by Holly Rayner
The way he said “us” sent a shiver of pleasure down her back. She’d thought that she wasn’t going to see Dimitris again after last night. Now she was entering into a business arrangement that would keep them in each other’s worlds for quite some time. She realized that she liked being an “us” with Dimitris Atheos.
He went on. “I could have the money wired to your account this weekend. Does that work for you?”
The thought of sixty thousand dollars appearing in her bank account that very weekend sent another happy shiver through her.
“That would be fine,” she said, feeling as though she was dreaming. Then she leaned forward and spoke quietly. “So how does this work? How do we prove that we’re really in a relationship?”
“I’ll get the details from my lawyer,” Dimitris said. “He’s a good friend, and I trust him.”
He paused and gave Eva that appreciative look of appraisal that she enjoyed so much.
Then he went on. “As far as anyone knows, we met yesterday afternoon and had an instant connection.” His words seemed laden with meaning that she didn’t dare read into. Was he trying to voice something about how he truly felt?
His dark eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “We couldn’t keep our hands off of each other. We knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together…” He leaned back in his chair, still surveying Eva with a thoughtful gaze. “These sorts of things happen, so why not to us? Who will know the difference?”
She sipped her drink. His mention of not keeping their hands off of each other sent her mind to places she wasn’t sure she wanted it to go.
She tried to push the thoughts away, but it was hard to do, as Dimitris continued to talk. “We shared a meal together yesterday evening, and then had a passionate night together—the details of which we’ll keep to ourselves.” He winked, and then gave her a playful smile.
Then he leaned forward and assumed a more businesslike tone. “Today, we met up again after you got off work. I proposed,” he said and looked around at the cafe, “in a candlelit coffee house.” He stood up and got down on one knee.
Eva felt her breath catching in her throat. She’d imagined what it would be like to be proposed to. Over the last decade, she’d seen countless friends share photos and stories of the moment their loved one popped the question. She’d longed to share a story of her own. Now, it was happening—just not under the circumstances that she’d ever imagined.
“I got down on one knee,’” Dimitris said, his dark eyes looking up into hers, “and I said: Eva, I loved you the minute I saw you. I know this is crazy, and I know that we just met—but will you be my wife? And you said…” His deep, soft voice trailed off.
Eva noticed that a few other patrons in the cafe were looking at them. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, of course.” It was hard to speak. She felt flooded with emotion, but she wasn’t sure why.
She had to look away from Dimitris and stare at her coffee cup to remind herself that the scene unfolding wasn’t real. From the corner of her eye, she saw Dimitris pop up to his feet and return to his seat. He leaned back again casually and put both hands behind his head. His biceps bulged.
“And that’s how it happened,” he said. “If we both stick to the same story, no one will know better. We’ll both get what we want.”
“Right,” she murmured reflexively, aware that Dimitris was waiting for her to speak. In the distance, she saw couples return to their private conversations.
“I’d like to have the ceremony as soon as possible, if that’s okay with you,” Dimitris went on. “I have some business to take care of in Argentina, and then I’m going to return to the States.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled his finger along the screen. “Let’s see… here it is. I’ll be back next Tuesday. I could meet you at a courthouse in the afternoon. Maybe around two, if they can fit us in then?”
“I think that would work,” Eva said.
“Good,” Dimitris said. “I’ll have my lawyer work out the details. He’ll probably want to get in touch with you to coordinate filling out the application beforehand.” He paused to polish off his espresso.
Eva’s head was spinning. She felt giddy and relieved at the same time. The burden of her debts and her bleak future had been weighing on her for so long. Now, all of that had been turned on its head. She no longer had to contend with her old worries, but a few new ones cropped up in their place.
Still, Dimitris’s presence helped to ease her fears. It was hard to fret when he was sitting across from her, looking as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.
She wrote her number down on a napkin, and he slipped it into his pocket.
“This is going to be fun,” he promised, once it was tucked safely away. “It’s a win-win situation. And I couldn’t imagine finding a better pretend wife, even if I searched for years. You’re perfect.”
“Hardly,” she said humbly. She sipped her drink, just so that she’d have something to do other than swoon at his words. The truth was, she loved basking in his appreciation.
If I’m perfect in Dimitris’s eyes, maybe I’m not such a bad person after all, she thought.
She finished her drink, and then set her napkin on the saucer along with her cup. She felt that their meeting was wrapping up, and there were a few calls she needed to make.
Dimitris took her cue, pushed his cup away, and stood.
“After you,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way out of the cafe. She felt his hand on the small of her back as he guided her through a narrow space between two tables.
Out on the sidewalk, the fresh air had the slightest cool edge to it, which was a relief. Eva felt flushed with heat.
“So it’s settled, then,” Dimitris said. “I’ll see you next Tuesday. I’ll have my assistant get in touch before then to set up a place where we can meet. It would probably be best if we showed up together. Might as well get off on the right foot.”
“Might as well,” Eva said softly.
