like it was a trick, then "Carmine" with a puzzled affection. Axel and I grew closer in the way of two people who share secrets: he taught me to decode the shallow music of public life, and I taught him how to fold a child's lunch into a freight of love.
Carmine surprised me. He would—without grand gestures—do something small that unhooked my heart. At the company café one afternoon, he removed his coat and draped it over my daughter's shoulders when she crawled into my lap. "She won't be cold," he said, in a voice like a closed door opening.
"Thank you," I said.
He was not a man who lavished words. He arranged life like chess. He sought to secure, to protect through acquisition. He also learned to look. Sometimes he'd catch me while I washed a dish or held Jaida's hand and his mouth would soften unselfconsciously.
"You were brave today," he said once, catching the turn of my spine.
"I had to be," I answered. "For them."
"Good," he said. "Brave is necessary."
We found the hacker. Axel traced an IP to an old neighborhood; Carmine's team closed in. The person behind the mischief was not what we'd expected: an angry genius who had once been an intern at Jezebel Security, a palimpsest of vengeance and skill. Carmine did not celebrate their capture; instead, he ensured their future would be less merciless, negotiating a reduced sentence in exchange for their help patching vulnerable systems.
In the quiet between public obligations, sometimes, the two of us would sit in his car, or at the little table in my apartment, with Brooks racing toy cars between our knees, and talk.
"Why me?" I asked once, honest. "Why pick me?"
"Because you do not trade yourself cheaply," he said. "You are honest in a way that resists being commodified."
"And yet my father sold me twice," I said.
"He doesn't get to anymore," he replied.
At night, when Jaida slept with her thumb in her mouth and dreams of flying robots, Carmine and I would sign papers—boring, binding documents. He would look at me while I signed and make some small joke about how terrible I was at alimony clauses and I would laugh and think—this was a contract that kept my child safe.
The city would keep talking. People would continue to whisper. Susanne and Marcella would try to climb out of the rubble they had made, but the sound had not returned. I did not move back into my father's house. He could keep the ledger.
We married in a private ceremony. Fredrik cried—an absurd, vulnerable thing. Carmine kissed my hand with a deferential awkwardness I'd never thought to associate with him.
Afterwards we kept the distance that was our understanding. We played spouses at charity balls, at dinners where socialites had been taught to curtsy. But in the small places where no cameras looked, there were moments he did not plan: an unguarded laugh in the kitchen, a hand on my daughter's hair, the way he sat in a child's art show with a small tenderness I had never permitted myself to expect.
Public life remained in flux. Susanne and Marcella's punishment circulated for a long while: public apologies, legal letters, the quiet rustle of lost invites. The city liked a spectacle, and they had produced one. But in time, their shapes in the society page diminished and dignity re-accumulated around smaller, truer things: afternoon cartoons with my girl, Axel's emails full of algorithms and concern, Carmine's occasional, disarmingly human letters.
We had a contract. We had conditions. But we also quietly formed a household that was not entirely transactional. That was the odd alchemy of being an accidental wife: you survive, you negotiate, and you reimagine what family can be.
One night, after Jaida fell asleep with a bookmark in her hand, I found Carmine in the living room, sleeves rolled, looking at an old photograph of a woman and a little boy.
"Who is she?" I asked.
"Someone I loved," he said. He paused. "I thought I had no use for love. I was wrong."
"Maybe we were both wrong," I said.
He smiled then, without calculation. It surprised me how much warmth that lack of calculation could contain.
"Will you stay?" I asked, the question I had learned to save for mornings.
"Where?" he asked.
"With me. With Jaida. Not because you must, but because you want to."
He set down the photo gently. "I will stay," he said. "I already have; I just needed to be certain."
Outside, the city glimmered like a chessboard of possibilities. Inside, the small apartment smelled of cereal and crayons and warm milk. I felt richer than any headline could explain.
We were not perfect. The contract could not be erased with good intentions. Susanne and Marcella faced their consequences in a public theater of humiliation and legal fallout that corrected some things and left others raw. But I learned slowly for Jaida—a kind of slow victory: you can sign for safety, you can bargain, you can be brave when people attempt to own your life.
One morning, Brooks wandered into our kitchen with a fat muffin and declared, "Aunt Em, your pancakes are the best."
"Thank you," I said. I looked at Carmine. He nodded with a private smile. For once, I let the quiet be enough.
The End
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