Guilt and shame are closely related, but they aren’t the same thing.
Guilt gnawed at Arielle’s heart because she had known it was wrong to accept Mitchell Saltonstall’s proposition, even if it was going to provide for her parents’ retirement. Furthermore, hiding her relationship with him was another betrayal, even though it was fictional.
When they’d confronted her, she’d told them the relationship was pretend because Match Play was now a dating app and their supposed romance was all for the cameras.
They didn’t believe her.
Arielle hadn’t told her parents about the contract. If she’d told them about the stock options they’d receive in January when she finished it out, they would have insisted she break the contract immediately, demanding that she stop prostituting herself for their retirement income.
They would’ve said they didn’t need it, which meant she would have been forcing her parents to lie.
There was already enough lying going around.
On the other hand, shame compressed her soul because, evidently, Arielle was the type of person who would lie to her family, friends, and the world for months to fake a relationship with someone who had swindled a member of her family.
Arielle had always thought she was an honest person, and that honesty and living a transparent life were important to her.
When she’d accepted the contract with Mitchell, no matter what her motivation had been, she’d betrayed everyone and herself.
She was a liar.
She was a traitor.
And the shame of being a liar and a traitor was going to destroy her.
But if Arielle broke the contract, her parents wouldn’t have nearly enough money for retirement at any age, let alone for medical care later in life.
If she broke the contract.
No matter what Arielle had been pretending was or wasn’t in the contract, she had read that contract carefully back in May and listened to the lawyers when they’d explained every clause to her.
If Mitchell Saltonstall broke the contract before New Year’s Day, Arielle’s parents would get the total amount he’d promised to give them, the stock options, and the vested securities.
Which meant Arielle had to make Mitchell break the contract.
And she needed to do it damn soon.
Arielle wasn’t particularly worried about her immortal soul being damned to Hell for bearing false witness. Still, she had managed to do her entire makeup routine without looking herself in the eyes in the mirror.
The mirror had shown her other changes she’d undergone over the last four months that had sneaked up on her.
Maybe in a subconscious attempt to please Mitchell Saltonstall, every time she’d had her hair touched up at one of the hotel salons, the blond highlights had become lighter and more numerous, even platinum, until even the darkest lowlights in her hair were light honey blond.
Her manicure was pale pink with subtle French tips.
Even the way she spoke was different. Growing up in the working-class neighborhoods of Phoenix had given her a Western accent with shades of Mexican Spanish.
The dialect coach at that first spa in California had taught her to smooth the working-class edges she’d grown up with, and hanging around Mitchell for nearly a third of her time every week had influenced the way she formed her vowels and hit her consonants until her words sounded vaguely upper-class New Englander with a slight British inflection.
Arielle looked and sounded expensive.
Just how Mitchell Saltonstall liked his women.
Taking a butcher knife to her fake nails and dousing her hair with Goth black hair dye could probably be construed as her violating the contract, which said she had to look the part of his girlfriend.
So Arielle hatched another plan.
In public, she would absolutely be the adoring girlfriend that the contract specified she had to be.
But in private and when other people couldn’t hear, she didn’t have to talk to that asshole or hang around him, and she wouldn’t.
And no matter what, she sure as hell wasn’t going to knock on his hotel room door or open her door for him.
Even Mitchell’s attentive, skilled intimacy wasn’t worth the shame corroding her soul.
The following Friday when she arrived in Connecticut because there was a gala opening that one of Mitchell’s friends wanted them to attend, Mitchell Saltonstall waited at the airport curb in his asshole Beamer convertible to pick her up.
When he reached for her hand, she pulled away.
Her father had been the most incensed at the fact that she’d been holding his hand and gazing up at him adoringly.
She wouldn’t let him touch her. There was no reason why Mitchell needed to touch her. At least she could keep the pictures of hand-holding to a minimum.
When he described their weekend itinerary, Arielle nodded and occasionally said, “Okay.”
They were staying in a hotel closer to the town of Newcastle, Connecticut, nearer to the country club or whatever it was.
When she got into her room, Arielle locked the door.
There was no way she was going to open that door when he knocked.
Absolutely no way.
Arielle absolutely denied that she had practically conditioned herself in a Pavlovian way to get horny when she was in a hotel and Mitchell Saltonstall was somewhere else in the same hotel.
Whenever she thought about him, her pulse pounded in her temples, swelling her skull. The urge to stretch overcame her every few minutes as her muscles clenched with wanting him.
It was just physical, and physical things could be denied.
It was nine o’clock in the evening when Arielle finished those ruminations, and Mitchell’s self-confident knock rattled her door.
Arielle strode toward the door with every intention of telling Mitchell Saltonstall that he could go to Hell through the closed door.