“Would you like me to call you a cab? Do you live far from here?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s okay. I’ll walk,” she said. She was having trouble thinking straight. She’d just agreed to marry a man she barely knew—and was incredibly attracted to. Was it really going to be a win-win situation? What had she gotten herself into?
Her knees felt weak as he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She longed for another kiss on the lips, like they’d shared the night before, but told herself that it was much better that he’d kissed her on the cheek.
“Good night, Eva,” he said.
“Good night.”
He waited while she turned to walk away. She felt his eyes on her until she reached the end of the block, but she didn’t turn back. Once around the corner, she pulled out her cellphone.
Now that she was no longer in Dimitris’s playful, confident presence, her anxiety was mounting.
She had a call to make.
It was late, but the call couldn’t wait.
Will he be up? she wondered, as she located the number and hit “call.”
Chapter 7
Eva
“Robert Esposito here, who’s this?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded groggy with sleep.
“Bobby, it’s Eva. I woke you, didn’t I? I’m so sorry.”
“Eva…” There was a grunt and then a rustling sound on the other end of the line, and Eva could imagine Bobby Esposito, her father’s friend, heaving his bulk out of bed.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice asked, in the background. Eva was sure it was Bobby’s wife.
“Eva Rhames,” Bobby said. “You know, Sammy’s girl.”
“What’s she doing calling this late? It’s after ten.”
“Must be important,” Bobby said. “Let me take this in the study. You go back to bed.” There was more rustling, and then the sound of a door closing.
“Eva, are you there?” Bobby asked.
“Yes. I’m here. I’m sorry for getting you out of bed.
I hoped you’d be up.”
“No problem. You in trouble? Geez, haven’t heard from you in years. Your father’s doin’ good, you know. He talks about you now and then.”
“Does he, now,” Eva said flatly. She was no longer angry with her father, as she had been six years before. But she well remembered the hurt and rage that had filled her when she found out what he’d been up to for so many years.
Sammy had been a single father, for the most part. Eva’s mother had skipped town when Eva was just a toddler. Looking back on this, in light of what she knew about her father, Eva wasn’t surprised. She couldn’t blame her mother for trying to get free from Sammy.
Sammy raised Eva alone and had been distant for the most part—leaving home early in the morning to go to work at the dry cleaning business that he owned, and then returning late at night. Eva had grown accustomed to a constant string of nannies who readied her for school, picked her up, made her dinner, and put her to bed.
Her father’s distance—the fact that sometimes they’d go weeks without saying more than a dozen words to each other—wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Sammy Rhames wasn’t actually earning a living from his dry cleaning business; the business was just a front for the illegal activities he was engaged in—activities that caught up with him when Eva was twenty-four years old.
At times, Eva wished it had been the police that had figured out just what her father was up to. In that case, they’d have carted him off to jail, and that would have been the end of it. Of course, seeing as he’d used her names on half of the bank accounts he opened up, she’d have been dragged through the mud, too. But dealing with the police would have at least been relatively safe.
Instead, a different group of people had caught on to her father’s illegal activities, and they weren’t happy about it.
Sammy was part of one organized crime unit in Long Island, where Eva had grown up, but there was more than one ring of criminals in the area. It was a branch of the Mafia that had caught on, and they’d been bent on teaching Sammy a lesson.
Eva remembered overhearing her father’s panicked voice as he called other guys in his ring. He’d cared more about the money in their accounts than he cared about the well-being of his own daughter, and that was the last straw. She may have been able to find a way to love her father, despite the mistakes that he’d made regarding his income, but his lack of concern for her safety had been just too much.
She’d been living with a roommate in NYC when it all came crashing down. She’d returned to her father’s place to pick up some of her old medical records, which she thought might be in a filing cabinet in the den. She’d let herself into his apartment unannounced and made her way to the kitchen. Her father was sitting at the table, speaking intently on the phone. He didn’t see Eva or know she was listening in. She stood in the shadows.
“We gotta transfer the money—use the account I set up under Eva’s name. No, they won’t find it. And watch your back, these guys are ruthless.” When he hung up, she’d stepped out of the shadows.
“You have accounts set up in my name?” she’d asked, aghast.
His eyes had grown wide. It was clear he was surprised to see his daughter. “Eva, when did you get here?”
“I heard you on the phone, Dad,” she’d said. “You’d better tell me what this is about. If you’ve dragged me into something dangerous, I want to know about it.”
He’d lied, right through his teeth, which only made her more suspicious. After getting her records, she’d left his apartment. She hadn’t even made it to her car before a black sedan rolled up, and a handful of heavy-set, gun-toting men poured out onto the sidewalk. One spotted her. “Hey—you’re Sammy’s daughter, Eva Rhames, aren’t you? Get over here!”
She’d turned and run.
And she’d been running ever since.
Bobby spoke, snapping Eva back to the present moment. “Okay,” he said. He wheezed a few times, and then coughed. The man’s smoking habit had gotten worse over the past six years, Eva could tell. Of all of her father’s friends, Bobby was the only one that had ever paid Eva the time of day. “I’m in my study, and the door’s closed. We can talk. Like I said, your old man talks about you now and then.”
