Contract Bride

The bank gave Isla Adair until Friday.

She read the email three times at her desk, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something kinder if she stared hard enough. They did not. Facility withdrawn. Outstanding balance due in full by close of business on Friday 14 March. We regret any inconvenience.

Inconvenience. That was one word for it.

From her office she could see the whole of Threadline: twenty-two desks crammed into a converted biscuit factory in Woodstock, the old ovens still bolted to the far wall because nobody could afford to have them removed. Sipho was arguing with the coffee machine. Marli had her headphones on and her feet on a filing cabinet, sketching gear trains the way other people breathed. Somebody had stuck a paper crown on the 3D loom prototype and labelled it Her Majesty.

Twenty-two people. Twenty-two salaries. Four years of eighteen-hour days, of explaining to men in fleece waistcoats why a machine that turned recycled fabric into new yarn was not, in fact, a hobby.

And now a Friday deadline.

Her phone buzzed. A number she didn't know, a Cape Town code.

"Isla Adair."

"Ms Adair." The voice was low, unhurried, faintly amused, as if it had already heard the end of the conversation and found it satisfactory. "My name is Callum Rhys. I believe you're about to have a bad week."

She sat up straighter. "I'm sorry, who is this?"

"Someone who read your bank's credit committee minutes before you read their email." A pause. "I'd like to buy you dinner. Tonight, eight o'clock, the Harbour Room. Come hungry and bring your cap table."

The line went dead.

Isla stared at the phone. Then she typed the name into a search bar and watched her afternoon get considerably worse.

Callum Rhys. Thirty-four. Founder of Rhys Capital, which owned slices of half the clever companies between Cape Town and Nairobi. Photographed exactly four times in the last five years, always looking as if the camera owed him money. One profile called him "the quiet shark". Another, less flattering, called him "the man who buys the boat and then sinks the crew".

Marli appeared in the doorway, headphones round her neck. "You've got the face."

"What face?"

"The one you had when the investor from Joburg asked if the loom came in pink." Marli folded her arms. "What happened?"

Isla turned the laptop round. Marli read the bank's email, then the search results and let out a long, low whistle.

"Are you going?"

"I don't have a choice."

"You always have a choice."

"Fine." Isla closed the laptop. "I have one choice and it's wearing an expensive suit."

---

The Harbour Room sat at the end of the old pier like a jewel somebody had dropped and forgotten to pick up. Glass on three sides, the sea black and restless beneath, the lights of the waterfront trembling on the water. Isla had walked past it a hundred times and never once considered going in.

She wore the only good dress she owned, navy, borrowed confidence in silk form and carried a laptop bag that clashed with it completely.

The maître d' didn't ask her name. He simply said, "Ms Adair. Mr Rhys is expecting you," and led her through the room to a corner table where the glass met the dark.

Callum Rhys stood when she arrived.

The photographs had lied, or perhaps they had simply been too small. He was tall, broad through the shoulders in a charcoal suit that had clearly never met a hanger it didn't respect. Dark hair, cut short at the sides. A face built on hard lines, softened only slightly at the mouth. And his eyes, grey as winter water, travelled over her once, slowly, with the kind of attention that felt less like looking and more like reading.

"You came," he said.

"You hung up on me."

"I find people are more curious when they don't get the last word." He pulled out her chair. "Sit. Please."

She sat, mostly because her knees suggested it.

He ordered for both of them without consulting the menu, which should have annoyed her and did, though not as much as the fact that he ordered exactly what she would have chosen. Line fish. A crisp white from Elgin. Bread with too much butter.

"You've done your homework," she said.

"I always do." He leaned back. "Threadline. Four years old. Patented spinning process that recovers ninety-one per cent of fibre from post-consumer textiles. Two pilot contracts, one with a uniform supplier in Durban, one with a hospital laundry group. Burn rate of roughly one point two million rand a month. Bank facility of eleven million, which your lender has just called in because their new risk officer doesn't understand anything that isn't a shopping centre." He tilted his head. "How am I doing?"