She peeked through the fisheye lens of the peephole because she didn’t want to tell a room service staff person to get the hell out and never return. She was going to need room service that weekend.
But yes, Mitchell Saltonstall stood outside, glancing down the corridor as if he was worried people might see him.
Her hands clicked open the deadbolt with the same mindless, instinctive movement of reaching into a bag of chips while trying to diet, and she opened the door.
Mitchell was on her in a heartbeat, slamming the door behind himself and shoving her up against the wall, grabbing at her clothes as he kissed and sucked the side of her neck to her collarbone. He growled, “What happened?”
Arielle fumbled with the buttons on his dress shirt, forcing her fingers to open them faster. “My parents found out that I’ve been lying to them for months and dating the guy who ruined my father’s life. They don’t believe we’re just pretending. My mother said that the way I looked at you when we were at the ribbon-cutting for the Match Play Special Edition app couldn’t be faked. They are pissed at me, and I can’t believe I’ve been lying to them and betraying them for four months.”
She must’ve been taking too long with his shirt buttons, because Mitchell reached around her thigh she’d already wrapped around his waist and unzipped his fly, and then he reached between them to jam a condom on.
He yanked the crotch of her panties aside and drove himself up into her, filling her as she fell over him, impaling herself down to his balls. She was already so hot for him that even too-fast burn felt so good that she was almost on the edge of an orgasm.
His body thrust into her, and he grabbed a handful of her hair on the back of her head and pulled her head to the side to mouth her neck. “And yet you let me in.”
She was mindless with the friction spiraling closer to orgasm, and she forgot to lie. “I couldn’t stop myself from opening the door. I can’t stop myself with you.”
Mitchell growled near her ear, “Every time I see you, I think about us in bed, and I want you so badly that I can’t think. My only thoughts are all the different ways I want to take you. I want to see you stretched out on my bed at Westcott Cove, tied down while I take you until you’re senseless. I want to bend you over the kitchen island of my house while we have dinner guests in the dining room. I want you to think about me and get wet. I want to take your ass, and your face, and your tits, and your pussy until you know every part of your body belongs to me.”
“Just let me go. Break the contract so that this won’t drive me crazy anymore,” she begged.
“Never. I won’t let you go. I’ll have you on my arm until New Year’s Day because the contract forces you to be there if that’s the only way I can be around you.”
Arielle’s body squeezed down, and Mitchell gasped in her ear as ecstasy flooded up her spine and the world went white.
Arielle’s sanity slowly returned, and she found herself huddled on the floor while Mitchell stood above her, buttoning his pants. He said, “If you want to hate me, fine, but I will knock on your hotel room door every night until you tell me to go away.”
She slept fitfully that night, vacillating between hating him with every cell in her body and wanting him to come back so she could have him again.
Arielle stayed in her hotel room the next day, passing the time by playing games on her phone when she wanted to call Mitchell and tell him to come back. Finally, she applied her makeup and put on her dress, readying herself to meet him in the hotel lobby at four o’clock to ride to Newcastle Golf Club.
And yes, when she looked at herself in the long mirror after she was done, Arielle grimly determined that she did indeed look expensive. The dress delivered to her hotel room that morning fit her like silvery, crystal-encrusted Saran Wrap, and she’d gotten very good at doing her makeup like the spa had taught her.
When Arielle approached Mitchell in the lobby, his eyes traveled from the top of her carefully curled blond hair, down the silvery dress that clung to her curves, to the ridiculously expensive shoes she wore, and back up again. “Damn, Arielle. You look stunning.”
She still hated him, and she felt sick about that, too.
Arielle didn’t speak to him the whole ride over in his stupid BMW 840i that had probably cost over a hundred thousand dollars, and he quit trying to talk to her after the first few minutes.
Newcastle Golf Club was a manicured golf course with a clubhouse and a large building that looked like a coliseum rising behind the driving range.
Inside the clubhouse, signs swagged from the second floor balcony, reading Fall Formal and Grand Opening.
Arielle did her best to adhere to the letter of the contract the whole night long, even though she was grinding her teeth through every smile. Every minute she was there, she was betraying her parents and her friends, but if she walked out, she would leave her parents without financial security and the office without someone to advocate to Mitchell for them.
Mitchell wore a black-tie tuxedo that had obviously been tailored to cling to his broad shoulders and narrow waist. He really was astonishingly handsome, with the strong line of his jaw and dark blond hair, like underwear-model attractive, and his green eyes seemed to see the dirty thoughts running through her head as soon as she looked at him.
Dammit, he was right. Her panties were damp.
