Conveniently Engaged To The Boss
Conveniently Engaged To The Boss
Ellie Darkins
From assistant to fiancée!Joss Dawson knows the one thing that will make his dying father happy is to see his son find love…the problem is, he's sworn off love forever!But the answer's simple! Asking his father's fiercely intelligent, beautiful assistant Eva to play the perfect role – his fiancée. Only for Eva it's not that easy…Pretending to be Joss's fiancée threatens to ruin the life she's worked so hard for! And how will she keep her head when she's losing her heart to her frustratingly attractive new boss?
From assistant to fiancée!
Joss Dawson knows the one thing that will make his dying father happy is to see his son find love...the problem is, he’s sworn off love forever!
But the answer’s simple! Asking his father’s fiercely intelligent, beautiful assistant Eva to play the perfect role—his fiancée. Only for Eva it’s not that easy...
Pretending to be Joss’s fiancée threatens to ruin the life she’s worked so hard for! And how will she keep her head when she’s losing her heart to her frustratingly attractive new boss?
She leaned back against the door, and Joss stood in front of her, filling her vision with the wide shoulders of his exquisitely cut suit.
“Everything okay?” he asked, his voice low and sensual.
Eva nodded, when what she really wanted to do was shout. To tell him that no—she wasn’t okay. This was far, far from okay. This was confusing and terrifying and oh so much more complicated than she had ever wanted her life to be.
But she couldn’t let go of his hand. Couldn’t be the one to break that connection between them.
She’d felt it growing as they’d played their parts over dinner. A touch of the hands here. A brush of fingers over an arm there.
The intimacy had grown between them in some strange simulacrum of the relationship they had invented. But she had expected them to walk away from it. Expected to leave it at the table. She hadn’t expected it to stalk them into the lift and back up to their suite.
Intimacy was safe in public, where neither of them could act on it. But with her back against this door and Joss in front of her—looking serious, smelling delicious—it was a more dangerous prospect. And Joss knew it, too.
Conveniently Engaged to the Boss
Ellie Darkins
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ELLIE DARKINS spent her formative years devouring romance novels, and after completing her English degree decided to make a living from her love of books. As a writer and editor, she finds her work now entails dreaming up romantic proposals, hot dates with alpha males and trips to the past with dashing heroes. When she’s not working she can usually be found running around after her toddler, volunteering at her local library, or escaping all the above with a good book and a vanilla latte.
For Mike
Contents
Cover (#ua2513185-b9a9-5d3c-a4c1-604ab4a30e9b)
Back Cover Text (#u45bfd18d-ba2a-5756-87eb-884ece55a016)
Introduction (#u04d665b4-8e71-5129-a48b-402421965f0b)
Title Page (#udff039a7-93fa-5a82-ac48-069032e3f1b7)
About the Author (#u730cc55b-8532-5ccb-bd08-4e4531c3090b)
Dedication (#u95cceb68-6bbe-5f4b-beae-3c8511c146d1)
CHAPTER ONE (#uadbbacb6-e984-50ed-ba98-715af914e86c)
CHAPTER TWO (#u4df043e1-0bf4-55bb-bbc9-7674c3b9d0cb)
CHAPTER THREE (#u837850cf-6efb-5207-9c60-45ed62469d99)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u6d215726-b3e7-54f7-9cb3-434f15467240)
‘COULD YOU HELP me with this zip, or are you just going to watch?’
Instinctively Joss shut the door behind him, wondering if anyone else had seen, and glanced through the window of the office to make sure his father wasn’t nearby.
‘Sorry, Eva. I was looking for my dad. What are you doing in his office? And why does it involve being undressed?’
Eva shrugged—he watched her shoulder blades move under pale, exposed skin where the dress’s zip was gaping at the back.
‘Edward’s already gone to the boardroom. Shouldn’t you be there too? Never mind. Could you help? I should have been there five minutes ago, but I spilt a cup of coffee over myself and now I’ve got the zip stuck.’
‘Okay, okay—sure,’ Joss said, with a glance back at the closed door. ‘My dad wanted to see me in here before the meeting, but I couldn’t get away from my last call.’
He reached Eva and gently batted her hands away from the zip, pulling the slider to the top as quickly and impersonally as he could manage.
Eva turned her head to look over her shoulder, and as his eyes met hers he felt the tug of attraction that was ever-present around his father’s executive assistant.
‘Um... Joss, I meant unzip.’
Oh, no, that was not what he’d signed up for. No way was he that stupid. He’d been keeping his eyes, hands and mind off this woman for years. He knew the limits of his self-control, and just this proximity to her was pushing it—never mind anything else.
‘I’m not sure that’s...’
‘Joss, would you just do it? Shut your eyes, if you want, but get me out of this thing! It’s not like I’m naked under here, in case you’re worried about your delicate sensibilities.’
He took a deep breath and unzipped, but the teeth snagged halfway down her back.
‘It’s stuck.’
‘Still? Brilliant. I was hoping it was just the angle I was pulling it. Can you unstick it?’
He wasn’t sure he wanted to—not when unsticking it meant exposing more creamy skin and finding out exactly what she’d meant when she said that she wasn’t naked under there.
Joss fiddled with the zip, passing the teeth slowly through the slider and unpicking the threads that had got caught. Finally it gave way and slid smoothly down Eva’s back, revealing a silk slip in a soft pink colour, edged with delicate cream lace. Worse than naked, perhaps, to be so close to seeing the body that he’d dreamed of, only to find it tantalisingly out of reach.
‘At last! Thank goodness for that,’ Eva said, stepping quickly out of the dress and reaching for another, which Joss had just noticed draped over his father’s chair. As the fabric was sliding over her head he turned for the door, but Eva stopped him. ‘Wait—can you zip up this time? I don’t want to be any later than I already am.’
Joss let out a sigh, but crossed the office again and reached for the slider of the zip, his fingertips very close to the rose silk at the base of her spine. He lingered for a moment as he swept her hair away with his other hand, revealing the wispy baby hairs at the nape of her neck and the invitingly soft skin behind her ear.
But before he could cover her safely, the door behind him opened.
‘Eva, are you in—?’
Damn his father and his terrible timing.
‘I’m sorry, Edward. I’ll be right there,’ Eva said, reaching for the zip herself and pulling it further down in the process of twisting round.
‘No, no—I can see I’m interrupting,’ Edward said. ‘I trust you’re both on your way.’
Joss couldn’t bring himself to look, but he could almost hear the huge grin on his father’s face, verging on a full-on laugh.
‘We’re waiting for you.’
His father left the room before Joss could explain that nothing had been going on between him and Eva. He shot a look at her, and saw she looked as taken aback as he did as she struggled with her dress. He pulled the zip up for her—no lingering this time—and strode for the door.
‘What are we going—?’ Eva started.
‘I’ll handle it,’ Joss said.
He walked into the boardroom, still fighting images of Eva’s lingerie-clad body and the look of intrigue and delight on his father’s face when he’d so clearly misinterpreted what had been going on in his office.
He was more used to seeing disappointment from his father, especially when it involved him and women. Since Joss’s first marriage had failed, his father had tried to hide his disappointment that he’d not been able to settle down with anyone else. He knew that when he’d first told his parents he was getting a divorce, they’d blamed the break-up on him.
And then, when he’d walked into the office as a single man, emerging from the dark clouds of clinical depression and divorce, he had realised the strength of his attraction to his father’s executive assistant.
He’d told himself that he would not be going near her—under any circumstances. His father doted on her, and would not take kindly to her feelings being hurt. And after what Joss had done to his marriage—the destruction he’d been powerless to prevent—he knew that he couldn’t expect to make any woman happy.
At least his father respected him professionally. He’d been working for the family’s chain of luxury department stores since he was in primary school, and had earned his position as Vice President of UK Stores. But professional respect and personal pride were two very different things, and Joss knew that an abundance of one would never compensate for the lack of the other.
All eyes turned to him as he entered the full boardroom, with Eva right behind him. They found a couple of spare chairs in the corner. Sunlight flooded in through the old lead-paned windows, brightening the panelled room, which could feel oppressive on a gloomier day.
Joss tried to catch his father’s eye, but he was either deliberately avoiding his gaze or so entranced by the view out of the window that he couldn’t bring himself to look away. The well-heeled streets of Kensington were bustling below, and Joss could tell just from the hum of the traffic that the pavement outside the store was filled with shoppers and tourists, stopping to take in the magnificent window displays for which the store was renowned.
Eventually, though, the old man cleared his throat and looked around the room, glancing at each of the board members in turn.
‘I’d like to thank you all for being here,’ Edward began, with a smile that Joss couldn’t interpret. ‘Especially at such short notice and on a Friday afternoon, when I’m sure you’d all rather be at a long working lunch. I’m afraid that, as some of you may have guessed, an emergency board meeting is rarely called to share good news, and today is no different. So, it is with regret that I have to announce that due to ill health I will be resigning from the company in all capacities with immediate effect.’
Joss felt fear and dread swell in an all too familiar fashion in the base of his stomach as the deeper meaning of his father’s words sank in. His father must be ill—seriously ill—to even consider leaving the business.
But Edward carried on speaking, leaving him no time to dwell.
‘You all know that over the years we have taken steps to ensure a smooth transition when the time came for me to hand over the reins, and so—if you are all still in agreement—I will be leaving you in the capable hands of my son, Joss, who will become Managing Director and Chairman of the Board in my place. Eva, of course, will be assisting Joss in his new role, as I suspect she knows more about my job than I do. I know you will continue to support them, just as you have supported me. Now, I imagine there will be questions, so I’ll answer them as best I can. Who’s first?’
The room sank into silence as Edward finished speaking. Joss looked closely at his father. Ill-health? His father hadn’t taken a day off sick in his life, and yet now he was resigning completely? Yes, they’d talked about succession plans. Any sensible businessman had contingencies for all eventualities, and Edward would not have wanted to leave the company in chaos if anything had happened to him. But had there actually been more to it than that? Had his father known that he would soon be stepping down?
The dread in Joss’s stomach twisted into stark fear as the implications of the announcement sank in and he realised what this must mean. His father wouldn’t resign because of a dodgy hip or ‘a touch of angina’, as he’d once described a health scare. He’d always sworn he’d be carried out of a Dawson’s department store in his coffin. For him to resign must mean he had had some terrible news.
Panic and grief gripped his throat as he noticed for the first time the slight grey tinge to his father’s skin, and the lines around his eyes that suggested a habitual wince of fatigue. Why hadn’t he noticed before? Why hadn’t he been looking? His father wasn’t exactly a spring chicken, and he was still working sixteen-hour days long past the age when most people would expect to retire.
He should have made his father take things easier—should have taken more off his plate.
He met his father’s eye and saw sympathy and understanding in his father’s gaze. He wanted to rush to embrace him, but something froze him to his chair, chilling his blood.
And then warmth crept from the tips of his fingers as a hand slid into his and he heard Eva’s voice.
‘Edward, are you in pain? What can we do to help?’
Joss’s eyes swam and he clenched his jaw, determined not to allow a single tear to fall, to keep control over his emotions. Besides, swiping a falling tear before anyone saw would mean taking his hand from Eva’s, and at that moment he couldn’t see how he was meant to do that.
‘Perhaps we should speak in my office?’ Edward said to Joss, his voice gentle. ‘And you lot—’ he addressed the remaining members of the board ‘you have a good gossip while I’m gone and think of what you need to ask me. Head back to the pub and finish your lunch, if you want to. But get your questions to me sharpish, because I’m planning on being on a sun lounger by the end of next week.’
Edward rose and Joss noticed, as he hadn’t before, that his father leaned heavily on the table for support.
Joss snapped out of his trance and back into business mode as they walked down the corridor and back to Edward’s office, firing questions all the way.
‘Dad? What’s happening? Are you okay? Was this what you wanted to talk to me about?’
Edward collapsed into the chair behind his desk and rested back against the padded seat. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, son. Of course I wanted to tell you first, but you didn’t arrive for our meeting—’
‘Dad, if I’d known—’
‘I know.’ He softened the words with a smile. ‘I know. But it was difficult for Eva to get everyone here at such short notice. I couldn’t delay it any longer.’
‘Couldn’t delay? What’s wrong with you, Dad?’
‘Sit down, son.’ His father indicated the chair opposite. ‘And you, Eva. You both need to hear this. It’s cancer, I’m afraid, and there’s nothing they can do about it. I ignored it for a bit too long, it seems. So I thought it was about time I took that holiday I’ve been promising myself for the last thirty years and let you get on with running the business while I’m still around to answer your questions—there’s no deadline for you two, of course.’
