As a saint.
A savior.
With one look, she made me feel alive again. Something I’d been struggling to feel the last two years since the accident.
I pulled a ratty, yellow-lined piece of paper from my pocket. My bucket list. I’d written this two years ago from a hospital bed back in Germany. I’d read the sheet a thousand times since, checking things off as I accomplished them. With each item I checked off, a sense of loneliness and longing crept over me. The list was meant to give me life. Purpose. To refuel the tanks, so to speak. Give me something to work toward, to live for. Instead, checking off each item left me feeling flatlined—the same way I had in the hospital after the crash.
Until now.
Until her.
Savannah.
I shook off the melancholy, folded the piece of paper, and slipped it back into the inner pocket of my suit coat and stood up. An attendant from the auction approached.
“Mr. Johansen, please come with me. I’ll take you to the contract room where you will meet your intended face-to-face and sign the marriage agreement.” He continued to speak but I was in no mood for conversation, having just agreed to purchase a woman I’d be married to for three years without even shaking her hand or taking her to my bed first.
We exited the viewing room, and he led me down a long hallway. “After signing, the deposit will be transferred from your account to Ms. McAllister’s along with the entire commission fee. Upon the day of your marriage, the first year’s entire amount will be transferred into Ms. McAllister’s account automatically and will follow that system each year on the anniversary of your marriage.”
I nodded numbly and kept my feet moving forward. Closer to her. To my future wife.
My palms started to dampen as nerves stole through my form, making me feel jittery and unsettled. A feeling I wasn’t accustomed to. Being the sole owner of the Johansen Brewing Company, one of the top-selling companies in the beer market internationally, competing with the likes of Anheuser-Busch, Heineken, and the other big brands, nerves weren’t something I often experienced.
That had all changed two years ago .
Now I was a mess of emotions.
My mother and father continued to worry incessantly about me. Noticing the lack of enthusiasm I had for the things that once were so important to me. My new desire to travel and stay out of the day-to-day business operations when all I’d ever done in the past was sit at the helm of my family’s empire and make money hand over fist.
None of that mattered anymore. It was all just a means to an end.
Rich men died rich men.
And I almost had.
I wasn’t living for the thrill of purchasing another small brewing company and adding it to my empire. Selling more beer worldwide to push out the competition or hit a higher margin than I had the previous quarter didn’t have the same feeling it once did. I could spend twenty thousand dollars a week, every week, for the rest of my life, and not even put a tiny dent in the fortune I’d amassed. Most people would sell their souls to be in my position. To have the fortune I did. And yet, I’d have given it all up to feel truly alive. To feel as though I’d contributed to something bigger than myself.
As I neared the door that led to a future where I wouldn’t be alone anymore, I clenched my fists, feeling the folded-up piece of paper burn against my chest, right over my heart.
Was this the thing that would change it all?
Was Savannah my salvation? Or the next thing in a long list of checked-off items that had failed to bring me back to life?
The attendant gestured to the door, bowed, and took his leave, returning back down the hall.
I swallowed down the discomfort, straightened my spine, and lifted my chest the way I readied myself before any business deal. Only this wasn’t your standard business deal. Not in any normal sense of the word I was used to. This was marriage. Binding myself to another person for no less than the next three years of both of our lives.
At least I wouldn’t be alone.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
I’d never backed out of a challenge, and I wouldn’t start now.
What’s done is done. What will be, will be.
I opened the door and lost my breath when the woman I was about to make my wife turned around suddenly. The dark-green hue of the dress she wore seemed to make her skin glow and her red hair catch fire against the lights shining down over her.
She was a vision.
The Northern Lights of the Arctic meeting the roaming crystal-green mountains of the fjords back home, all in one woman. The most magnificent thing I’d ever laid eyes on.