* * *
His words appeared to strike Molly like an electric shock, and Julian wondered if that was a good thing, a bad thing or totally irrelevant to his newly hatched plan.
“Excuse me?” She jerked upright on his couch and gripped the leather cushions with such force that it looked as if she was on a roller-coaster ride. “I’m sure I heard wrong. Did you just offer to be my boyfriend or something?”
“Or something,” Julian agreed, his lips curling upward.
He knew he looked calm. Collected. But inside his head, the wheels were turning with particularly inspiring ideas. Ideas he might later regret. But they were still damned good.
“Wh-what do you mean ‘or something’?” she asked him.
Julian could hardly get over how adorable she looked sitting there, shocked and disbelieving as if she’d just won the Megabucks.
Her eyes were just so wide and so damned blue you’d have to be made of freaking stone not to be willing to move mountains for her. Honestly, he’d never seen such expressive, genuinely innocent eyes in his life. It was a guarantee that Molly would lose every poker game she ever played, her expressions were so real and so clear. Hell, just the way she looked at him with those eyes made him feel like some sort of superhero. Not even his own mother gazed at him like Molly did.
With an amused smile, one he sometimes found himself wearing when he was with her, he explained, “‘Or something’ means I don’t have girlfriends, Molly. I have lovers. And I’d be happy to pretend to be yours.”
He’d meant to emphasize the word pretend, but somehow when he spoke, the only word he seemed to be able to emphasize was yours.
Because obviously he would only ever do this kind of stuff for Molly.
“You’re kidding me, Jules,” she said as she somberly scanned his face. She was not even moving, had practically become a statue on the couch.
He might have laughed at that, except to his own disbelief and amazement, he was dead serious. Dead. As heck. Serious. And now he needed to know if she was, too. “I may like to kid around, Molls, but I wouldn’t kid you with this.”
“So you’re prepared to pretend to be in love with me?”
He nodded, and his hands itched to wipe away a green smudge of paint from her forehead and a red one from her cheek. “I figure I’ve probably done worse, Moo. Like that girl who just left…not really prime in the head, if you get me.”
He tapped his forehead, but she wasn’t even paying attention.
As though in a trance, Molly rose to her feet, all five feet of chaotic red hair and heavy turquoise necklaces and creamy paint-streaked skin, her eyes shining as his proposal finally seemed to dawn on her. “And Garrett will see us together and be madly jealous! Oh, my God, yes, yes, this is brilliant, Julian! How long do you think it will take to get him to realize he loves me? A couple of days? A week?”
Julian stared at her in silence. She really sounded…enamored. Didn’t she?
He thought about it for a bit, and with each passing second, he grew more and more baffled. Suddenly all he wanted was for somebody to please tell him what in the hell was going on here. Was this some sort of lame-ass joke? Molly? Dreaming about his older brother? For real?
If the ten-year age difference wasn’t an issue, the fact that the Gages had grown up with strict codes of conduct regarding the Devaney girls should matter. And tons. Especially to Garrett, who never, ever broke a rule. Had his brother done something to give Molly the impression of being interested?
Dammit, this just struck him as so, so wrong, he didn’t even know where to begin.
His brother Garrett was ridiculously overprotective of the Devaney girls. The reason they’d become orphans in the first place was because their only living parent, who had been the Gages’ bodyguard, had died in the line of duty protecting Julian’s father and Garrett from an armed gang hired by the Mexican mafia to murder Julian’s father for newspaper coverage disclosing their names and operations. But the Gages’ bodyguard had died protecting Garrett, too. Though the gang members had been sentenced to life in prison, as the lone survivor of that bloody night two decades ago, Garrett had been sentenced to a life in hell.
Now he lived with a boatload of guilt and regret. When their widowed mother had taken the girls under their wing, Garrett had been rabid to protect them, even, apparently, from Julian—who had liked to tickle the hell out of Molly and make her giggle… Well, Garrett had always ridden Julian’s goddamn back about the rules where the Devaney sisters were concerned. This annoyed not only Julian but also Molly—who loved being tickled by him.
So now, after Molly had complained a thousand times that Garrett never let Julian and her have any fun, it was damned hard to believe that she suddenly had the hots for Garrett.
What in the hell was that about?
Julian and Molly were friends. Honest-to-God, die-for-you, chase-a-killer-for-you and do-all-kinds-of-strange-stuff-for-you friends.
Julian was Molly’s one, two and three on her freaking speed dial. The first number was for his office, the second for his cell phone and the third for his home. Molly even frequently admitted that their friendship was better than a romantic relationship, and it sure as hell had lasted longer than any marriage these days.
But after hearing her profess her love for Garrett several times today, Julian had realized that if she was serious—and apparently she was—he would have to help her.
He was going to “help” her realize that she was not in love with Garrett Gage. Period.
“I think we can get Garrett where we want him in about a month,” he finally assured her, gazing deeply into her eyes in an attempt to gauge how deeply in love she believed herself to be. Knowing what a romantic Molly was, he actually dreaded the answer.