Joss stared at his father, unable to take in his words. His hand found Eva’s again and he gripped it hard, taking strength from the solid presence of her, the warmth that always radiated from her.
‘How long, Dad?’
‘Oh, you know doctors. Never give you a straight answer. A few months, it seems. Long enough to have a little fun before I go. I love this business—you know that I do—but news like this makes you rethink, and I don’t want these four walls to be the last thing I see before I go.’
‘I’m so sorry, Edward.’
Joss could hear the tears in Eva’s voice, and he squeezed her hand. He knew how fond she was of his father, and that her grief must mirror his own. ‘Are you sure you’re comfortable? Is there anything we can do?’
‘Quite comfortable for now, my dear. Thank you for your concern. Now it’s my turn to ask the questions.’ He glanced at their clasped hands. ‘Is there anything you two would like to tell me?’
* * *
Eva sat in shock, silenced by Edward’s words. She couldn’t believe that the old man was dying. Sure, he’d looked a little creaky around the joints lately, but he’d never complained of so much as a runny nose. It just didn’t make sense that he could be terminally ill.
Joss had taken hold of her hand and she could feel the contact burning her skin. She hadn’t thought about it when she’d slid her fingers between his back in the boardroom. Hadn’t thought about all the times she’d imagined the slide of his skin against hers over the years. All she’d been able to feel was the grief and fear radiating from him, and she had acted on instinct, trying to ease it in any way she could.
And now Edward was calling them on it. Under normal circumstances she’d have cleared up the understanding with Edward the minute it had happened. But this was Joss’s father, and they had both just been hit with shocking news. It was Joss’s place, not hers, to explain.
‘I’m sorry you saw that, Dad—’ he started.
‘Oh, don’t be sorry—I’m delighted. I do remember what it was like to be young, believe it or not. I’m just pleased that you two have finally found each other. I can’t deny that I’ve been waiting for this for some time. I take it that if you’re bringing your personal life with you to work then it’s serious?’
Eva felt her mouth fall open and waited for Joss to correct his father, to sum up what had happened with the dress and the coffee and the zip. But expressions chased across Joss’s face faster than she could read them.
She was just about to jump in and explain for herself what had happened when Joss finally spoke.
‘Yes, it’s serious,’ Joss said. ‘In fact, we’re engaged.’
She was about to call him on being completely ridiculous when she clocked the look on Edward’s face. A smile had brought a glow to his face, and he was beaming at them both. Just a moment she was so shocked she couldn’t speak. And then real life kicked in, and she remembered the news that Edward had just delivered, that Joss had just received. She found that she couldn’t contradict him.
Still, she gently withdrew her hand. She had to maintain some semblance of control if she was going to keep her head.
She’d been trying to pretend to herself for years that she didn’t have an enormous crush on this man. That he didn’t enter her mind when she was out on a date with any other guy. And now he had to go and pretend to be in love with her. And the only result of calling him on it would be to hurt the man she’d come to care for almost as a parent. She couldn’t do it to him. She’d have to talk to Joss in private. He could break it to his father gently.
Funny how being angry with him made him that little bit less fanciable—she’d been looking for something to knock the shine off him for years.
It wasn’t as if she wanted to be attracted to him—she told herself that often enough. She couldn’t think of anyone less suitable for falling in love with than the son of her boss, who spent half his time on the road visiting the UK stores, and the other half in his office, buried in spreadsheets and dodging calls from disappointed would-be dates.
Secretaries talked—hardly breaking news.
As soon as she’d recognised where her feelings were going—the irritating pitter-patter of her heart, the annoying dampness of her palms, not to mention the completely inappropriate but delicious dreams that had her waking flushed and impressed by the breadth of her own imagination—she’d acted.
She’d put space between them at the office, avoided him in the break room and at the pub. She’d thrown herself into dating in a way that was the opposite of Joss’s clinical style: enthusiastically, prolifically, discriminately. She’d found handsome, eligible bachelors who weren’t intimidated by her salary or her seven fluent languages—or the handful of conversational ones. She’d dated in Russian, Greek and German, and once—haltingly, but memorably—in Mandarin. She’d gone dancing, cocktail-making, picnicking. Tried blue blood and blue collar.
And not a single one of the men she’d kissed so demurely on the cheek at the end of the night had helped her even start forgetting about Joss. He was beginning to appear annoyingly unforgettable, and now he was pulling her into a deceit that she knew, unhesitatingly, was a BAD IDEA. All caps.
‘Well, like I said, I can’t say that I’m surprised. I’ve suspected for a while that you two have a soft spot for each other,’ Edward said at last, still smiling.
Eva groaned inwardly. Oh, no, how much of her stupid crush had he seen? How much was he going to figure out? How much was Joss going to figure out for himself?
‘And it makes me a very happy man to see you settled and in love before I go.’
The three of them sank into silence as the meaning of his words hit home and the reality of his illness intruded once again on the completely insane situation Joss had just created.
‘But now I’ve got work to do—so get out of here, the pair of you.’
Eva kissed Edward on the cheek and mumbled something indiscernible, then let Joss follow her from the room, past the open-plan desks and into Joss’s office.
‘What the hell was that?’ she demanded as soon as they were alone, staring at Joss as he sank into his chair and rested his face in his hands.
‘Not now, Eva.’
‘Not now? You just told your father we’re engaged—I think I’m entitled to an explanation.’
‘He’s just told me he’s dying. I can’t talk about this now.’
She dropped into a chair opposite him, feeling sick to her stomach. Joss was right—he’d just had terrible news. Much as she had every right to give him hell, perhaps now wasn’t the time.
‘You didn’t know anything about it?’ she asked gently.
‘He didn’t say anything. Just that he needed to speak to me before the meeting. But I was tied up on a call and I... I missed the meeting. He wanted to tell me.’
‘You couldn’t have known he was going to tell you that.’ She crossed to stand beside him and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘It wouldn’t have changed anything. The news would have been the same.’
‘It would have felt different if he’d been able to talk to me before having to tell everyone else.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’
He leaned his head against her arm and she let her hand brush against his hair.
‘And I’m sorry for what I told him about us.’
Eva moved her hand away, aware of a sudden change of the chemistry in the room. She hitched herself onto the corner of the desk, letting her stilettoed feet dangle.
‘What was that about? The truth would have been a much simpler explanation. It’s going to be a hundred times harder to explain things now. Engaged or not, who knows what he thinks we were up to in his office?’
‘I was thinking on my feet. I didn’t want him to think that you were involved in something sordid, and my brain went to “engaged” rather than “wardrobe malfunction”. You saw his face when I told him that we were getting married. I knew that it would make him happy.’
‘Marrying me?’
‘Being happy...settled. It’s all he wants for me. And since my divorce... You don’t want to hear all that. Just trust me on this one. I know my father. I knew it would make him happy.’
‘So what’s it going to do to him when you tell him there’s no engagement?’
And suddenly, from the defiant clench of his jaw and the killer look in his eyes, Eva knew that he wasn’t planning on telling his father the truth at all.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, keeping her voice low and commanding. ‘We have to tell him the truth. I’ll tell him about the coffee and the dress. I’ll sort this out.’
Joss shrugged, never breaking eye contact, never backing down from the challenge she’d made so clear in her voice.
‘We’ll explain about the dress. But I see no reason to drop the pretence of our engagement.’
She stood slowly from the desk and took a step towards him, letting him know that she found neither his position in the company nor the six inches in height he had over her intimidating in the slightest. Least of all when he was seated and she could tower over him.
‘No reason, Joss? You just panicked and told a bare-faced lie that has implications for us both. I have no intention of lying to your father, so unless you want him to hear from me that you just fabricated a fiancée, I think you would do better to just tell him now.’
‘Or we could make him believe that it’s true.’
She took half a step back to stare at Joss. ‘Have you completely lost your mind? Why would we want to do that?’
‘Maybe I have lost my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time. I don’t know... What I do know is that my father has just told me that he’s dying, and I—we—can do something to make him happy in the time he has left.’
‘By lying to him? Do you think he’d really want that?’
‘You saw his face. You tell me if you think the lie hurt him.’
She shrugged, unable to contradict him. ‘I know he seemed happy, Joss. But it can’t be right. I mean, how long would we have to keep this up?’
She sat down again, losing a little of her anger as she realised what she was asking.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...’
‘I know. I know you didn’t mean anything by it. But, yeah, we would have to keep it up until he dies. Which, apparently, won’t be all that long. Don’t worry—I don’t expect you to actually say I do.’
She sat and thought on it for a moment. Remembered the look on Edward’s face when Joss had told his lie. She couldn’t deny that he’d looked happy. As happy as she’d seen him for a long time.
She loved Edward. He had been the one constant in her life for so long now, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to manage without him. A sob threatened, and her hand lifted slowly to her throat as she forced it down. She slumped into the back of the chair, suddenly deflated. Surely if it made Edward happy she could do this. She should do this.
‘I need some time to think about it,’ she said eventually, not wanting Joss to know the direction her thoughts had been heading.
Goodness knew she’d been trying to keep the details of her mind secret from him for long enough. If they were to go through with this completely ridiculous idea, how was she meant to keep that up? To hide the fact that her mouth wanted to part every time she saw him? That she had to stop her tongue moistening her lips and her body swaying towards him?
‘Take some time, then. No work’s going to get done this afternoon anyway, by the looks of it.’
Eva shook her head. ‘Your father will need me.’
‘I’m going to my father’s office now, and we’re going to have a long talk. I’ll make sure there’s not a problem. If you want, I can say you went home with a headache.’
‘While he’s still at work with a terminal illness? Thanks but no thanks. Lock yourself in with your father if you want, but I’ll be at my desk if either of you need me.’
Joss leaned back in his chair, raising his hands to admit defeat. ‘We need to talk, though. And we can’t do that in the office. Dinner tonight?’
Dinner tonight.
How many times had she imagined Joss issuing an invitation like that? Though she’d always known that she wouldn’t accept. It wasn’t even the time that he spent travelling around the country that made her think he was a million miles from boyfriend material. No, it was the fact that even when he was here he wasn’t quite...here. There was an isolation about him. A distance. Even when he was close enough to touch.
She’d done long-distance before, with people in her life that she’d loved, and she’d hated every second of it. The last thing she needed was a man—a fiancé—who was distant even when he was in the room.
But she couldn’t ignore him while he was going around telling people that they had got engaged. She had to convince him to tell his father the truth. And then figure out how they were meant to work together.
‘Yes,’ she agreed eventually. ‘I guess we do need to talk about this. My place? I don’t feel like going out after news like this. I don’t suppose you do either.’
‘No. That sounds good. Eight?’
She nodded, and scribbled down her address.
Walking back to her desk, she grabbed the coffee-stained dress and put it in the garment bag that she’d flung over her chair as she’d raced for the boardroom.
The blinds in Edward’s office were drawn—a sure sign that he didn’t want to be disturbed—so she sat at her computer, knowing that her work—the one constant she had in her life—was going to change irrevocably, and there was nothing she could do about it.
CHAPTER TWO (#u6d215726-b3e7-54f7-9cb3-434f15467240)
EVA CHECKED ON the food and resisted glancing at her reflection in the window. She didn’t want Joss to think that she’d made an effort, so she’d not touched her hair or her make-up since she’d got home, and had just thrown on jeans and a comfy jumper. She always wore her skinnies and a cashmere sweater for a Friday night in—that was perfectly plausible.
She didn’t even want to think about how the conversation over dinner was going to go, but she had to. Had to be prepared—set out in her own mind, at least, what was and wasn’t going to be on the cards.
Joss was crazy, thinking that they could get away with a fake engagement. They’d be under scrutiny every minute they were together at the office. She knew how little fuel the gossip furnace needed to keep it alight. But every time she convinced herself of how terrible an idea it was, she remembered the happiness on Edward’s face and the eagerness to please his father on Joss’s.
She had to admit to being intrigued.
Joss was a powerful man. A director—now the MD—of a vast luxury group of department stores, with a presence on every continent, property in every major European shopping capital. He was notorious for the coldness of his personal life—the wife and the marriage that he’d neglected, and the transactional nature of the dates he took to industry functions. The women he dated were always clients and colleagues, there to further a business deal or a conversation, and they always went home alone.
She’d always seen something else in him. Something more. Something in the way that he joked with his father in a way he didn’t with anyone else. Being so close to Edward, she’d seen their father-son relationship up close. Seen that Joss might not be the cold-hearted divorcee that everyone had him pegged as.
And now he’d invented an engagement just to please his dying father, and her curiosity was piqued again.