As soon as they were in the greeting line at the gala, Arielle turned on her personality and talked to everybody she could except Mitchell. When it was absolutely necessary, she leaned against him or otherwise made it look like she could tolerate his existence, even though she wanted to stomp out of the clubhouse, key his stupid overpriced Beamer car, and call a rideshare to take her to the nearest airport and leave his sorry ass forever.
Mitchell introduced her to Jericho Parr, who was one of his partners at Last Chance, Inc.
Arielle smiled up at Jericho with all the good emotions she had left in her body, and she kissed him on his cheek when he leaned down as if he were European or something.
When Mitchell held out his arm, she scurried back under it and plastered herself to his side, curling around his hard, muscular form.
Mitchell wrapped his arm around her and pressed his lips to her temple, where he lingered for a heartbeat longer than a quick peck of a kiss.
She survived the first part of the evening even though she was praying for it to be over. After the clubhouse reception, she rode in a golf cart over to the massive building that Jericho was opening for business that evening. Her expensive shoes wouldn’t have handled the walk on the gravel path through the golf course.
Inside the colossal structure, five or more balconies wrapped around a field that looked like a baseball diamond except for the golf flags stabbed into it.
She clapped and smiled at all the correct times while Jericho Parr and the woman wearing a golden evening gown, who must be his girlfriend, Tiffany Jones, broke a champagne bottle on a Plexiglas shield to symbolize launching the new business, Pop Golf.
Jericho Parr picked up a small cube that had fallen out of the shattering glass bottle and turned around, bending on one knee, as he held it out and proposed with an adorable little speech that broke Arielle’s heart.
Literally, her chest clenched. Jericho's heartfelt, genuine sentiment was everything that she was missing in her life. She was contractually obligated to be with a guy she hated, an asshole who had destroyed her parents’ retirement and screwed up her friends’ jobs, and she was sleeping with him just because he was good at it.
She hated that she had ripped apart the connection between sex and love in her head. She knew they were different things, but love and sex together were amazing. Even though she now realized that Nick hadn’t been very good in bed, like, at all, at least he’d sort of meant it when he was with her.
Maybe he’d meant it when he was with the other women, too.
Maybe he’d meant it even more with them, but that hurt too much to think about.
Mitchell didn’t mean it. His hands and mouth weren’t driven by love, just by skill and experience.
And she didn’t mean it, either.
Arielle clapped and smiled while she blinked back tears as Jericho Parr and Tiffany Jones, newly engaged, waved to the crowd. Without moving her lips or opening her teeth, she snarled at Mitchell, “How much longer do I have to stay?”
Mitchell said, “Through dinner and the dancing, and then I’ll call you a limo to take you back to the hotel.”
“Fine.”
“We just have to make it through New Year’s Eve.”
“Fine.”
Mitchell said, “After December, we never have to see each other again.”
“It can’t come soon enough for me.”
“That’s not what you say when you knock on the door of my hotel room.”
“If you didn’t want it, you shouldn’t have invited me in.”
“Of course, I invited you in. I’m a gentleman.”
Her derisive snort probably echoed off the insulation-coated rafters. “You are no gentleman.”
Mitchell whispered to Arielle, “That’s what you like best about me.”
Arielle’s jaw popped from where she was grinding her teeth. “I don’t like anything about you, asshole.”
Mitchell turned back and continued clapping with the rest of the crowd. “Yes, you do.”
“I hate you.” She grabbed her skirt in both hands and walked away before she started crying.
“You, too, sugar plum!” he called after her and continued to applaud.
Arielle stalked away through the crowd and found one of the guys in the golf carts to take her back up to the clubhouse, where she sat in a bathroom stall and cried silently until she heard the rest of the people returning from Pop Golf.
After fixing her makeup, she found Mitchell in the crowd and sat beside him for the rest of the evening, forcing herself to make inane conversation with his business partners.
The food was tasteless in her mouth, and the dozens of toasts to the newly engaged happy couple reminded her of what she didn’t have and might never have with every speech.
After all, her relationship with Nick had ended in heartbreak, and this one with Mitchell was entirely fake. There might be no one out there for her because she sucked at relationships.
Mitchell did call a limo to take her back to the hotel after a minimum amount of dancing.
When she walked into her room, she double- and triple-locked her door, deciding once and for all that there was no way on God’s green Earth that she was going to open it when Mitchell Saltonstall knocked later that night.
The hotel room felt as empty as her life.
She was pretending to have a boyfriend, her work was pointless and awful, and her relationship with her parents was breaking down so much that they might disown her.
But hours later, when Mitchell knocked at the door, she practically ran to the door and opened it.
It might have been a Pavlovian response, but she was so damn lonely that even a pretend connection with another human being was better than nothing.
Because lying and betrayal had destroyed everything, and she had nothing left.