From Fake to Forever (15 page)

She put a palm on his arm to still his near-frantic rooting through her stuff. “As sexy as it is for a guy to expend so much effort to put clothes
on
me, chill out for a second. I don’t want to go to dinner with your mom, like we’re a happily married couple. There’s no point in it. We’re about to sign divorce papers. I’m going back to Houston.”

“About that.” He turned to face her and in the close confines of the closet, the smell of his soap and his skin melded into something wholly Jason and wholly delicious.

She didn’t want to notice the way he smelled, not with the calculating glint she caught in his gaze. “What about it? Don’t you dare tell me I have more stuff to do before you divorce me after all. If the secret is out, my job is over. I’m not of any use to you any longer.”

“Not true. I can’t divorce you. Not yet.”

She shook her head before he’d stopped talking. “You have to. It’s over. Avery messed up your plans, and while I’m sad I don’t get to tell her off, what else can I do here?”

“Bettina likes that I’m married. She actually said she can consider retiring now and would gladly turn over the reins to me since I’ve settled down.” In a totally surprising move, he took her hand and curled her fingers around his, as if they often held hands while talking. “Avery’s plan, whatever it was, backfired. Don’t you see?”

It dawned on her, though how her brain still functioned with Jason’s fingers brushing hers was mystifying. “You mean she did it to make you look bad. She thought Bettina would take it as an act of irresponsibility.”

“Exactly. But she didn’t. The opposite, in fact.”

The unsettled feeling in her stomach turned into one big knot of foreboding as she connected the dots. “Let me get this straight. Your mom is all set to retire and name you as the new Lyn CEO because you got married. So you’re not going to sign the divorce papers. Because it benefits you to stay married.”

“In a nutshell.” He dropped her hand. “I’m asking you to be my wife, out in the open. We’ll make an announcement and everything, and you’ll move into my condo. Once Bettina follows through with handing me the CEO job, then I’ll divorce you.”

“No. No way.” She couldn’t spit it out fast enough, especially since her heart was screaming “Yes, yes, yes” to being Jason’s wife for real, for as long as it lasted. “Not for anything could you convince me this is a good idea.”

It was too open-ended, too real, too rife with possibilities for her to get used to the arrangement, and then where would she be? Trying to forget Jason after a whole new level of intimacy.

He smiled and it did dangerous things to her pulse. “I’ll give you whatever amount of money you were going to get as a loan from your father. Name it.”

She didn’t hesitate. “A hundred thousand dollars.”

“Done. And now you don’t have to tell your family that you messed up in Vegas. Think about it. No loan. All you have to do is fake this marriage well enough so my mother feels warm and squishy about retiring.”

Crap.
She’d thought he’d say no to such an outrageous sum and now she was stuck. “I can’t... You want me to
live
with you? What are you saying, that we’ll sleep in the same bed and stuff? Pretend we’re in love?”

Her throat tightened. How long could she keep that up before it became a reality?

Forever.
She’d have to keep it up forever because she was
not
falling in love with Jason. It was too dangerous.

“No to the first, yes to the second. I have a spare room.”

“Of course. Sleeping with your wife is way over the line.” She hadn’t meant for that to come out so sarcastically.

Was she actually disappointed that he wasn’t using their marriage as an excuse to play husband and wife to the fullest? Separate bedrooms actually made a sick sort of sense. It was tawdry to trade sex for a hundred thousand dollars and she’d deck him if he had suggested it.

But what if he’d suggested something totally different? Like the two of them having some kind of normal relationship full of making love and fun and togetherness. Falling asleep wrapped in each other’s arms and sharing secrets in the dark. That she would have agreed to in a heartbeat because it meant he felt all the same confusing, scary things she felt.

Her mind buzzed dully with all the implications of that one crystalline realization. Maybe she wasn’t so confused after all because there it was. She wanted something special and real and lasting with Jason. He didn’t.

He cocked his head and contemplated her. “Sharing a bedroom complicates our interaction unnecessarily. This is a business proposition. Same as the first one.”