The two men didn’t have much time left together—and they both seemed happier with this alternative reality than with real life. Who was she to judge? Who was she to tell them they were wrong? If she hadn’t been personally involved she’d be telling them to do whatever they had to do in order to enjoy the time they had left together. But to say that she was ‘involved’ was putting things mildly—and this was way personal. She’d be as responsible as Joss if the truth came out and Edward’s heart was broken in his last few weeks or months.
And maybe all of this was academic. Because it assumed that they stood a chance of getting away with this charade. Making everyone believe that they were in love. Well, it wouldn’t be too hard to convince on her side, she supposed, given the attraction that she’d been hiding for years.
Through the break-up of his marriage—that time of dark black circles under his eyes and an almost permanent blank expression on his face—she was the only one who had seen him lean back against his father’s office door after he’d left a meeting, composing his features and erasing all emotion before he went and faced the rest of the office. And in the time since, he’d been working non-stop—not competing with his colleagues but seemingly competing with himself.
It was hard to pinpoint when she had realised she had a heck of a crush growing. Perhaps after the dip in her stomach when she’d won a hard-earned smile, or when they’d argued in the boardroom and he’d held up his hands in concession to her point, never mind that he was a director and she an assistant.
Or when he’d walked in on her today, half-dressed in his father’s office, and her whole skin had hummed in awareness of him. She’d had to hide the blush that had crept over her cheeks when his fingertips had clasped the zip and pulled it down—something she’d fantasised about more times than she wanted to admit, even to herself.
But nothing that she had done so far had worked in trying to get herself to forget him.
Perhaps it was time to do something different. She had proved that ignoring this thing wasn’t going to make it go away. Maybe getting closer to him was the key. It was easy to maintain a crush, a fantasy, from afar. When you didn’t have to deal with wet towels on your bed or dirty dishes left on the table. Maybe what she needed was some old-fashioned exposure therapy.
Because what did she really know about Joss, beyond what she saw when he was occasionally in the office? If there was one sure way to test a romance it was for a couple to move in together.
Was she completely losing her mind thinking that this was even a feasible idea—never mind a good one?
The doorbell rang, shocking her out of her internal debate. Good, she was getting sick of the sound of her own thoughts. At least with Joss here she would have a sparring partner.
She jogged down the stairs to the street-level door, trying to ignore the familiar flip of her heart at the sight of him. Not that he was looking his best—he had clearly come straight from the office. His shirt was creased, his collar unfastened and his tie loosened.
And then she remembered again how his day had been a thousand times worse than hers and had to resist the urge to pull him close and comfort him.
‘Hey—you found it okay?’
‘Yeah.’ He waved his phone vaguely at her. ‘Just a little help from this. I’ve not been here since I was a kid.’
‘Of course—your dad used to stay here back then. I’d forgotten you must have been here too.’
She stepped back so that he could get through the door. From her little cobbled mews she could barely hear the traffic from the main road nearby, muffled by the square of white stucco pillared houses around the private, locked garden. She showed Joss upstairs to her apartment—a legacy of the time when the building would have had stables downstairs and living quarters for servants of the wealthy above, all tucked away behind the grand mansions on the square.
Eva loved the understated elegance of her home, with clipped bay trees at the door, original cobbles paving the passage and soft heritage colours on the doors and windows.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Joss said as he reached the top of the stairs and crossed to the living room, where great tall windows flooded light in one side of the room. ‘Have you been living here long?’
‘Since I started at Dawson’s.’
Joss looked intrigued. ‘I thought my dad had got rid of this place.’
‘He had—sort of,’ Eva said, reaching for a bottle of wine and raising a glass in question at Joss.
He nodded and reached to take it from her when it was full.
‘He realised it was mostly sitting empty while it was a company flat, so he decided to rent it out. When I started working for the company I was stuck for somewhere to stay. Your dad didn’t have a tenant at the time, and needed someone to house-sit, so he offered me this place.’
Joss raised his eyebrows. ‘Lucky you.’
‘Yeah, I don’t like to move a lot, and he offered me a long-term lease. I like it here.’
‘So I’m going to have a hard time convincing you to move in with me?’
Eva snorted, and winced at the sting of wine in her nose.
‘That part’s non-negotiable,’ she confirmed. ‘This is my home and I’m not leaving it.’
‘So you’re coming round to the rest of it? Good.’
She should have given him an outright no—told him there and then that there was absolutely no way she was going along with his ridiculous scheme. But somehow, with him here in her home, in her space, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. All of a sudden she wasn’t sure about anything.
That was what happened when the only stable part of your life upped and threatened to leave. It had sunk in on her short walk home from the office that she could be about to lose her job—the first point of stability she’d ever had in her life. The safe place that she’d built for herself in the twelve years that she’d been with the company.
She would have thought she’d have been used to it by now. She’d had her whole childhood to practise, after all. Every time her mother or her father had shipped out, or they’d all packed up and moved to another army base, she’d told herself it was the last time she’d care. The last time she’d cry.
She’d not managed to stick to her word until the final time. The time her mother hadn’t come home at all.
Her father had packed her off to boarding school then, not long after she’d begged him to leave the army, to stop moving her around and give her some stability. She’d taken herself straight off to university after school, and from there straight into business, landing in Edward’s team and working her way up to be his executive assistant.
Her parents had never managed to give her the stability she’d craved, so she’d found her own—with Dawson’s. It was a family business, its history stretching into the last century and the one before that. The company had been around long before Edward, and she had no doubt that it would continue without him.
But how was it ever going to feel the same after he was gone? And what else was going to change?
The succession plans that had been approved by the board had appointed her as Joss’s new EA—she was tied to the job role, not to the holder—but once his father was gone Joss had no reason to stick with that decision. She could be out through the door as soon as Edward was dead.
An engagement to the heir apparent—even a fake one—was another tie to the company. To the family. Another bond to the life that she’d built for herself. An obstacle between her and everything falling away. Was that completely crazy? Maybe. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.
‘Here.’ She passed Joss a bowl of potatoes and a salad. ‘Can you stick these on the table? The chicken will be just another minute.’
He took the bowls from her and glanced at the pan on the hob.
‘That looks amazing. You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, though. We could have ordered something.’
She shrugged. ‘It was no trouble. I’d have been cooking for myself anyway.’
‘You cook like this every night?’
She narrowed her eyes as she tried to work out his angle. ‘Are you asking if that’s part of the deal?’
‘I’m making conversation. At least, I’m trying to.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head as she grabbed a couple of plates and started serving up. ‘Everything just feels so...weird. I can’t get my head around it.’
‘It doesn’t need to be weird.’
‘Joss, this afternoon you asked me to pretend to be your fiancée. Now you’re asking me to move in with you. How can it be anything but weird?’
‘Because it’s not real, Eva.’
She brandished a set of tongs at him. ‘That makes it worse! How can faking something like that not feel weird to you? Lying to your father won’t feel weird?’
He held his hands up and shrugged, though his expression belied his casual attitude. ‘Do you tell your parents everything that’s going on with you?’
‘There’s just my dad. We’re not close. But I’ve never invented a fiancé.’
Before now, she added in her head. Because this conversation seemed to be gathering momentum, and she wasn’t sure she was going to put a stop to it. She hadn’t come out and told Edward that it wasn’t true yet, so at the very least she was complicit in the lie getting this far.
It was only when Joss had mentioned it that she’d even thought about the fact that she might have to tell her dad. How was it that she’d put more emotional energy into worrying that she was lying to Edward than into the fact that she would also have to lie to her own father? She’d not even considered that going through with this would affect him too.
Maybe it didn’t have to. Maybe she could keep the whole thing from him—it wasn’t as if they spoke often. Or at all, really.
‘You’re quiet,’ Joss commented as they sat down to eat at the dining table tucked into the corner of the living room.
‘Thinking,’ she replied, helping herself to salad and potatoes.
‘Enlighten me,’ Joss instructed, equally economical with his words.
Eva sighed, but he was here to talk and they weren’t going to get anywhere if neither of them opened up. And, if what she’d seen of Joss over the years was anything to go by, she would be waiting a long time for an emotional outpouring from his end.
‘I’m not sure that this is a good idea.’ A good start, she thought. Get her cards on the table. ‘We’re lying to your father. It’s likely we’ll be found out. It’s a distraction when we should be concentrating on what he needs.’
Joss raised an eyebrow.
‘What?’ Eva asked.
‘We’re doing it for my father. You saw how happy it’s making him.’
Joss had said that they needed to talk, but it was only now she realised that he thought he was here to sort out details—not to convince her. He was assuming that she would just go along with it. He’d taken her decision not to tell Edward the truth from the start as approval, and he was here to iron out the fine print.
‘You really think I’m going to go along with this?’
Joss looked up and held her gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable.
‘I think you already are.’
A shiver ran through her at the tone of his voice. So commanding. So sure of himself. So arrogant. She’d had no idea before this moment that that did something for her, but the heat between her legs and the tightness in her belly told her it definitely did.
‘If you were going to back out,’ he continued, ‘you would have done it back at the office. Or just told my father the truth on the spot. Why are we bothering to dance around this when we both know you’ve made up your mind?’
She fixed him with a stare and muttered an Arabic curse under her breath, trying not to show him how right she knew he was. Because she could have called a halt to this hours ago. The fact that she hadn’t told them both all they needed to know.
‘I’m doing it to make your father happy,’ she clarified, still holding that gaze, making sure Joss could see that she wasn’t backing down or giving in to him. She was making her own decisions for her own very good reasons.
‘I know.’ He nodded, taking a sip of his wine, breaking their eye contact and cutting into his chicken.
‘I mean it,’ he said, after he’d polished off half the plate. ‘I could get used to this.’
‘Good,’ she said, standing up and picking up her plate, suddenly losing her appetite. ‘You can get used to doing the washing up as well.’
Joss finished his food and followed her through to the little kitchen. ‘You think you’re going to scare me away with threats of stacking the dishwasher?’
She gestured around the bijou kitchen. ‘You see a dishwasher in here?’
He glanced around. ‘Fine. So we’ll get someone in. I’ll pay,’ he added when she started to shake her head.
‘It’s not about the money.’
‘What? It’s about me being willing to get my hands wet? Fine. But I’m not a martyr, Eva. If you’re hoping to scare me then I might as well tell you now that it’s not going to work.’
‘You don’t want to move in here. There’s no space.’
He leaned back against the kitchen counter, a hand either side of his hips. His man-spreading made his intentions clear. It would have been more subtle if he’d marked the doorframe with his scent.
‘I decide for myself what I do and don’t want, Eva. This is where you live, so it’s where I’ll live too. You’ve stated your ground rules; now I’m stating mine.’
She folded her arms and leant back against the kitchen counter. ‘There’s not even any space in the wardrobe.’
‘You can’t expect us to live apart.’
‘We’re going to see each other all the time at work. Isn’t moving in together a bit much?’
He took a step towards her, and Eva had to admit that his height was a little intimidating in the tiny kitchen.
‘And how many people are going to believe our story if we’re not living together?’
‘We could tell people we’re waiting until after the wedding.’
He shook his head and, much as she hated it, Eva knew he was right.
‘They’d ask us which century we’re living in. Perhaps if this was a real relationship we’d say to hell with what they think. But we need to make them believe us. I don’t want to give them any reason not to. I’ll start moving some stuff in on Monday.’
He moved to leave, and somehow, although it was what her rational brain wanted, it seemed her body wasn’t expecting it. Disappointment washed through her. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to living alone. She loved having her own space. But they’d been through a lot today, and she wasn’t particularly keen on being left alone with her thoughts.
‘Do you want a coffee before you go?’ she asked, flicking on the kettle behind her.
‘Sure,’ Joss said, watching her carefully. ‘Something wrong?’
‘No,’ she replied, rubbing her forehead and realising she wasn’t being very convincing. ‘Just a lot to take in. Weird day.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Joss said, leaning back on the counter.
Eva looked up and realised that it wasn’t a figure of speech.
‘No, no—it’s fine,’ she said.
‘I can listen. Even help.’
‘I can’t, Joss. He’s your dad. You don’t want to... It should be me asking if you’re okay.’
‘I don’t get an exclusive on it, Eva. I know you care for him too.’
‘I just can’t believe I didn’t know...you know.’
She made two coffees and carried them back through to the living room. Plonking them on the coffee table, she just had time to wish she had space for a bigger sofa before Joss appeared behind her.
‘Do you sit and spy on your neighbours?’ Joss asked, pointing out the way the sofa was angled towards the big picture window out onto the mews.
‘More like bask in the sun. I get enough gossip at work.’
He looked surprised.
‘What? Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed.’
He shook his head. ‘What do people gossip about?’