Eva was sure Bobby was just trying to be kind. Her father had barely acknowledged her back when she was living in the area. She doubted very much that he thought of her at all, now that she was gone.
“Should I tell him you called?” Bobby asked. “You doin’ good?”
“I’m fine,” Eva said. “Sure, if you want to tell him I’m okay, you can.”
“Good, good,” Bobby said. “I’ll do that. So, what’s going on? You wouldn’t call this late unless it was something important.”
“I’m thinking about getting married,” she told Bobby.
“Are you, now? Tyin’ the old knot, hm? Well that’s great. Congratulations. Who’s the lucky man?”
“A guy I recently met, in my new city.” She wanted to keep the information she shared as sparse as possible. Bobby, like her father, was a criminal at heart.
That had come in useful six years prior, when she’d needed to extricate herself from her old life. She’d called on Bobby for help, and he’d created a new identity for her—social security card, license, birth certificate and all. She didn’t know how he did it, exactly, but she was sure that some element of criminal activity had been involved. Her new identity was by no means legal, but it had saved her life.
She gripped the phone tighter, and her anxiety mounted. “The thing is, Bobby, the guy is from another country. We’re going to have to fill out some paperwork so that we can officially be married, and I’m worried about the identification that you gave me. Will it hold up?”
There was a pause, and then the sound of fingers, tapping on a desk. Eva could picture Bobby’s thick, sausage-like fingers, his Rolex watch, and dark arm hair. She wondered if he still wore his black hair slicked back with gel, and if he still smelled like cigar smoke. She suspected that the answer was yes, on both accounts.
“Hm… now what did I give you… Oh, yeah. We changed your last name, is that right? You’re going by ‘Sharpe’ now. Not ‘Rhames’?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“Oh yeah, yeah, it’s comin’ back to me now. I had my guy over on the West End make up your documents. Man, he was good. Too bad he got shot in the gut a couple years back. I miss the guy. He was good at his work; the best I’ve seen, I’ll tell you that much.”
“So they’ll hold up?” Eva prompted.
“They have so far, haven’t they?” Bobby asked her. “You were able to get a job, I assume, and open new bank accounts?”
Eva thought this through. When she’d left her old life behind, she’d faced the almost impossible task of closing her art gallery, breaking her lease, and trying to start all over with a new identity. Starting all over again hadn’t been cheap, and she’d ended up majorly in the hole, financially.
At least I lived, she thought, recalling the way it felt to run from the gun-wielding Mafia man.
“Yeah, so far they’ve worked great,” Eva said.
“Of course they have,” Bobby said. “My guy was a genius. He did good work. What did I just tell you?”
“You said he was good,” Eva said.
“The best,” Bobby reiterated. “You’re gonna be fine with the marriage thing. The government sees so many of those applications go through every day, they’re not even gonna look twice at your documents. They’ll do a surface check. They’d only dig deep if this guy you’re marrying is going to be involved in government affairs. You know—politics and that kind of thing. He’s not, is he?”
“He owns a private company,” Eva said. “He’s not a politician or anything. He travels a lot, though.”
“A real jet-setter, huh? Yeah, that should be fine. No big deal. Your documents will do the trick. Congratulations again, Eva. I’ll tell your dad you said hi. I better go, I took a sleeping pill
right before I laid down and being up is giving me an awful headache.” He made another grunt as he stood up.
“Thanks, Bobby,” Eva said. “Sorry again to get you out of bed. I appreciate you taking the time to talk. And thanks again for what you did for me, all those years ago.”
“Yeah, well, I never had any kids,” he said. “But if I had, I sure wouldn’t have treated them like your dad treated you. I was glad to see you get out of that mess. You take care of yourself, okay?”
“I will,” Eva promised.
When she hung up, she felt her anxiety melting away.
For the next forty-five minutes, as she walked home under the stars, Eva tried to process the dramatic way in which her life had just changed. She’d gone from knowing what the next weeks and months of her existence would entail, to not having a clue. What was it going to be like to be fake-married to Dimitris? How often would she see him? How long would the union last? There were so many unknowns, and this made her heart soar with hope.
He said I was perfect, she thought. Maybe there’s a reason he asked me to enter into this arrangement with him. As we get to know each other, we could fall in love. What starts as just a marriage on paper could become something more—so much more. He must be hoping for that, just like I am.
It felt good to have so much possibility before her. There was a spring in her step as she headed to her second-floor apartment unit.
On her front door, there was a little pink note. She pulled it off and read it as she unlocked. “Eva—did you get an electric bill that was meant for me? I was expecting it last week.”
Eva hummed happily to herself as she opened up the door, flipped on the lights, and then stuck the note on top of a pile of mail on her counter. She knew it was from her neighbor, Marge; for the last year or so, the mailman had been mixing up their letters and bills. He couldn’t seem to get it straight that Eva was in unit 21A and Marge in 21B. He seemed to stuff mail into either slot marked with a 21, regardless of the name on it. In the past, this had irked Eva to no end, but on this particular evening, nothing could interrupt her good mood.