Right, how could she forget? She wanted something he would never give her—the man buried beneath his strategy. “I know. Marriage is still your weapon of choice.”

This new deal was far more difficult to agree to. She’d be insane to say no. This would solve all her problems in one, easy shot. Except for the one where she’d be acting like Jason’s wife without any of the benefits, like a supportive husband who cared about her and thought she was the best thing that ever happened to him.

She’d be insane to say yes.

“I need you, Meredith.” His blue eyes filled with vulnerability and her breath hitched. Not the puppy-dog eyes. She could stand anything but that. It threw her back to that time two years ago when he’d needed her. And she’d needed him.

God help her, she still did. She couldn’t resist him when he morphed into that man she’d spent so many blissful hours with. It was stupid to even pretend she didn’t want to stay a few more days. Stupid to pretend she’d snatched back that piece of her soul she’d given him in Vegas.

This was her chance, her very last chance, to find out if she’d made a mistake walking away from him in Vegas. And the last chance to find out if she was making a mistake wishing for something more this time.

If living in the same house couldn’t afford her an opportunity to get there, nothing could. She could go back to Houston with the knowledge that Jason wasn’t the man for her and get over him, once and for all. Somehow.

“How long?” she croaked. “I do have another job, my real job, to get back to.”

Which was less and less attractive the longer she stayed smack-dab in the middle of the New York fashion industry. Wedding dresses was Cara’s forte, Cara’s love. Meredith only worked with Cara because they were family, and her sister didn’t care that Meredith brought nothing to the table other than money.

“I don’t know. Maybe a couple of weeks. Is that a yes?” The hopefulness in his voice coupled with vulnerability pretty much made her choice for her.

She held up a hand before his smile grew any wider. “How can this possibly work? I don’t understand what your mother thinks we’ve been doing for two years with no contact.”

He shook his head. “She thinks we got married recently. She’s all gushy over the romance of it.”

“Wait a minute. So now we’re going to take our marriage, pretend it’s fake with each other but real to everyone else
and
lie about the timing? How does that make sense? Avery figured out we were married from somewhere and might actually know the whole story. Do you really want to give her that much leverage?”

Jason grinned instead of getting huffy about her contradicting him, like she’d expected. “I love the way your mind works. Please, my beautiful wife, tell me what we should do instead.”

Rolling her eyes, she crossed her arms before she punched him. “We tell everyone we got married in Vegas and intended to get it annulled, but neither one of us could bear to go through with it. Then we reconnected because you had to get the divorce to marry Meiling. It was obvious to both of us we never stopped loving each other and you knew you could never go through with your arranged marriage and here we are.”

“That’s—”

“Brilliant. Duh. Always ask a woman to give you a romantic cover story.”

Cover story.
Because it wasn’t true. There was no romance to their practical union and they weren’t in love. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about what might happen while they were living under the same roof. If she could only get him to let his guard down, like when he’d gotten so emotional about his father, she could say
Adios
to the corporate Jason Lynhurst. The man she wanted was in there and she’d entice him into making a more permanent appearance. Then, all bets were off.

His expression veered between amusement and admiration. “Great. It’s all settled, then. Right?”

She sighed. “I’m the least settled I think I’ve ever been in my life.”

“You’ll be great.” He waved it off as if he had the slightest clue what she was feeling, but he couldn’t possibly. “And we’re late for dinner. Mess up your hair and we’ll act like we had a really good reason for our tardiness.”

“Careful, or you’ll find yourself putting your money where your mouth is.”

He grinned as if she was kidding and glanced at his watch. “Gold top. White pants. Get a move on, Mrs. Lynhurst.”

Mrs. Lynhurst.
Why did that make her shiver with a strange combination of apprehension and wonderment? She’d come to New York for a divorce. And yet she’d agreed to tell the world she and Jason were married in hopes of turning their relationship into something more than an advantage.

She handed him the remote. “Make yourself comfortable. I plan to take a while getting ready while I practice how I’m going to tell Hurst I quit.”

“But we’re already late,” he protested.

“You asked for a wife. You got one. And all the idiosyncrasies that come with it. Welcome to married life.”