‘Oh, you know—the usual. Who’s sleeping with who. Who’s angling for a promotion. Who’s getting fired.’
‘So why don’t I hear any of this?’
Eva rolled her eyes. With all his expensive business education, did he seriously not understand how an office worked? She was clearly going to have to spell this out to him.
‘Of course you don’t hear the gossip,’ she said. ‘One, you’re practically the boss. No one gossips in front of the boss. Two, you’re hardly ever in the office. And three, you’re not exactly Mr Friendly over the coffee machine when you are there.’
‘People don’t think I’m friendly?’
‘I don’t think you’re friendly. I can’t speak for anyone else.’
He folded his arms and fixed her with a stern look. She was tempted to laugh.
‘What’s so unfriendly about me?’
Should she go for it? Unload all his faults? All the reasons she’d been telling herself for years why he was a million miles from boyfriend material.
Why not? Perhaps it would be the final straw in this idiotic deception.
‘Fine—if you want to hear it. You’re not exactly an open book, are you, Joss? You don’t talk to people unless it’s directly about the business.’
‘I don’t do small talk. There’s a difference.’
‘Right: the difference between being friendly and not friendly. It’s not a criticism. Just an observation.’
‘You think I should be friendlier?’
She sighed and shook her head. Seriously, this man’s emotional intelligence didn’t even register on the scale. ‘I didn’t say that. I don’t think you need to change. But just don’t be surprised if people don’t open up around you.’
‘Well, you don’t seem to be having a problem with that.’
She shrugged and gave a resigned laugh. ‘Proposing to a girl will have that effect. If you didn’t want to know, you shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Might as well know what people think of me. So—office gossip. Is there going to be a lot of it. About us?’
‘Are you kidding?’ She laughed properly, genuinely amused for the first time all day. ‘I’m going to be grilled like a fish about this on Monday morning.’
‘You could just not go in,’ Joss offered. ‘Take a few days off. Benefits of dating the boss.’
The smile dropped from her face as the insult hit. As if she could just not show up for work, with no notice, and it wouldn’t make a difference to anyone.
‘I think we need to get a couple of things straight, Joss. One—I work very hard with your father. My job is important, and I can’t just swan off because you say so. Unless you fancy handling his correspondence in Arabic, Italian and French on Monday morning, I’ll be at my desk as usual. Two—we are not now, nor will we ever be “dating”. If I’d wanted to date you, I’d have asked you out for dinner. I’m going along with your little charade because I care about your father. Don’t confuse the two.’
‘Would you?’ He leaned into the arm of the sofa with a smile that was verging dangerously on smug.
‘Would I what?’
‘Have asked me out for dinner?’
She sighed. Bloody man. ‘The key part of that sentence, Joss, was if. I’ve never asked you because I don’t want to date you.’
‘You know, you sound like you’ve given that quite a lot of thought. Should I be flattered?’
‘Honestly. Only a man with your ego could find a way to take that as a compliment. Listen to me carefully, Joss. I don’t want to date you. I don’t want to be engaged to you. I’m going along with it for now. But when the time comes we’ll both extract ourselves from this situation with as much dignity as we can muster and forget it ever happened.’
CHAPTER THREE (#u6d215726-b3e7-54f7-9cb3-434f15467240)
EVA SPENT THE weekend in a daze. The further she got from having seen Joss the more ridiculous the whole thing seemed. So when she pitched up at her desk at eight o’clock on Monday morning she was almost surprised to see him there waiting for her.
‘You’re in early,’ she commented, unwinding her scarf from around her neck and draping it over the coatstand. ‘Trying to impress somebody?’
‘I told you—my father wants to start handing things over today. I thought we’d need an early start.’
‘Well, we’ve both beaten the boss in.’ She glanced through the blinds to Edward’s darkened office beyond. ‘Did you see him at the weekend? How is he?’
‘He is marvellous, Eva, dear,’ Edward said, bowling up behind her. ‘Thank you for asking. And I was out of the city this weekend, so I’ve not seen anyone since I left the office on Friday. How about you two? I hope you did something nice with your weekend and didn’t spend it worrying about me.’
‘Dinner on Friday night,’ Joss supplied truthfully.
‘And Borough Market on Saturday,’ Eva added.
No need to mention that she’d gone alone. She disliked the taste of the half-lie in her mouth, but the smile on Edward’s face softened the blow.
‘And arriving together on Monday morning. Were you this indiscreet before or am I really getting old?’
‘Actually,’ Joss said, ‘we thought that now everyone will be finding out our news there’s no reason we can’t arrive together. In fact, I’ll be moving my things over to Eva’s place tonight.’
‘Well, that’s marvellous. Wish it had all worked like that when your mother and I were that age. Now, I’m glad I’ve found you two alone—I’ve been thinking, and there’s something I want to say to you. I don’t know what your plans are, but I don’t want you to rush them for me. I know my news has been upsetting, but I don’t want you hurrying anything up for my sake. Please?’
It was perfect, in a way, Eva realised. They wouldn’t have to find an excuse not to marry before he died.
‘But enough about that. I need the two of you in Milan as soon as you can get there. The store manager’s feeling jumpy, and we have a couple of major suppliers over there as well who would probably appreciate a visit. I need you to smooth things over. Let people see that you’re more than ready for the big job.’
Joss’s eyebrows drew together, and she knew he wasn’t happy at the implication that his employees didn’t trust him.
‘Dad, I met Matteo at the conference earlier in the year and it was all fine. The managers all know me. Surely you want me here? I’m not sure now’s the time for me to be travelling.’
‘Now’s the perfect time, son. We need to steady things. You’re going to have to visit all the flagship stores. The big suppliers too. They’re worried—it’s been a long time since this company faced big changes. This is part of your job now.’
‘But what if something happens here?’
Eva winced. She knew exactly what Joss meant.
‘What if I pop my clogs, you’re asking? It’s not going to happen overnight, son. We have some time. And I’d like to see the old girl looking straight before I go. I promise if anything changes you’ll be the first to know. If it helps you make your mind up, I’m not planning on hanging around London waiting to die. Some places I want to see before I go. But you two need to be on a plane before lunchtime, and I’ve got an inbox the size of Milan Cathedral to work through with Eva before you go.
* * *
Joss walked away, leaving Eva and his father huddled around his computer monitor. Eva was making notes on a pad and occasionally reaching across to touch the screen. It was clear to him how fond she was of his father, and how distressed at the news of his illness.
And now he’d told them that he didn’t want a hasty wedding. Yes, it got them out of having to take this charade too far, but Joss saw something else in it.
How much did his father know about his last marriage? About how he had felt rushed, unable to stop the oncoming commitment even after he’d realised it was a bad idea. More than he had let on at the time, it seemed.
He’d been rash and stupid announcing their non-existent engagement to Edward, and he supposed that he should be grateful that Eva had agreed to go along with it.
She’d told him that it was because she cared for the old man, and Joss didn’t doubt that. But that didn’t mean he believed she’d given him the whole story. There were things that she was hiding. Layers of secrets, he suspected, from the frequently veiled expressions that crossed her face. Well, he was going to find out what they were—they had hours of travelling ahead of them, and she couldn’t dodge his questions the whole way to Italy.
Or maybe he’d sleep instead of quizzing her, because that definitely hadn’t been happening enough since his father had dropped his bombshell. He’d have liked to say it was grief over his father’s illness that was causing his insomnia, but he knew that it was something else.
It was sleek chestnut hair and hazel eyes. The memory of a rose-pink slip under a serious navy dress. It was the thought of his holdall of clothes stashed in his office, destined for her flat just as soon as they got back from their trip. The thought of living in such close quarters with a woman he’d determinedly avoided since he’d noticed his attraction to her.
Back in his office, he dug out his toothbrush and a change of clothes from the holdall. If they weren’t on a plane until lunchtime, he knew that they’d need to stay over. With his dad sending him off in such a hurry, he guessed it wasn’t going to be a short meeting at the other end.
A noise caught his attention and he looked up to see Eva, stalled at the entrance of his office. He felt that familiar pull, the heat in his body he knew was inevitable when he was near her. Again he silently cursed whatever impulse it was that had made him lie to his father.
He felt a twist of pain in his belly. He knew how dangerous secrets could be—keeping his feelings bottled up had turned toxic before, and lying to his father felt unnatural now.
Intellectually, he understood the reasons he’d done it. Because he’d let his father down so many times over the years. He’d married his university girlfriend, a friend of the family, because she was ‘the right sort of girl’ from ‘the right sort of family’, and everyone had expected it to happen. He’d done what he’d thought was the right thing—stood up in front of their friends and their family and made the commitment that was expected from him, no matter how wrong it had felt inside.
As his depression had grown and his marriage had darkened, he’d ignored the problems. Blinkered himself against his wife’s pain and buried himself in his work rather than go back on his word and end a marriage that was never going to make either of them happy. Until she’d upped and left, and he’d seen the disappointment in his parents’ eyes that he had failed. Failed his wife. Failed both their families.
It had only been after the breakdown of his marriage that he’d realised he needed help. He’d gone weeks with barely a couple of hours’ sleep a night. Seen his weight drop and his appetite disappear. It had only been when he’d looked up his symptoms on the internet that he’d realised they were classic signs of depression.
As soon as he’d read that, everything had fallen into place—that was the dark tunnel that he’d found himself in as his personal life had hurtled towards marriage while he’d buried his head in the sand, concentrating on the business.
So he’d gone to his doctor, worked hard at therapy. Eaten and exercised well. Taken the meds he’d been prescribed. And he’d recovered from his illness with a clarity and a focus that he’d not felt in years.
He shouldn’t have been in that relationship to start with. He should have called it off as soon as he’d had doubts—before his illness had blinkered his vision and left him feeling that he didn’t have a way out.
His parents had hinted over the years since his divorce that he should start seeing someone else, get back out there. But he knew he didn’t want to be a bad husband, a bad partner, again. He couldn’t risk doing that to someone else.
But he also knew that his father wanted to see him settled and happy—that was what had made it so easy for those words to slip out of his lips in the heat of the moment. And it was what made him burn with guilt now, knowing that he was misleading him. He suspected his father felt partially responsible for Joss feeling he had to go along with family expectations. If this lie made Joss feel uncomfortable, it would be worth it if it meant that his father could let his guilt rest before he died.
The recent spate of sleepless nights was a worry, though. It was years since he’d felt this drag of fatigue, and it reminded him of a time in his life he had absolutely no wish to revisit. This time it carried with it an extra shade of dread. He didn’t want to be ill again. Didn’t want his world to shrink and pale as he fought with his own brain chemistry to feel even the smallest amount of hope.
And right there was another good reason not to listen to the pull of his body when Eva was near. No. They had to keep real life, real feelings, and their charade separate. Regardless of how attracted they were to each other.
He considered his own thoughts. Was he right? Was she attracted to him as he was to her?
‘Hey, come in,’ he said, remembering that she was still standing, watching him from the doorway.
She shut the door behind her and Joss shifted in his chair at the sudden charge in the room that their isolation created.
‘How’s Dad getting on?’ Talking about his father seemed like the safest option.
‘He’s great. Same as always. If he hadn’t told us, I still wouldn’t know there was anything wrong. Says he’s looking forward to some more time out of the city. You?’
‘I’m good. Could do without this trip, if I’m being honest.’
‘Yeah.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Your dad’s asked me to book us a room. Said he thought the meetings might go on a bit. I need to go home and pack a bag, so I’ll just meet you at the airport.’
‘It’s easier if I come with,’ Joss said, leaning back in his chair. ‘You’re only around the corner. We’ll get a cab from there. It means I can drop my stuff off too.’
‘You brought it to the office?’ Eva looked horrified.
‘What? Are you still worried about the gossip?’
‘It’s easy for you to joke about it. You’ve not been grilled about our grand romance every time you’ve so much as looked at the coffee machine.’
‘I’m sorry you’re getting the brunt of it. Do you want me to say something?’
She sighed and shook her head. ‘What? A formal announcement about our fake relationship? A little weird, Joss.’
‘Fine. Well, we’ll be out of here in an hour. Think the news has reached the Milan store already?’
‘Oh, I can guarantee it’ll travel faster than we do.’
* * *
As the plane lifted from the runway Joss itched to reach into his bag for his laptop, hoping to relax in the familiarity of a working journey. He’d travelled between stores more times than he could count, and he knew he could get plenty of work done before their meeting. Plus staring at the screen of his computer was safer than glancing across at the woman sitting beside him.
