The Boyfriend Arrangement

She unrolled the bundle, looking over the neatly organized pieces of jewelry in the different pockets. A few looked like nice costume jewelry, but in one pouch she pulled out a pair of diamond stud earrings that were at least one carat each. She slipped them into her purse, following with a necklace with a fat, pear-shaped sapphire pendant. Last, she pocketed a diamond-and-ruby tennis bracelet and an aquamarine-and-diamond cocktail ring. All nice, but somehow she’d expected more from Harper. Maybe she’d left her pricier pieces at home this trip.

In the other piece of luggage, Sebastian’s she assumed, she found a fancy pair of gold-and-emerald cufflinks in a velvet box and an old pocket watch. She wasn’t a jeweler, but she knew enough to estimate that she’d made up for a good chunk of the money Harper had shorted her. It was a start, at least. She’d have a jeweler back in the States appraise her haul later.

Harper seemed to think there was no way she could come up with the money, but she just wasn’t putting her mind to it. Just flipping through the clothes in the closet, she spied a couple designer pieces that would fetch a pretty penny on Poshmark. The Hermès Birkin purse she was carrying the other day would, too. There was a waiting list to get one of those bags. Even the case she kept her jewelry in was worth at least a couple hundred dollars.

Harper had a lot of expensive things. There wasn’t a single designer piece in her own closet, but then again, she wasn’t pretending to be rich. Having these things was all part of Harper’s ruse. Of course, if she could get her hands on stuff this nice just to fake out her friends and family, she could get the money, too.

Part of her wanted to blow the top off Harper’s whole lie just to expose how shallow she was. What a horrible thing it was to be poor! She was just trying to make it by until that next big payment from granddad, then everything would be okay again. In their lifetimes, most people would never see the amount of money she’d already blown, never mind what she was set to inherit later.

There were worse things than being poor in this world. Perhaps being shallow? Being a liar? Maybe even a thief? She laughed at that thought. She didn’t look at this as theft. She was just an instrument of karma in this scenario. If she got a tiny piece of the pie in the process, that was just a bonus.

She turned around and looked at the tidy, elegant room. Housekeeping had already come for the morning and left chocolates on the pillows. It hadn’t been a part of her original plan, but she decided on the spot that it could use a little redecorating. Just to make the place look lived in, of course.

When she was out of breath and the room looked like it had been hit by a tornado, she took the white envelope out of her pocket and left it on the nightstand.

She had officially turned up the heat on Miss Drake.

* * *

They’d spent a long afternoon touring the Irish countryside and Sebastian had enjoyed it. It was a quiet, peaceful country to just sit and soak in the atmosphere. A good choice for a vacation location and he was sure his doctor would approve. Outside Dublin, most of the towns were small and laid back. No honking taxis and aggressive panhandlers. Just old historic sites and friendly people, all with stories to tell.

Despite the peaceful scenery, having Harper in the seat beside him on the bus had the opposite effect. The nearness of her kept his pulse fairly high. Every now and then he would get a whiff of her perfume. She would lean in to him to say something, touch his knee and playfully kiss him. At this point, the lines of their relationship were so blurry, he didn’t know if she was really kissing him or if it was all for show. Though if people were suspicious of their relationship, it was a little too late to care. The wedding was tomorrow. They would be back in the US before long.

So did she mean it?

Sebastian tried not to overthink it. Instead he turned back to his notebook and worked on a sketch he’d started at the abbey. It seemed an odd place to get inspiration for medical equipment, but there had been a statue in the museum that was wearing some kind of armor. The shape of how it fit to the knight’s leg had got him to thinking about prosthetic and robotic legs in a whole new way. That was all it had taken for him to lose all interest in old churches and to turn his focus back to work.

“You’re not even listening,” he heard Harper say.

Snapping out of the zone, Sebastian looked up. “What?”

“You’re a million miles away. Did you hear a word I said?”

He shook his head sheepishly. “I didn’t. I was focused on my work.”

“I thought so. What is that?”

He sighed and looked at the rough sketch. It would take a lot of refinement for the doodle to become a cutting-edge piece of equipment, but it was a start. “One day, it may be BioTech’s latest design for a robotic prosthetic. This one is for the leg.”

She looked at the sketch thoughtfully. “Is that the kind of thing you usually work on?”

He shrugged. “It varies. Our very first product, the one that put us up with the big boys, was a prosthetic arm. Looking back at it now, it seems like such a crude design, but it changed everything for patients at the time. Lately we’ve been using 3D printing to develop custom fits for patients. Insurance wouldn’t pay for something like that, so most people couldn’t afford a customized fit until now. That’s made a huge difference in comfort for people who’ve lost limbs.”

“Do you work a lot with soldiers?”

“Yes. We also work with accident victims or people born with various birth defects. That’s only part of what we do there. My latest project is for paraplegics. If I can get a successful prototype finished—one that can be produced affordably enough—it could change the lives of thousands of people that are wheelchair bound. This sketch is part of that.”

There was a long silence and when Sebastian turned to look at Harper, he realized she was staring at him, not his sketches. “What?” he asked.

She smiled and reached out to brush a chunk of dark hair from his eyes. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Like how?” He looked down to take inventory of himself self-consciously.

“I’ve never experienced your passion for your work. I guess I thought you were just another guy making a buck on medical research, but you really seem to care about what you’re doing. Your work is amazing.”

“Thank you,” he responded awkwardly.

It always made him uncomfortable when people gushed at him about his research. He didn’t do it for the feel-good factor. He did it for people like his brother who faced a lifetime lived with physical limitations. If he could finish the exo-legs, it meant he would have accomplished his biggest dream. Seeing his older brother walk again would mean he’d finally succeeded. The money, the success, the praise...it was all nice, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to see the look on his mother’s face when she saw her oldest son walk across the room unassisted. To him, that was worth sacrificing most of his life. Unfortunately he’d pushed too far and almost sacrificed all of it.