Possessive Fake Husband

“Sorry to hear that.” He frowns at me. “For what it’s worth, it sounds like he meant well.”

“He did,” I say. “Just went about it wrong. We’re good now though. Just back then, it was tough. He wasn’t happy when I went to college, I think he thought I was going right into the family business.”

“Ah.” He laughs. “I can empathize, although I had the opposite problem. I wanted to go into the family business right from high school and my dad said he wouldn’t hire a guy without a college degree normally, so why would he do it for me?”

I laugh and shake my head. “Harsh.”

“Yep. That was my dad.”

“Were you two close?”

“Sometimes,” he says as we moved on to the next car. “He was a good dad, really engaged with what I did, but he worked long hours. I didn’t see a lot of him growing up.”

“Really the opposite of my experience then.”

He laughs. “Exactly.”

“Did you always know you’d take over the company when your father passed?” I ask.

“No, that was a surprise, actually,” he admits. “There were other names floated around, but my father specified it in the will and the board just sort of… accepted it. I think the board decided they were getting out the moment my dad passed.”

I shake my head. “God, what assholes.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I can’t blame them. My father was the real power behind Cork from the start, I mean, when he took it over, he turned it into something much bigger than it ever could’ve been on its own. When he died, they probably felt that Cork was effectively over.”

“But then you came along.”

“I’ve been able to keep the ship going for a little bit, but this whole merger thing is really a last-ditch effort to keep it all alive.”

I bite my lip and look at him. “You really love the company, don’t you?”

“It’s my family,” he says, shrugging. “I have to keep it alive if I can. I mean, my father made it better than it was, so what will I be if I can’t do the same?”

I pause for a second and watch him work. His muscular arms rub the sponge along the side of the black sedan. His shirt is wet all along the chest and I have to admit, he has an incredible body. I admire him for a long moment before shaking my sponge at him.

Sudsy water hits him and he looks up at me. “You don’t want to start a water fight,” he says. “You’ll end up losing.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe even losing would mean I’d win.”

He laughs. “You got a bikini on under that shirt? That’s the only thing that’ll make this any better.”

“Unfortunately for you.” I tilt my head and squeeze some water out on the hood. “Did you ever consider just… letting the company die?”

He goes quiet for a second, watching me. His eyes stare down at my body then back up to my face and he shakes his head once.

“No,” he says.

“You could, you know. Nobody would blame you. They’d blame the markets, the changing times, all that. You could just cash out like the rest of the board.”

“And where would that leave you?”

I shrug. “Divorced. With a dick ex-husband.”

He smiles but doesn’t laugh. “No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s what I like about you.”

We lapse into silent cleaning again. We fall into a rhythm, moving from one car to the next. I count twenty, thirty, forty cars. We hit fifty, take a short break, and get at it again.

We don’t talk. We barely look at each other. My arms hurt, my feet hurt, my back hurts. We just keep going, keep cleaning.

He sprays the car and wipes it down. We finish number sixty-seven before he looks up at me as we move on to another red sports cars, this one squat and strange-looking with wide doors and sweeping angles, probably some kind of weird European prototype.

“Why do you think our dads hated each other?” he asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know. Business, I guess.”

“It can’t just be that,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I mean, there are other competitors in this business, right? Big and little. We compete with them all. But my dad really only hated your dad, as far as I can tell.”

“You think it’s personal,” I say.

“I really do.”

“Huh.” I frown a little. “I never thought about it.”

“You should ask him, next time you’re together.”

“I will. I mean, I guess I’d like to know, too. It just seems so strange. I’ve never known my dad to hate anyone really.”

“My dad was tough, he was mean sometimes, but I don’t think he ever hated someone like he hated your dad.”

We lapse into silence again. I keep looking at my husband, keep wondering what we’re doing right now. If our fathers hated each other so much, and his board hates my father just as much, then it seems like what we’re doing is doomed to failure.