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Ellie Darkins
From assistant to fiancée!Joss Dawson knows the one thing that will make his dying father happy is to see his son find love…the problem is, he's sworn off love forever!But the answer's simple! Asking his father's fiercely intelligent, beautiful assistant Eva to play the perfect role – his fiancée. Only for Eva it's not that easy…Pretending to be Joss's fiancée threatens to ruin the life she's worked so hard for! And how will she keep her head when she's losing her heart to her frustratingly attractive new boss?
From assistant to fiancée!
Joss Dawson knows the one thing that will make his dying father happy is to see his son find love...the problem is, he’s sworn off love forever!
But the answer’s simple! Asking his father’s fiercely intelligent, beautiful assistant Eva to play the perfect role—his fiancée. Only for Eva it’s not that easy...
Pretending to be Joss’s fiancée threatens to ruin the life she’s worked so hard for! And how will she keep her head when she’s losing her heart to her frustratingly attractive new boss?
She leaned back against the door, and Joss stood in front of her, filling her vision with the wide shoulders of his exquisitely cut suit.
“Everything okay?” he asked, his voice low and sensual.
Eva nodded, when what she really wanted to do was shout. To tell him that no—she wasn’t okay. This was far, far from okay. This was confusing and terrifying and oh so much more complicated than she had ever wanted her life to be.
But she couldn’t let go of his hand. Couldn’t be the one to break that connection between them.
She’d felt it growing as they’d played their parts over dinner. A touch of the hands here. A brush of fingers over an arm there.
The intimacy had grown between them in some strange simulacrum of the relationship they had invented. But she had expected them to walk away from it. Expected to leave it at the table. She hadn’t expected it to stalk them into the lift and back up to their suite.
Intimacy was safe in public, where neither of them could act on it. But with her back against this door and Joss in front of her—looking serious, smelling delicious—it was a more dangerous prospect. And Joss knew it, too.
Conveniently Engaged to the Boss
Ellie Darkins
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ELLIE DARKINS spent her formative years devouring romance novels, and after completing her English degree decided to make a living from her love of books. As a writer and editor, she finds her work now entails dreaming up romantic proposals, hot dates with alpha males and trips to the past with dashing heroes. When she’s not working she can usually be found running around after her toddler, volunteering at her local library, or escaping all the above with a good book and a vanilla latte.
For Mike
Contents
Cover (#ua2513185-b9a9-5d3c-a4c1-604ab4a30e9b)
Back Cover Text (#u45bfd18d-ba2a-5756-87eb-884ece55a016)
Introduction (#u04d665b4-8e71-5129-a48b-402421965f0b)
Title Page (#udff039a7-93fa-5a82-ac48-069032e3f1b7)
About the Author (#u730cc55b-8532-5ccb-bd08-4e4531c3090b)
Dedication (#u95cceb68-6bbe-5f4b-beae-3c8511c146d1)
CHAPTER ONE (#uadbbacb6-e984-50ed-ba98-715af914e86c)
CHAPTER TWO (#u4df043e1-0bf4-55bb-bbc9-7674c3b9d0cb)
CHAPTER THREE (#u837850cf-6efb-5207-9c60-45ed62469d99)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u6d215726-b3e7-54f7-9cb3-434f15467240)
‘COULD YOU HELP me with this zip, or are you just going to watch?’
Instinctively Joss shut the door behind him, wondering if anyone else had seen, and glanced through the window of the office to make sure his father wasn’t nearby.
‘Sorry, Eva. I was looking for my dad. What are you doing in his office? And why does it involve being undressed?’
Eva shrugged—he watched her shoulder blades move under pale, exposed skin where the dress’s zip was gaping at the back.
‘Edward’s already gone to the boardroom. Shouldn’t you be there too? Never mind. Could you help? I should have been there five minutes ago, but I spilt a cup of coffee over myself and now I’ve got the zip stuck.’
‘Okay, okay—sure,’ Joss said, with a glance back at the closed door. ‘My dad wanted to see me in here before the meeting, but I couldn’t get away from my last call.’
He reached Eva and gently batted her hands away from the zip, pulling the slider to the top as quickly and impersonally as he could manage.
Eva turned her head to look over her shoulder, and as his eyes met hers he felt the tug of attraction that was ever-present around his father’s executive assistant.
‘Um... Joss, I meant unzip.’
Oh, no, that was not what he’d signed up for. No way was he that stupid. He’d been keeping his eyes, hands and mind off this woman for years. He knew the limits of his self-control, and just this proximity to her was pushing it—never mind anything else.
‘I’m not sure that’s...’
‘Joss, would you just do it? Shut your eyes, if you want, but get me out of this thing! It’s not like I’m naked under here, in case you’re worried about your delicate sensibilities.’
He took a deep breath and unzipped, but the teeth snagged halfway down her back.
‘It’s stuck.’
‘Still? Brilliant. I was hoping it was just the angle I was pulling it. Can you unstick it?’
He wasn’t sure he wanted to—not when unsticking it meant exposing more creamy skin and finding out exactly what she’d meant when she said that she wasn’t naked under there.
Joss fiddled with the zip, passing the teeth slowly through the slider and unpicking the threads that had got caught. Finally it gave way and slid smoothly down Eva’s back, revealing a silk slip in a soft pink colour, edged with delicate cream lace. Worse than naked, perhaps, to be so close to seeing the body that he’d dreamed of, only to find it tantalisingly out of reach.
‘At last! Thank goodness for that,’ Eva said, stepping quickly out of the dress and reaching for another, which Joss had just noticed draped over his father’s chair. As the fabric was sliding over her head he turned for the door, but Eva stopped him. ‘Wait—can you zip up this time? I don’t want to be any later than I already am.’
Joss let out a sigh, but crossed the office again and reached for the slider of the zip, his fingertips very close to the rose silk at the base of her spine. He lingered for a moment as he swept her hair away with his other hand, revealing the wispy baby hairs at the nape of her neck and the invitingly soft skin behind her ear.
But before he could cover her safely, the door behind him opened.
‘Eva, are you in—?’
Damn his father and his terrible timing.
‘I’m sorry, Edward. I’ll be right there,’ Eva said, reaching for the zip herself and pulling it further down in the process of twisting round.
‘No, no—I can see I’m interrupting,’ Edward said. ‘I trust you’re both on your way.’
Joss couldn’t bring himself to look, but he could almost hear the huge grin on his father’s face, verging on a full-on laugh.
‘We’re waiting for you.’
His father left the room before Joss could explain that nothing had been going on between him and Eva. He shot a look at her, and saw she looked as taken aback as he did as she struggled with her dress. He pulled the zip up for her—no lingering this time—and strode for the door.
‘What are we going—?’ Eva started.
‘I’ll handle it,’ Joss said.
He walked into the boardroom, still fighting images of Eva’s lingerie-clad body and the look of intrigue and delight on his father’s face when he’d so clearly misinterpreted what had been going on in his office.
He was more used to seeing disappointment from his father, especially when it involved him and women. Since Joss’s first marriage had failed, his father had tried to hide his disappointment that he’d not been able to settle down with anyone else. He knew that when he’d first told his parents he was getting a divorce, they’d blamed the break-up on him.
And then, when he’d walked into the office as a single man, emerging from the dark clouds of clinical depression and divorce, he had realised the strength of his attraction to his father’s executive assistant.
He’d told himself that he would not be going near her—under any circumstances. His father doted on her, and would not take kindly to her feelings being hurt. And after what Joss had done to his marriage—the destruction he’d been powerless to prevent—he knew that he couldn’t expect to make any woman happy.
At least his father respected him professionally. He’d been working for the family’s chain of luxury department stores since he was in primary school, and had earned his position as Vice President of UK Stores. But professional respect and personal pride were two very different things, and Joss knew that an abundance of one would never compensate for the lack of the other.
All eyes turned to him as he entered the full boardroom, with Eva right behind him. They found a couple of spare chairs in the corner. Sunlight flooded in through the old lead-paned windows, brightening the panelled room, which could feel oppressive on a gloomier day.
Joss tried to catch his father’s eye, but he was either deliberately avoiding his gaze or so entranced by the view out of the window that he couldn’t bring himself to look away. The well-heeled streets of Kensington were bustling below, and Joss could tell just from the hum of the traffic that the pavement outside the store was filled with shoppers and tourists, stopping to take in the magnificent window displays for which the store was renowned.
Eventually, though, the old man cleared his throat and looked around the room, glancing at each of the board members in turn.
‘I’d like to thank you all for being here,’ Edward began, with a smile that Joss couldn’t interpret. ‘Especially at such short notice and on a Friday afternoon, when I’m sure you’d all rather be at a long working lunch. I’m afraid that, as some of you may have guessed, an emergency board meeting is rarely called to share good news, and today is no different. So, it is with regret that I have to announce that due to ill health I will be resigning from the company in all capacities with immediate effect.’
Joss felt fear and dread swell in an all too familiar fashion in the base of his stomach as the deeper meaning of his father’s words sank in. His father must be ill—seriously ill—to even consider leaving the business.
But Edward carried on speaking, leaving him no time to dwell.
‘You all know that over the years we have taken steps to ensure a smooth transition when the time came for me to hand over the reins, and so—if you are all still in agreement—I will be leaving you in the capable hands of my son, Joss, who will become Managing Director and Chairman of the Board in my place. Eva, of course, will be assisting Joss in his new role, as I suspect she knows more about my job than I do. I know you will continue to support them, just as you have supported me. Now, I imagine there will be questions, so I’ll answer them as best I can. Who’s first?’
The room sank into silence as Edward finished speaking. Joss looked closely at his father. Ill-health? His father hadn’t taken a day off sick in his life, and yet now he was resigning completely? Yes, they’d talked about succession plans. Any sensible businessman had contingencies for all eventualities, and Edward would not have wanted to leave the company in chaos if anything had happened to him. But had there actually been more to it than that? Had his father known that he would soon be stepping down?
The dread in Joss’s stomach twisted into stark fear as the implications of the announcement sank in and he realised what this must mean. His father wouldn’t resign because of a dodgy hip or ‘a touch of angina’, as he’d once described a health scare. He’d always sworn he’d be carried out of a Dawson’s department store in his coffin. For him to resign must mean he had had some terrible news.
Panic and grief gripped his throat as he noticed for the first time the slight grey tinge to his father’s skin, and the lines around his eyes that suggested a habitual wince of fatigue. Why hadn’t he noticed before? Why hadn’t he been looking? His father wasn’t exactly a spring chicken, and he was still working sixteen-hour days long past the age when most people would expect to retire.
He should have made his father take things easier—should have taken more off his plate.
He met his father’s eye and saw sympathy and understanding in his father’s gaze. He wanted to rush to embrace him, but something froze him to his chair, chilling his blood.
And then warmth crept from the tips of his fingers as a hand slid into his and he heard Eva’s voice.
‘Edward, are you in pain? What can we do to help?’
Joss’s eyes swam and he clenched his jaw, determined not to allow a single tear to fall, to keep control over his emotions. Besides, swiping a falling tear before anyone saw would mean taking his hand from Eva’s, and at that moment he couldn’t see how he was meant to do that.
‘Perhaps we should speak in my office?’ Edward said to Joss, his voice gentle. ‘And you lot—’ he addressed the remaining members of the board ‘you have a good gossip while I’m gone and think of what you need to ask me. Head back to the pub and finish your lunch, if you want to. But get your questions to me sharpish, because I’m planning on being on a sun lounger by the end of next week.’
Edward rose and Joss noticed, as he hadn’t before, that his father leaned heavily on the table for support.
Joss snapped out of his trance and back into business mode as they walked down the corridor and back to Edward’s office, firing questions all the way.
‘Dad? What’s happening? Are you okay? Was this what you wanted to talk to me about?’
Edward collapsed into the chair behind his desk and rested back against the padded seat. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, son. Of course I wanted to tell you first, but you didn’t arrive for our meeting—’
‘Dad, if I’d known—’
‘I know.’ He softened the words with a smile. ‘I know. But it was difficult for Eva to get everyone here at such short notice. I couldn’t delay it any longer.’
‘Couldn’t delay? What’s wrong with you, Dad?’
‘Sit down, son.’ His father indicated the chair opposite. ‘And you, Eva. You both need to hear this. It’s cancer, I’m afraid, and there’s nothing they can do about it. I ignored it for a bit too long, it seems. So I thought it was about time I took that holiday I’ve been promising myself for the last thirty years and let you get on with running the business while I’m still around to answer your questions—there’s no deadline for you two, of course.’
Joss stared at his father, unable to take in his words. His hand found Eva’s again and he gripped it hard, taking strength from the solid presence of her, the warmth that always radiated from her.
‘How long, Dad?’
‘Oh, you know doctors. Never give you a straight answer. A few months, it seems. Long enough to have a little fun before I go. I love this business—you know that I do—but news like this makes you rethink, and I don’t want these four walls to be the last thing I see before I go.’