"Ninety-three per cent," Isla said. "Not ninety-one. We improved it in January."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The rumour of one.

"Ninety-three," he said. "Noted."

"What do you want, Mr Rhys?"

"Callum."

"What do you want, Mr Rhys?"

This time the smile came properly, brief and devastating. She hated how her pulse answered it.

"I want to invest," he said. "Forty million rand. Enough to clear your bank, build your first commercial plant and carry you through eighteen months."

Isla set down her glass very carefully. "In exchange for what?"

"Thirty per cent of the company. A seat on your board." He paused and for the first time he looked away from her, out at the black water. "And one other thing."

"Which is?"

He turned back. His voice did not change at all.

"I need you to marry me."

---

She laughed. She couldn't help it. It came out of her too loud for the room and two diners at the next table looked round.

Callum waited, entirely unbothered, until she'd finished.

"You're serious," she said.

"I rarely joke about forty million rand."

"You don't know me."

"I know you better than most men know their wives." He refilled her glass. "I know you work until two most nights and run Lion's Head at six. I know you turned down a buyout from a Swiss textile group last year because they'd have closed the Woodstock factory. I know your mother is in a care home in Hermanus and you drive out every second Sunday. I know you eat lunch standing up."

"That's surveillance."

"That's due diligence."

"Why?" She leaned forward. "Of all the women in Cape Town, many of whom I'm sure would be thrilled, why me?"

For a moment he said nothing. The waiter arrived with the fish, set it down with ceremony and withdrew. Callum didn't touch his.

"My grandfather built Rhys Holdings," he said at last. "Shipping, then property, then everything. He died in November. His will leaves the controlling stake to me, on one condition. I must be married within six months of his death and remain married for one year."

Isla blinked. "That can't be legal."

"It's entirely legal. It's also entirely him." The ghost of the smile again, colder this time. "He thought I was turning into a machine. He wasn't wrong. If I don't comply, control passes to my uncle Desmond, who will strip the company for parts and sell it to whoever owns the most yachts. Four thousand people work for Rhys Holdings. Most of them have never heard of me. All of them would be unemployed by Christmas."

"So you need a wife."

"I need a wife who understands that this is a contract. Who won't fall in love with me, won't sell the story to a magazine and won't try to take half of everything when the year is over." His eyes held hers. "You need forty million rand by Friday: eleven to clear the bank, the rest to keep twenty-two people paid. You're smart, you're discreet and you have every reason to keep your end of the bargain."

"How romantic."

"I'm not offering romance, Ms Adair. I'm offering a solution."

She looked down at her plate. The fish was beautiful, glazed and golden. She had no appetite at all.

Twenty-two desks. Marli with her feet up. Sipho and the coffee machine. Her Majesty with her paper crown.

"I'd want it in writing," she heard herself say. "All of it. Separate property. No claim on Rhys Holdings, no claim on Threadline beyond your thirty per cent. Separate bedrooms."

"Naturally."

"And no touching."

That made him pause. His gaze dropped, briefly, to her mouth and came back up again.

"In public," he said, "we'll need to be convincing. My uncle will be watching for any excuse to challenge the will. So there will be touching. Hands. Perhaps the occasional kiss." His voice lowered. "But I promise you this. I will never touch you in private unless you ask me to."

The way he said ask did something unwelcome to the back of her neck.

"I won't ask," Isla said.

"Then we have nothing to worry about." He raised his glass. "Do we have a deal?"

She should have walked out. She should have called her lawyer, or her mother, or literally anyone with a functioning sense of self-preservation.

Instead she lifted her glass and touched it to his.

"One year," she said.

"One year," Callum agreed.

The glasses chimed. Outside, the sea threw itself against the pier and drew back, again and again, as if it couldn't decide whether to stay.

Isla drank and tasted salt and told herself that her heart was racing because of the money.

It was nearly true.