Marry Me Now: An Arranged Marriage Collection

“Of course.” My smile widens. “Thank you so much for all your hard work, Tony.” I hang up and call through the open door. “You’re welcome.”

Luke winks. “You’re an angel, Celia.”

An angel. My heart skips a beat. I file that away, into the mental file filled with every compliment Luke has paid me in the past year. Ever since I got promoted out of the general secretarial pool and into my position as head assistant for Luke Rossfield, President and CEO. Billionaire genius inventor.

Hottest man I’ve ever met.

The office is small, practically start-up sized, which means, in about thirty minutes when everyone starts to file out for lunch, it’s not long before I’m left solo at my desk. Luke has a 12:30 lunch meeting that will run overtime, I’m sure. It always does when he meets with this particular investor. The rest of our staff tend to take long lunches on Thursdays, and they’ll be especially long today, on the first sunny Thursday of spring. This weekend is a long weekend too. Extra motivation for everybody to take a long lunch.

My hands move as if they have a will of their own. I open a website and follow my history trail through to one of the most frequently visited sites on my computer, as embarrassing as it is to admit. It’s a “reality fanfiction” forum, mostly filled with people’s fantasies about NFL players or rock stars or even particularly sexy bartenders they’ve run across in real life. Those are the rules. You can contribute any sexy story you want, but they have to be about a real person—fake name used to disguise them, of course.

It’s the first and only place I’ve ever confessed my feelings for Luke.

It started out so innocently. Just a couple of fantasies late at night when I had trouble falling asleep, early on after my promotion. I swear it’s because we’d spend such late hours together at the office; I wouldn’t be able to hear anything but his voice by the time I got home, or picture anything but his sexy exasperated smirk, as we discussed one issue or another.

Then it progressed to imagining what I wish would happen in those office after-hours meetings. I’d picture him shutting the office door behind me and instead of starting to complain about regulatory guidelines, he’d pin me against the door and kiss me, telling me he just can’t keep his hands off me for one second longer.

Eventually, I started to write out some of the fantasies. Just a couple of them. Just for myself.

Then I found this site, and posted one of them, only to suddenly gain an enormous following. Now I have readers begging for another installment.

I have other readers begging me to just make a move already.

If this Liam—that’s my pseudonym for Luke online, to protect his real identity—is anywhere near as hot as you say, girl, you need to get on that before somebody else does. That’s the most recent comment on the story I posted a few days ago.

I do another quick check around the office and scroll back up to the top, to reread what I wrote.

“Cecily.” Liam reaches up to tuck a single strand of hair behind my ear. But his hand lingers on my cheek, for just a beat too long, his gaze fixed on me. “How long has it been?” he asks, his voice a low murmur.

Behind us, I’m all too aware of the empty floor, our colleagues long since checked out for the night. The lights are out, everywhere but here in his office, where he has a single lamp burning beside his desk. It’s not much illumination. Just enough for me to make out the searing heat in his eyes. “A year,” I say.

“A year of working with you.” His hand slides down my cheek to cup the back of my neck. He tugs me closer, and I can’t help it. I step toward him, my hands sliding up to rest against his chest. I savor the warmth of his body, the feel of his muscles underneath my fingertips. “A year of torture.”

My lips part in surprise. I start to step back, hurt, but his other hand slides around my waist and holds me close. Pins me against him, until my supple body melts into his muscular one.

“Because I haven’t been able to touch you, Cecily. I haven’t been able to tell you how I really feel…”

My head tips back, my eyes fixed on his. “Liam, we can’t. There are rules—”

“Fuck the rules.” He kisses me, and it’s everything I’ve ever wanted. His mouth is soft and sweet and tastes faintly of smoke, just like the cologne he wears. He spins me around, and my back bumps up against the desk. Then he’s lifting me onto the edge of it, the wood digging into my thighs, as his hands slide down my waist to the bottom of my skirt. It’s office appropriate attire, but the second he gets his hands on it, it no longer feels like it. He hikes the skirt up my thighs, and slides a warm hand between my legs, caressing the sensitive skin in a way that makes me shiver from the top of my head all the way to my toes.

“Cecily,” he whispers again, against my mouth. “I want you so fucking badly I can hardly stand it. Every single day we’re in this office together—”

“Celia?”

I jump so badly I nearly spill my coffee all over my desk. I slap the button to darken my desk monitor and leap to my feet all in one motion, heart in my throat. “Luke! I thought you left for your 12:30 already.” I plaster on a huge, fake smile, and pray he doesn’t read too much into my flushed cheeks. I wonder if he can hear my heart pounding. It’s deafening to me. If he can’t, it’s a miracle.

“Sorry.” He’s grinning, amused. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t,” I lie. God, I’m a terrible liar.

He glances away from me, and nods at the monitor. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your, ah… alone time.”

Alone time. Did he see my screen? Oh, god, did he guess what I was doing? “I just didn’t hear you coming. Did you need something?” Deflect, deflect. Anything to keep him from asking too many questions about why I just panicked and turned off my computer screen.

“Actually, yes.” He nods past me toward his office. “It’s a bit… sensitive, though. Could we talk in private?” He doesn’t wait for my response, just strides past me into the office.

I cast another panicked glance around the floor, but there’s nobody else here, no one who can spare me from this. My heart sinks. Luke never asks me to speak in private, much less about sensitive issues. He’s normally an out in the open kind of boss. The only time he shuts his door is if he needs to tell someone they’ve done something wrong.

Which means this is it. He knows I’ve been writing dirty fantasies about him. He caught me reading them at work—what was I thinking? —and he’s about to tell me he needs to move me to another department.

Heart in my throat, I step into his office. The second I shut the door behind me, Luke gestures to the chair across from him. Oh no. Worse and worse. We don’t normally stand on ceremony, not between us. If he wants me to sit, it must be bad news.

I perch on the edge of the chair, too nervous to sit back or relax. “What is it?” I ask, eager to get it over with. I’ve never liked waiting, especially for bad news. I’d rather just rip this band aid off straight away.

But Luke leans back in his chair and considers me for a long moment. Dragging it out. His gaze drifts past me to the windows and back again, like he’s double-checking that we’re alone. Finally, he sighs. “There’s no easy way to say this, Celia.”

I clench my fists in my lap and resist the urge to shut my eyes, to brace for the blow.

“Will you be my wife?”

2

My jaw drops. I feel like the floor is tipping out from under me. Like I’ve just fallen headfirst out of reality and into a daydream.

But then Luke catches my expression and adds quickly, “Pretend to be, I mean. Only for the weekend.”

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I’m pretty sure my face is bright red, and hot enough to light a cigarette off of. “Um… what?”

He laughs softly. “It’s stupid, I know. It’s just, I have this weekend trip planned with my friend Paul and his fiancée, out at the DelMonte—”

“That new hotel with the five-sta

r chef that everyone’s been talking about?” I interrupt.

“Out on the shore, yes, that one.” He smiles. “Anyway, my friend and I had a bet going, a few years ago, about who would get married first. He kept insisting it would be him, because I’m married to my job.”

I blink and bite back my instinctive response, which is Aren’t you? I can’t help but think about the fact that, in one whole year of working directly with Luke, day in and day out, I have never seen any evidence of him dating. And I handle just about everything for him, all the way down to scheduling his barber shop visits and sending out his dry cleaning. If there were girls in the picture, I’d have seen evidence of it by now.