‘I’m so sorry, Edward.’
Joss could hear the tears in Eva’s voice, and he squeezed her hand. He knew how fond she was of his father, and that her grief must mirror his own. ‘Are you sure you’re comfortable? Is there anything we can do?’
‘Quite comfortable for now, my dear. Thank you for your concern. Now it’s my turn to ask the questions.’ He glanced at their clasped hands. ‘Is there anything you two would like to tell me?’
* * *
Eva sat in shock, silenced by Edward’s words. She couldn’t believe that the old man was dying. Sure, he’d looked a little creaky around the joints lately, but he’d never complained of so much as a runny nose. It just didn’t make sense that he could be terminally ill.
Joss had taken hold of her hand and she could feel the contact burning her skin. She hadn’t thought about it when she’d slid her fingers between his back in the boardroom. Hadn’t thought about all the times she’d imagined the slide of his skin against hers over the years. All she’d been able to feel was the grief and fear radiating from him, and she had acted on instinct, trying to ease it in any way she could.
And now Edward was calling them on it. Under normal circumstances she’d have cleared up the understanding with Edward the minute it had happened. But this was Joss’s father, and they had both just been hit with shocking news. It was Joss’s place, not hers, to explain.
‘I’m sorry you saw that, Dad—’ he started.
‘Oh, don’t be sorry—I’m delighted. I do remember what it was like to be young, believe it or not. I’m just pleased that you two have finally found each other. I can’t deny that I’ve been waiting for this for some time. I take it that if you’re bringing your personal life with you to work then it’s serious?’
Eva felt her mouth fall open and waited for Joss to correct his father, to sum up what had happened with the dress and the coffee and the zip. But expressions chased across Joss’s face faster than she could read them.
She was just about to jump in and explain for herself what had happened when Joss finally spoke.
‘Yes, it’s serious,’ Joss said. ‘In fact, we’re engaged.’
She was about to call him on being completely ridiculous when she clocked the look on Edward’s face. A smile had brought a glow to his face, and he was beaming at them both. Just a moment she was so shocked she couldn’t speak. And then real life kicked in, and she remembered the news that Edward had just delivered, that Joss had just received. She found that she couldn’t contradict him.
Still, she gently withdrew her hand. She had to maintain some semblance of control if she was going to keep her head.
She’d been trying to pretend to herself for years that she didn’t have an enormous crush on this man. That he didn’t enter her mind when she was out on a date with any other guy. And now he had to go and pretend to be in love with her. And the only result of calling him on it would be to hurt the man she’d come to care for almost as a parent. She couldn’t do it to him. She’d have to talk to Joss in private. He could break it to his father gently.
Funny how being angry with him made him that little bit less fanciable—she’d been looking for something to knock the shine off him for years.
It wasn’t as if she wanted to be attracted to him—she told herself that often enough. She couldn’t think of anyone less suitable for falling in love with than the son of her boss, who spent half his time on the road visiting the UK stores, and the other half in his office, buried in spreadsheets and dodging calls from disappointed would-be dates.
Secretaries talked—hardly breaking news.
As soon as she’d recognised where her feelings were going—the irritating pitter-patter of her heart, the annoying dampness of her palms, not to mention the completely inappropriate but delicious dreams that had her waking flushed and impressed by the breadth of her own imagination—she’d acted.
She’d put space between them at the office, avoided him in the break room and at the pub. She’d thrown herself into dating in a way that was the opposite of Joss’s clinical style: enthusiastically, prolifically, discriminately. She’d found handsome, eligible bachelors who weren’t intimidated by her salary or her seven fluent languages—or the handful of conversational ones. She’d dated in Russian, Greek and German, and once—haltingly, but memorably—in Mandarin. She’d gone dancing, cocktail-making, picnicking. Tried blue blood and blue collar.
And not a single one of the men she’d kissed so demurely on the cheek at the end of the night had helped her even start forgetting about Joss. He was beginning to appear annoyingly unforgettable, and now he was pulling her into a deceit that she knew, unhesitatingly, was a BAD IDEA. All caps.
‘Well, like I said, I can’t say that I’m surprised. I’ve suspected for a while that you two have a soft spot for each other,’ Edward said at last, still smiling.
Eva groaned inwardly. Oh, no, how much of her stupid crush had he seen? How much was he going to figure out? How much was Joss going to figure out for himself?
‘And it makes me a very happy man to see you settled and in love before I go.’
The three of them sank into silence as the meaning of his words hit home and the reality of his illness intruded once again on the completely insane situation Joss had just created.
‘But now I’ve got work to do—so get out of here, the pair of you.’
Eva kissed Edward on the cheek and mumbled something indiscernible, then let Joss follow her from the room, past the open-plan desks and into Joss’s office.
‘What the hell was that?’ she demanded as soon as they were alone, staring at Joss as he sank into his chair and rested his face in his hands.
‘Not now, Eva.’
‘Not now? You just told your father we’re engaged—I think I’m entitled to an explanation.’
‘He’s just told me he’s dying. I can’t talk about this now.’
She dropped into a chair opposite him, feeling sick to her stomach. Joss was right—he’d just had terrible news. Much as she had every right to give him hell, perhaps now wasn’t the time.
‘You didn’t know anything about it?’ she asked gently.
‘He didn’t say anything. Just that he needed to speak to me before the meeting. But I was tied up on a call and I... I missed the meeting. He wanted to tell me.’
‘You couldn’t have known he was going to tell you that.’ She crossed to stand beside him and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘It wouldn’t have changed anything. The news would have been the same.’
‘It would have felt different if he’d been able to talk to me before having to tell everyone else.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’
He leaned his head against her arm and she let her hand brush against his hair.
‘And I’m sorry for what I told him about us.’
Eva moved her hand away, aware of a sudden change of the chemistry in the room. She hitched herself onto the corner of the desk, letting her stilettoed feet dangle.
‘What was that about? The truth would have been a much simpler explanation. It’s going to be a hundred times harder to explain things now. Engaged or not, who knows what he thinks we were up to in his office?’
‘I was thinking on my feet. I didn’t want him to think that you were involved in something sordid, and my brain went to “engaged” rather than “wardrobe malfunction”. You saw his face when I told him that we were getting married. I knew that it would make him happy.’
‘Marrying me?’
‘Being happy...settled. It’s all he wants for me. And since my divorce... You don’t want to hear all that. Just trust me on this one. I know my father. I knew it would make him happy.’
‘So what’s it going to do to him when you tell him there’s no engagement?’
And suddenly, from the defiant clench of his jaw and the killer look in his eyes, Eva knew that he wasn’t planning on telling his father the truth at all.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, keeping her voice low and commanding. ‘We have to tell him the truth. I’ll tell him about the coffee and the dress. I’ll sort this out.’
Joss shrugged, never breaking eye contact, never backing down from the challenge she’d made so clear in her voice.
‘We’ll explain about the dress. But I see no reason to drop the pretence of our engagement.’
She stood slowly from the desk and took a step towards him, letting him know that she found neither his position in the company nor the six inches in height he had over her intimidating in the slightest. Least of all when he was seated and she could tower over him.
‘No reason, Joss? You just panicked and told a bare-faced lie that has implications for us both. I have no intention of lying to your father, so unless you want him to hear from me that you just fabricated a fiancée, I think you would do better to just tell him now.’
‘Or we could make him believe that it’s true.’
She took half a step back to stare at Joss. ‘Have you completely lost your mind? Why would we want to do that?’
‘Maybe I have lost my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time. I don’t know... What I do know is that my father has just told me that he’s dying, and I—we—can do something to make him happy in the time he has left.’
‘By lying to him? Do you think he’d really want that?’
‘You saw his face. You tell me if you think the lie hurt him.’
She shrugged, unable to contradict him. ‘I know he seemed happy, Joss. But it can’t be right. I mean, how long would we have to keep this up?’
She sat down again, losing a little of her anger as she realised what she was asking.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...’
‘I know. I know you didn’t mean anything by it. But, yeah, we would have to keep it up until he dies. Which, apparently, won’t be all that long. Don’t worry—I don’t expect you to actually say I do.’
She sat and thought on it for a moment. Remembered the look on Edward’s face when Joss had told his lie. She couldn’t deny that he’d looked happy. As happy as she’d seen him for a long time.
She loved Edward. He had been the one constant in her life for so long now, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to manage without him. A sob threatened, and her hand lifted slowly to her throat as she forced it down. She slumped into the back of the chair, suddenly deflated. Surely if it made Edward happy she could do this. She should do this.
‘I need some time to think about it,’ she said eventually, not wanting Joss to know the direction her thoughts had been heading.
Goodness knew she’d been trying to keep the details of her mind secret from him for long enough. If they were to go through with this completely ridiculous idea, how was she meant to keep that up? To hide the fact that her mouth wanted to part every time she saw him? That she had to stop her tongue moistening her lips and her body swaying towards him?
‘Take some time, then. No work’s going to get done this afternoon anyway, by the looks of it.’
Eva shook her head. ‘Your father will need me.’
‘I’m going to my father’s office now, and we’re going to have a long talk. I’ll make sure there’s not a problem. If you want, I can say you went home with a headache.’
‘While he’s still at work with a terminal illness? Thanks but no thanks. Lock yourself in with your father if you want, but I’ll be at my desk if either of you need me.’
Joss leaned back in his chair, raising his hands to admit defeat. ‘We need to talk, though. And we can’t do that in the office. Dinner tonight?’
Dinner tonight.
How many times had she imagined Joss issuing an invitation like that? Though she’d always known that she wouldn’t accept. It wasn’t even the time that he spent travelling around the country that made her think he was a million miles from boyfriend material. No, it was the fact that even when he was here he wasn’t quite...here. There was an isolation about him. A distance. Even when he was close enough to touch.
She’d done long-distance before, with people in her life that she’d loved, and she’d hated every second of it. The last thing she needed was a man—a fiancé—who was distant even when he was in the room.
But she couldn’t ignore him while he was going around telling people that they had got engaged. She had to convince him to tell his father the truth. And then figure out how they were meant to work together.
‘Yes,’ she agreed eventually. ‘I guess we do need to talk about this. My place? I don’t feel like going out after news like this. I don’t suppose you do either.’
‘No. That sounds good. Eight?’
She nodded, and scribbled down her address.
Walking back to her desk, she grabbed the coffee-stained dress and put it in the garment bag that she’d flung over her chair as she’d raced for the boardroom.
The blinds in Edward’s office were drawn—a sure sign that he didn’t want to be disturbed—so she sat at her computer, knowing that her work—the one constant she had in her life—was going to change irrevocably, and there was nothing she could do about it.
CHAPTER TWO (#u6d215726-b3e7-54f7-9cb3-434f15467240)
EVA CHECKED ON the food and resisted glancing at her reflection in the window. She didn’t want Joss to think that she’d made an effort, so she’d not touched her hair or her make-up since she’d got home, and had just thrown on jeans and a comfy jumper. She always wore her skinnies and a cashmere sweater for a Friday night in—that was perfectly plausible.
She didn’t even want to think about how the conversation over dinner was going to go, but she had to. Had to be prepared—set out in her own mind, at least, what was and wasn’t going to be on the cards.
Joss was crazy, thinking that they could get away with a fake engagement. They’d be under scrutiny every minute they were together at the office. She knew how little fuel the gossip furnace needed to keep it alight. But every time she convinced herself of how terrible an idea it was, she remembered the happiness on Edward’s face and the eagerness to please his father on Joss’s.
She had to admit to being intrigued.
Joss was a powerful man. A director—now the MD—of a vast luxury group of department stores, with a presence on every continent, property in every major European shopping capital. He was notorious for the coldness of his personal life—the wife and the marriage that he’d neglected, and the transactional nature of the dates he took to industry functions. The women he dated were always clients and colleagues, there to further a business deal or a conversation, and they always went home alone.
She’d always seen something else in him. Something more. Something in the way that he joked with his father in a way he didn’t with anyone else. Being so close to Edward, she’d seen their father-son relationship up close. Seen that Joss might not be the cold-hearted divorcee that everyone had him pegged as.
And now he’d invented an engagement just to please his dying father, and her curiosity was piqued again.
The two men didn’t have much time left together—and they both seemed happier with this alternative reality than with real life. Who was she to judge? Who was she to tell them they were wrong? If she hadn’t been personally involved she’d be telling them to do whatever they had to do in order to enjoy the time they had left together. But to say that she was ‘involved’ was putting things mildly—and this was way personal. She’d be as responsible as Joss if the truth came out and Edward’s heart was broken in his last few weeks or months.