She flounced to the bathroom and the only reason she slipped into the gold top was because she never had to see Allo again. She’d throw Jason a bone for that one.

Ten

F
ortunately, Bettina was still waiting patiently at the restaurant, despite the fact that Jason and Meredith walked in almost an hour past the time she’d specified. Grinning like a loon, Bettina’s gaze skittered right over Jason and fastened on the woman he’d brought.

“Sorry, Mom.” Jason bent to kiss her cheek and opted not to offer a lame excuse for why it had taken him nearly sixty minutes to convince his wife to let her mother-in-law buy them dinner. “This is Meredith.”

“Ms. Lynhurst, it’s a pleasure.” Meredith held out her hand and after a perfunctory shake, she slid into the chair opposite his mother and leaned in, elbows on the table. “Your jeans are my favorite. The fit is divine. You’re one of the reasons I learned to sew when I was a teenager.”

Jason did a double take. That was laying it on a bit thick, wasn’t it? But Meredith’s face exuded sincerity and his mother was eating it up.

Bettina beamed. “Call me Bettina. I’m so happy to meet you at last. Jason is off my Christmas list for not introducing us at the Garment Center gala the other day.”

“Geez, Mom.”

“Oh, I know,” Meredith said on top of his protest and shushed him. “I was disappointed when he hustled me out the door so soon after we’d arrived. He couldn’t wait to get me alone.”

With a curse, Jason took his own chair and signaled the waiter. It did not distract either woman from their conversation...which apparently didn’t include him.

Bettina laughed. “I’ll bet. He couldn’t keep his eyes off you the entire time I was talking to him. Obviously, he was thinking about taking you home then.”

“Really?” Meredith’s hand found its way onto his thigh and she shot him a sideways glance that he had no trouble interpreting. It was hot and wicked and set his blood on a low simmer.

This was not exactly how he’d envisioned dinner going. Or their marriage, for that matter. This was the problem with Meredith; she had her own vision of how things should go and it rarely coincided with his.

“That’s enough about the gala,” Jason interjected before his mother could say something else risqué that gave Meredith the wrong idea. He wasn’t hung up on Meredith like his mother had made it sound. He’d only been watching her so closely because she’d been talking to Avery.

Mostly. You couldn’t blame a guy for noticing how beautiful Meredith was. Or how smart and funny and...good for his plans.
That
was her best quality, he reminded himself.

“Well, you should have told me Meredith was your wife when I mentioned her.” His mother ordered an obscenely expensive bottle of wine from the waiter and waved him off to focus on Meredith again. “How do you like working for Hurst?”

Meredith wrinkled her nose. “It’s got no soul. The designs are good, but not great. All the people are in it for the money, you can tell.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” The woman
Vogue
had once dubbed the First Lady of Fashion contemplated the composed younger woman across the table. “Where did you study?”

“Meredith didn’t go to college,” Jason said, a little miffed that he’d been excluded from the conversation thus far.

The temperature from his wife’s glare nearly gave him a sunburn and her hand slipped away from his thigh. And now that it was gone, he wished she’d put it back.

“She was talking to me.” Meredith flicked a fingernail at his arm, her tone mild, but he could tell she was not happy with him. “You’ve had her attention for thirty-some-odd years. Now it’s my turn.” She refocused on Bettina. “My sister is a designer and I’ve been working with her for a couple of years. Other than that, I’m self-taught.”

Meredith and his mother descended into a lengthy back and forth about the merits of formal education versus finding a mentor, leaving him to stew over his wine.

Why was his temper flaring? This was exactly what he’d asked for—Meredith playing up the part of his wife.

He just hadn’t expected her to do it so well.

Or for his mother to like her so much. How was he going to break it to Bettina when he signed the divorce papers? He hated it when he couldn’t see all the angles, hated it when he hadn’t anticipated the direction a situation was going to go.

He dug into his filet mignon and asparagus tips, determined to get through this dinner so he could take Meredith back to her hotel and get her stuff. They needed to strategize on the announcement and settle her into his condo.