And maybe all of this was academic. Because it assumed that they stood a chance of getting away with this charade. Making everyone believe that they were in love. Well, it wouldn’t be too hard to convince on her side, she supposed, given the attraction that she’d been hiding for years.
Through the break-up of his marriage—that time of dark black circles under his eyes and an almost permanent blank expression on his face—she was the only one who had seen him lean back against his father’s office door after he’d left a meeting, composing his features and erasing all emotion before he went and faced the rest of the office. And in the time since, he’d been working non-stop—not competing with his colleagues but seemingly competing with himself.
It was hard to pinpoint when she had realised she had a heck of a crush growing. Perhaps after the dip in her stomach when she’d won a hard-earned smile, or when they’d argued in the boardroom and he’d held up his hands in concession to her point, never mind that he was a director and she an assistant.
Or when he’d walked in on her today, half-dressed in his father’s office, and her whole skin had hummed in awareness of him. She’d had to hide the blush that had crept over her cheeks when his fingertips had clasped the zip and pulled it down—something she’d fantasised about more times than she wanted to admit, even to herself.
But nothing that she had done so far had worked in trying to get herself to forget him.
Perhaps it was time to do something different. She had proved that ignoring this thing wasn’t going to make it go away. Maybe getting closer to him was the key. It was easy to maintain a crush, a fantasy, from afar. When you didn’t have to deal with wet towels on your bed or dirty dishes left on the table. Maybe what she needed was some old-fashioned exposure therapy.
Because what did she really know about Joss, beyond what she saw when he was occasionally in the office? If there was one sure way to test a romance it was for a couple to move in together.
Was she completely losing her mind thinking that this was even a feasible idea—never mind a good one?
The doorbell rang, shocking her out of her internal debate. Good, she was getting sick of the sound of her own thoughts. At least with Joss here she would have a sparring partner.
She jogged down the stairs to the street-level door, trying to ignore the familiar flip of her heart at the sight of him. Not that he was looking his best—he had clearly come straight from the office. His shirt was creased, his collar unfastened and his tie loosened.
And then she remembered again how his day had been a thousand times worse than hers and had to resist the urge to pull him close and comfort him.
‘Hey—you found it okay?’
‘Yeah.’ He waved his phone vaguely at her. ‘Just a little help from this. I’ve not been here since I was a kid.’
‘Of course—your dad used to stay here back then. I’d forgotten you must have been here too.’
She stepped back so that he could get through the door. From her little cobbled mews she could barely hear the traffic from the main road nearby, muffled by the square of white stucco pillared houses around the private, locked garden. She showed Joss upstairs to her apartment—a legacy of the time when the building would have had stables downstairs and living quarters for servants of the wealthy above, all tucked away behind the grand mansions on the square.
Eva loved the understated elegance of her home, with clipped bay trees at the door, original cobbles paving the passage and soft heritage colours on the doors and windows.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Joss said as he reached the top of the stairs and crossed to the living room, where great tall windows flooded light in one side of the room. ‘Have you been living here long?’
‘Since I started at Dawson’s.’
Joss looked intrigued. ‘I thought my dad had got rid of this place.’
‘He had—sort of,’ Eva said, reaching for a bottle of wine and raising a glass in question at Joss.
He nodded and reached to take it from her when it was full.
‘He realised it was mostly sitting empty while it was a company flat, so he decided to rent it out. When I started working for the company I was stuck for somewhere to stay. Your dad didn’t have a tenant at the time, and needed someone to house-sit, so he offered me this place.’
Joss raised his eyebrows. ‘Lucky you.’
‘Yeah, I don’t like to move a lot, and he offered me a long-term lease. I like it here.’
‘So I’m going to have a hard time convincing you to move in with me?’
Eva snorted, and winced at the sting of wine in her nose.
‘That part’s non-negotiable,’ she confirmed. ‘This is my home and I’m not leaving it.’
‘So you’re coming round to the rest of it? Good.’
She should have given him an outright no—told him there and then that there was absolutely no way she was going along with his ridiculous scheme. But somehow, with him here in her home, in her space, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. All of a sudden she wasn’t sure about anything.
That was what happened when the only stable part of your life upped and threatened to leave. It had sunk in on her short walk home from the office that she could be about to lose her job—the first point of stability she’d ever had in her life. The safe place that she’d built for herself in the twelve years that she’d been with the company.
She would have thought she’d have been used to it by now. She’d had her whole childhood to practise, after all. Every time her mother or her father had shipped out, or they’d all packed up and moved to another army base, she’d told herself it was the last time she’d care. The last time she’d cry.
She’d not managed to stick to her word until the final time. The time her mother hadn’t come home at all.
Her father had packed her off to boarding school then, not long after she’d begged him to leave the army, to stop moving her around and give her some stability. She’d taken herself straight off to university after school, and from there straight into business, landing in Edward’s team and working her way up to be his executive assistant.
Her parents had never managed to give her the stability she’d craved, so she’d found her own—with Dawson’s. It was a family business, its history stretching into the last century and the one before that. The company had been around long before Edward, and she had no doubt that it would continue without him.
But how was it ever going to feel the same after he was gone? And what else was going to change?
The succession plans that had been approved by the board had appointed her as Joss’s new EA—she was tied to the job role, not to the holder—but once his father was gone Joss had no reason to stick with that decision. She could be out through the door as soon as Edward was dead.
An engagement to the heir apparent—even a fake one—was another tie to the company. To the family. Another bond to the life that she’d built for herself. An obstacle between her and everything falling away. Was that completely crazy? Maybe. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.
‘Here.’ She passed Joss a bowl of potatoes and a salad. ‘Can you stick these on the table? The chicken will be just another minute.’
He took the bowls from her and glanced at the pan on the hob.
‘That looks amazing. You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, though. We could have ordered something.’
She shrugged. ‘It was no trouble. I’d have been cooking for myself anyway.’
‘You cook like this every night?’
She narrowed her eyes as she tried to work out his angle. ‘Are you asking if that’s part of the deal?’
‘I’m making conversation. At least, I’m trying to.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head as she grabbed a couple of plates and started serving up. ‘Everything just feels so...weird. I can’t get my head around it.’
‘It doesn’t need to be weird.’
‘Joss, this afternoon you asked me to pretend to be your fiancée. Now you’re asking me to move in with you. How can it be anything but weird?’
‘Because it’s not real, Eva.’
She brandished a set of tongs at him. ‘That makes it worse! How can faking something like that not feel weird to you? Lying to your father won’t feel weird?’
He held his hands up and shrugged, though his expression belied his casual attitude. ‘Do you tell your parents everything that’s going on with you?’
‘There’s just my dad. We’re not close. But I’ve never invented a fiancé.’
Before now, she added in her head. Because this conversation seemed to be gathering momentum, and she wasn’t sure she was going to put a stop to it. She hadn’t come out and told Edward that it wasn’t true yet, so at the very least she was complicit in the lie getting this far.
It was only when Joss had mentioned it that she’d even thought about the fact that she might have to tell her dad. How was it that she’d put more emotional energy into worrying that she was lying to Edward than into the fact that she would also have to lie to her own father? She’d not even considered that going through with this would affect him too.
Maybe it didn’t have to. Maybe she could keep the whole thing from him—it wasn’t as if they spoke often. Or at all, really.
‘You’re quiet,’ Joss commented as they sat down to eat at the dining table tucked into the corner of the living room.
‘Thinking,’ she replied, helping herself to salad and potatoes.
‘Enlighten me,’ Joss instructed, equally economical with his words.
Eva sighed, but he was here to talk and they weren’t going to get anywhere if neither of them opened up. And, if what she’d seen of Joss over the years was anything to go by, she would be waiting a long time for an emotional outpouring from his end.
‘I’m not sure that this is a good idea.’ A good start, she thought. Get her cards on the table. ‘We’re lying to your father. It’s likely we’ll be found out. It’s a distraction when we should be concentrating on what he needs.’
Joss raised an eyebrow.
‘What?’ Eva asked.
‘We’re doing it for my father. You saw how happy it’s making him.’
Joss had said that they needed to talk, but it was only now she realised that he thought he was here to sort out details—not to convince her. He was assuming that she would just go along with it. He’d taken her decision not to tell Edward the truth from the start as approval, and he was here to iron out the fine print.
‘You really think I’m going to go along with this?’
Joss looked up and held her gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable.
‘I think you already are.’
A shiver ran through her at the tone of his voice. So commanding. So sure of himself. So arrogant. She’d had no idea before this moment that that did something for her, but the heat between her legs and the tightness in her belly told her it definitely did.
‘If you were going to back out,’ he continued, ‘you would have done it back at the office. Or just told my father the truth on the spot. Why are we bothering to dance around this when we both know you’ve made up your mind?’
She fixed him with a stare and muttered an Arabic curse under her breath, trying not to show him how right she knew he was. Because she could have called a halt to this hours ago. The fact that she hadn’t told them both all they needed to know.
‘I’m doing it to make your father happy,’ she clarified, still holding that gaze, making sure Joss could see that she wasn’t backing down or giving in to him. She was making her own decisions for her own very good reasons.
‘I know.’ He nodded, taking a sip of his wine, breaking their eye contact and cutting into his chicken.
‘I mean it,’ he said, after he’d polished off half the plate. ‘I could get used to this.’
‘Good,’ she said, standing up and picking up her plate, suddenly losing her appetite. ‘You can get used to doing the washing up as well.’
Joss finished his food and followed her through to the little kitchen. ‘You think you’re going to scare me away with threats of stacking the dishwasher?’
She gestured around the bijou kitchen. ‘You see a dishwasher in here?’
He glanced around. ‘Fine. So we’ll get someone in. I’ll pay,’ he added when she started to shake her head.
‘It’s not about the money.’
‘What? It’s about me being willing to get my hands wet? Fine. But I’m not a martyr, Eva. If you’re hoping to scare me then I might as well tell you now that it’s not going to work.’
‘You don’t want to move in here. There’s no space.’
He leaned back against the kitchen counter, a hand either side of his hips. His man-spreading made his intentions clear. It would have been more subtle if he’d marked the doorframe with his scent.
‘I decide for myself what I do and don’t want, Eva. This is where you live, so it’s where I’ll live too. You’ve stated your ground rules; now I’m stating mine.’
She folded her arms and leant back against the kitchen counter. ‘There’s not even any space in the wardrobe.’
‘You can’t expect us to live apart.’
‘We’re going to see each other all the time at work. Isn’t moving in together a bit much?’
He took a step towards her, and Eva had to admit that his height was a little intimidating in the tiny kitchen.
‘And how many people are going to believe our story if we’re not living together?’
‘We could tell people we’re waiting until after the wedding.’
He shook his head and, much as she hated it, Eva knew he was right.
‘They’d ask us which century we’re living in. Perhaps if this was a real relationship we’d say to hell with what they think. But we need to make them believe us. I don’t want to give them any reason not to. I’ll start moving some stuff in on Monday.’
He moved to leave, and somehow, although it was what her rational brain wanted, it seemed her body wasn’t expecting it. Disappointment washed through her. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to living alone. She loved having her own space. But they’d been through a lot today, and she wasn’t particularly keen on being left alone with her thoughts.
‘Do you want a coffee before you go?’ she asked, flicking on the kettle behind her.
‘Sure,’ Joss said, watching her carefully. ‘Something wrong?’
‘No,’ she replied, rubbing her forehead and realising she wasn’t being very convincing. ‘Just a lot to take in. Weird day.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Joss said, leaning back on the counter.
Eva looked up and realised that it wasn’t a figure of speech.
‘No, no—it’s fine,’ she said.
‘I can listen. Even help.’
‘I can’t, Joss. He’s your dad. You don’t want to... It should be me asking if you’re okay.’
‘I don’t get an exclusive on it, Eva. I know you care for him too.’
‘I just can’t believe I didn’t know...you know.’
She made two coffees and carried them back through to the living room. Plonking them on the coffee table, she just had time to wish she had space for a bigger sofa before Joss appeared behind her.
‘Do you sit and spy on your neighbours?’ Joss asked, pointing out the way the sofa was angled towards the big picture window out onto the mews.
‘More like bask in the sun. I get enough gossip at work.’
He looked surprised.
‘What? Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed.’
He shook his head. ‘What do people gossip about?’
‘Oh, you know—the usual. Who’s sleeping with who. Who’s angling for a promotion. Who’s getting fired.’
‘So why don’t I hear any of this?’
Eva rolled her eyes. With all his expensive business education, did he seriously not understand how an office worked? She was clearly going to have to spell this out to him.
‘Of course you don’t hear the gossip,’ she said. ‘One, you’re practically the boss. No one gossips in front of the boss. Two, you’re hardly ever in the office. And three, you’re not exactly Mr Friendly over the coffee machine when you are there.’
‘People don’t think I’m friendly?’
‘I don’t think you’re friendly. I can’t speak for anyone else.’
He folded his arms and fixed her with a stern look. She was tempted to laugh.
‘What’s so unfriendly about me?’
Should she go for it? Unload all his faults? All the reasons she’d been telling herself for years why he was a million miles from boyfriend material.
Why not? Perhaps it would be the final straw in this idiotic deception.
‘Fine—if you want to hear it. You’re not exactly an open book, are you, Joss? You don’t talk to people unless it’s directly about the business.’
‘I don’t do small talk. There’s a difference.’
‘Right: the difference between being friendly and not friendly. It’s not a criticism. Just an observation.’
‘You think I should be friendlier?’
She sighed and shook her head. Seriously, this man’s emotional intelligence didn’t even register on the scale. ‘I didn’t say that. I don’t think you need to change. But just don’t be surprised if people don’t open up around you.’
‘Well, you don’t seem to be having a problem with that.’
She shrugged and gave a resigned laugh. ‘Proposing to a girl will have that effect. If you didn’t want to know, you shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Might as well know what people think of me. So—office gossip. Is there going to be a lot of it. About us?’
‘Are you kidding?’ She laughed properly, genuinely amused for the first time all day. ‘I’m going to be grilled like a fish about this on Monday morning.’
‘You could just not go in,’ Joss offered. ‘Take a few days off. Benefits of dating the boss.’
The smile dropped from her face as the insult hit. As if she could just not show up for work, with no notice, and it wouldn’t make a difference to anyone.
‘I think we need to get a couple of things straight, Joss. One—I work very hard with your father. My job is important, and I can’t just swan off because you say so. Unless you fancy handling his correspondence in Arabic, Italian and French on Monday morning, I’ll be at my desk as usual. Two—we are not now, nor will we ever be “dating”. If I’d wanted to date you, I’d have asked you out for dinner. I’m going along with your little charade because I care about your father. Don’t confuse the two.’
‘Would you?’ He leaned into the arm of the sofa with a smile that was verging dangerously on smug.
‘Would I what?’
‘Have asked me out for dinner?’
She sighed. Bloody man. ‘The key part of that sentence, Joss, was if. I’ve never asked you because I don’t want to date you.’
‘You know, you sound like you’ve given that quite a lot of thought. Should I be flattered?’
‘Honestly. Only a man with your ego could find a way to take that as a compliment. Listen to me carefully, Joss. I don’t want to date you. I don’t want to be engaged to you. I’m going along with it for now. But when the time comes we’ll both extract ourselves from this situation with as much dignity as we can muster and forget it ever happened.’
CHAPTER THREE (#u6d215726-b3e7-54f7-9cb3-434f15467240)
EVA SPENT THE weekend in a daze. The further she got from having seen Joss the more ridiculous the whole thing seemed. So when she pitched up at her desk at eight o’clock on Monday morning she was almost surprised to see him there waiting for her.
‘You’re in early,’ she commented, unwinding her scarf from around her neck and draping it over the coatstand. ‘Trying to impress somebody?’
‘I told you—my father wants to start handing things over today. I thought we’d need an early start.’
‘Well, we’ve both beaten the boss in.’ She glanced through the blinds to Edward’s darkened office beyond. ‘Did you see him at the weekend? How is he?’
‘He is marvellous, Eva, dear,’ Edward said, bowling up behind her. ‘Thank you for asking. And I was out of the city this weekend, so I’ve not seen anyone since I left the office on Friday. How about you two? I hope you did something nice with your weekend and didn’t spend it worrying about me.’
‘Dinner on Friday night,’ Joss supplied truthfully.
‘And Borough Market on Saturday,’ Eva added.
No need to mention that she’d gone alone. She disliked the taste of the half-lie in her mouth, but the smile on Edward’s face softened the blow.
‘And arriving together on Monday morning. Were you this indiscreet before or am I really getting old?’
‘Actually,’ Joss said, ‘we thought that now everyone will be finding out our news there’s no reason we can’t arrive together. In fact, I’ll be moving my things over to Eva’s place tonight.’
‘Well, that’s marvellous. Wish it had all worked like that when your mother and I were that age. Now, I’m glad I’ve found you two alone—I’ve been thinking, and there’s something I want to say to you. I don’t know what your plans are, but I don’t want you to rush them for me. I know my news has been upsetting, but I don’t want you hurrying anything up for my sake. Please?’
It was perfect, in a way, Eva realised. They wouldn’t have to find an excuse not to marry before he died.
‘But enough about that. I need the two of you in Milan as soon as you can get there. The store manager’s feeling jumpy, and we have a couple of major suppliers over there as well who would probably appreciate a visit. I need you to smooth things over. Let people see that you’re more than ready for the big job.’
Joss’s eyebrows drew together, and she knew he wasn’t happy at the implication that his employees didn’t trust him.
‘Dad, I met Matteo at the conference earlier in the year and it was all fine. The managers all know me. Surely you want me here? I’m not sure now’s the time for me to be travelling.’
‘Now’s the perfect time, son. We need to steady things. You’re going to have to visit all the flagship stores. The big suppliers too. They’re worried—it’s been a long time since this company faced big changes. This is part of your job now.’
‘But what if something happens here?’
Eva winced. She knew exactly what Joss meant.
‘What if I pop my clogs, you’re asking? It’s not going to happen overnight, son. We have some time. And I’d like to see the old girl looking straight before I go. I promise if anything changes you’ll be the first to know. If it helps you make your mind up, I’m not planning on hanging around London waiting to die. Some places I want to see before I go. But you two need to be on a plane before lunchtime, and I’ve got an inbox the size of Milan Cathedral to work through with Eva before you go.
* * *
Joss walked away, leaving Eva and his father huddled around his computer monitor. Eva was making notes on a pad and occasionally reaching across to touch the screen. It was clear to him how fond she was of his father, and how distressed at the news of his illness.
And now he’d told them that he didn’t want a hasty wedding. Yes, it got them out of having to take this charade too far, but Joss saw something else in it.
How much did his father know about his last marriage? About how he had felt rushed, unable to stop the oncoming commitment even after he’d realised it was a bad idea. More than he had let on at the time, it seemed.
He’d been rash and stupid announcing their non-existent engagement to Edward, and he supposed that he should be grateful that Eva had agreed to go along with it.
She’d told him that it was because she cared for the old man, and Joss didn’t doubt that. But that didn’t mean he believed she’d given him the whole story. There were things that she was hiding. Layers of secrets, he suspected, from the frequently veiled expressions that crossed her face. Well, he was going to find out what they were—they had hours of travelling ahead of them, and she couldn’t dodge his questions the whole way to Italy.
Or maybe he’d sleep instead of quizzing her, because that definitely hadn’t been happening enough since his father had dropped his bombshell. He’d have liked to say it was grief over his father’s illness that was causing his insomnia, but he knew that it was something else.
It was sleek chestnut hair and hazel eyes. The memory of a rose-pink slip under a serious navy dress. It was the thought of his holdall of clothes stashed in his office, destined for her flat just as soon as they got back from their trip. The thought of living in such close quarters with a woman he’d determinedly avoided since he’d noticed his attraction to her.
Back in his office, he dug out his toothbrush and a change of clothes from the holdall. If they weren’t on a plane until lunchtime, he knew that they’d need to stay over. With his dad sending him off in such a hurry, he guessed it wasn’t going to be a short meeting at the other end.
A noise caught his attention and he looked up to see Eva, stalled at the entrance of his office. He felt that familiar pull, the heat in his body he knew was inevitable when he was near her. Again he silently cursed whatever impulse it was that had made him lie to his father.
He felt a twist of pain in his belly. He knew how dangerous secrets could be—keeping his feelings bottled up had turned toxic before, and lying to his father felt unnatural now.
Intellectually, he understood the reasons he’d done it. Because he’d let his father down so many times over the years. He’d married his university girlfriend, a friend of the family, because she was ‘the right sort of girl’ from ‘the right sort of family’, and everyone had expected it to happen. He’d done what he’d thought was the right thing—stood up in front of their friends and their family and made the commitment that was expected from him, no matter how wrong it had felt inside.
As his depression had grown and his marriage had darkened, he’d ignored the problems. Blinkered himself against his wife’s pain and buried himself in his work rather than go back on his word and end a marriage that was never going to make either of them happy. Until she’d upped and left, and he’d seen the disappointment in his parents’ eyes that he had failed. Failed his wife. Failed both their families.
It had only been after the breakdown of his marriage that he’d realised he needed help. He’d gone weeks with barely a couple of hours’ sleep a night. Seen his weight drop and his appetite disappear. It had only been when he’d looked up his symptoms on the internet that he’d realised they were classic signs of depression.
As soon as he’d read that, everything had fallen into place—that was the dark tunnel that he’d found himself in as his personal life had hurtled towards marriage while he’d buried his head in the sand, concentrating on the business.
So he’d gone to his doctor, worked hard at therapy. Eaten and exercised well. Taken the meds he’d been prescribed. And he’d recovered from his illness with a clarity and a focus that he’d not felt in years.
He shouldn’t have been in that relationship to start with. He should have called it off as soon as he’d had doubts—before his illness had blinkered his vision and left him feeling that he didn’t have a way out.
His parents had hinted over the years since his divorce that he should start seeing someone else, get back out there. But he knew he didn’t want to be a bad husband, a bad partner, again. He couldn’t risk doing that to someone else.
But he also knew that his father wanted to see him settled and happy—that was what had made it so easy for those words to slip out of his lips in the heat of the moment. And it was what made him burn with guilt now, knowing that he was misleading him. He suspected his father felt partially responsible for Joss feeling he had to go along with family expectations. If this lie made Joss feel uncomfortable, it would be worth it if it meant that his father could let his guilt rest before he died.
The recent spate of sleepless nights was a worry, though. It was years since he’d felt this drag of fatigue, and it reminded him of a time in his life he had absolutely no wish to revisit. This time it carried with it an extra shade of dread. He didn’t want to be ill again. Didn’t want his world to shrink and pale as he fought with his own brain chemistry to feel even the smallest amount of hope.
And right there was another good reason not to listen to the pull of his body when Eva was near. No. They had to keep real life, real feelings, and their charade separate. Regardless of how attracted they were to each other.
He considered his own thoughts. Was he right? Was she attracted to him as he was to her?
‘Hey, come in,’ he said, remembering that she was still standing, watching him from the doorway.
She shut the door behind her and Joss shifted in his chair at the sudden charge in the room that their isolation created.
‘How’s Dad getting on?’ Talking about his father seemed like the safest option.
‘He’s great. Same as always. If he hadn’t told us, I still wouldn’t know there was anything wrong. Says he’s looking forward to some more time out of the city. You?’
‘I’m good. Could do without this trip, if I’m being honest.’
‘Yeah.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Your dad’s asked me to book us a room. Said he thought the meetings might go on a bit. I need to go home and pack a bag, so I’ll just meet you at the airport.’
‘It’s easier if I come with,’ Joss said, leaning back in his chair. ‘You’re only around the corner. We’ll get a cab from there. It means I can drop my stuff off too.’
‘You brought it to the office?’ Eva looked horrified.
‘What? Are you still worried about the gossip?’
‘It’s easy for you to joke about it. You’ve not been grilled about our grand romance every time you’ve so much as looked at the coffee machine.’
‘I’m sorry you’re getting the brunt of it. Do you want me to say something?’
She sighed and shook her head. ‘What? A formal announcement about our fake relationship? A little weird, Joss.’
‘Fine. Well, we’ll be out of here in an hour. Think the news has reached the Milan store already?’
‘Oh, I can guarantee it’ll travel faster than we do.’
* * *
As the plane lifted from the runway Joss itched to reach into his bag for his laptop, hoping to relax in the familiarity of a working journey. He’d travelled between stores more times than he could count, and he knew he could get plenty of work done before their meeting. Plus staring at the screen of his computer was safer than glancing across at the woman sitting beside him.
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Ellie Darkins
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From assistant to fiancée!Joss Dawson knows the one thing that will make his dying father happy is to see his son find love…the problem is, he′s sworn off love forever!But the answer′s simple! Asking his father′s fiercely intelligent, beautiful assistant Eva to play the perfect role – his fiancée. Only for Eva it′s not that easy…Pretending to be Joss′s fiancée threatens to ruin the life she′s worked so hard for! And how will she keep her head when she′s losing her heart to her frustratingly attractive new boss?