Fake Marriage Box Set

Janice came back into the kitchen, looking uncertain.

“Who was it?” I asked. “Let me guess: it's a critical election year, and they want to have accurate polls of the area to pass on to my representative. Or else, I will absolutely die if I don't buy the latest in drone technology, or potato-peeling technology, or whatever the latest 'inventor' has thought up.”

“Actually, you may want to answer this one,” Janice said, looking and sounding almost as though she'd seen a ghost.

I frowned and closed my laptop, giving her my full attention. “Is something wrong? What have the neighbors done now?”

“It's not the neighbors,” Janice said, shaking her head. “You'd really better answer this one for yourself.”

“I'm in my sweatpants,” I pointed out. “I'm not even wearing a shirt yet.”

“I'll get you a shirt,” Janice said. “I just folded a load of laundry, but I was waiting until after I mopped the floors to bring it upstairs so that then I could get to work on dusting the upper floor.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, holding up my hands and wondering why she was so insistent about it. I wondered if whoever it was had given her lip when she'd tried to shoo them away. If they had, I was going to have to have a serious word with them. Janice might only be my maid, but I looked out for my loyal workers.

I grabbed a shirt off the aforementioned stack on top of the dryer and pulled it over my head, running a hand through my hair to get it back to some semblance of normal. Then, I went out to the front hall.

Standing there in the doorway was none other than Lexi. It had been a few years since I'd last seen her, and there were a few wrinkles around her eyes which hadn't been there before. She was thinner, too. Almost gaunt, even. But she looked just as beautiful as ever, despite the fact that she was dressed in paint-stained jeans and an oversized sweater, with her dark hair pulled up in a messy ponytail.

It was honestly strange that I still remembered her name and was able to recognize her. I must have slept with a hundred other women in the intervening years, and yet, she was the one that I couldn't seem able to get out of my mind. Not that I'd ever admit that to anyone, and especially not to her.

I cocked my head to the side, wondering what she was doing there. In Hollywood movies, you always saw those one-night stands coming back years later to confess their undying love or other ludicrous things like that. But Lexi hadn't struck me as the kind of woman prone to displays like that. The other thing Hollywood had taught me that she might come looking for was money. She'd threaten to blackmail me or something like that. But what was she going to do? She didn't have anything on me.

Maybe she wanted me to get her a job with Orinoco. The company was still surging further and further ahead of its competitors. We had to be doing better than whatever company she was working for.

I tried to remember what company it had been that she was working for when we had met, but the name escaped me. It had been too many years and too many other takeovers since then, and one company tended to blend into another.

I didn't dwell on how strange it was that I remembered her name and couldn't remember the name of the company that we'd almost bought.

Whatever she was doing there, I wasn't about to help her. I wasn't running a charity business. If she wanted a position with Orinoco, she would have to apply, the same as anyone else. I wasn't about to give her preferential treatment just because we'd spent one night, albeit a great night, together. Nepotism was no way to run a business.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, but even as I was asking it, my eyes fell on the small girl at her side.

The girl was young, maybe two or three, and she was clinging to Lexi's hand, her eyes wide and worried. As my gaze fixed on her, she bit her lower lip, and I could tell that she wanted to duck behind her mother's legs. But she was a brave little thing, and she didn't move except to shuffle her feet a little.

Was this Lexi's daughter? Was that why she had suddenly turned up on my doorstep, because she wanted to blackmail me into helping out with this kid? She must be really desperate, to turn to a one-night stand for help.

But the kid didn't look very much like Lexi. In fact, if I had to point to someone that she looked like, the girl looked very much like Katherine had at her age. If someone had taken a picture of the kid and put it up on my mantle next to the similar pictures of Katherine and I around that young age, I wouldn't have even noticed anything out of place.

My eyes darted back to Lexi's, even though I already knew what she was about to say. Lexi scooped up the girl, holding her in her arms, and I could see that the young mom's eyes were brimming with tears.

“Andrew?” she asked, her voice hoarse. “This is Emma. She's your daughter. Our daughter.”

With all the women that I'd slept with over the years, I had known, somewhere, that I must have gotten at least one of those women pregnant, statistically speaking. But to find out that I had a young daughter? That was another thing entirely. I stared at the pair of them, absolutely stunned.

Then, I gathered my wits and took a step back, holding the door open. “I think you'd better come inside.”

Chapter Nine

Lexi

We had hardly crossed the threshold before Emma was whining, “Mama, I'm hungry.”

I gave her a distracted smile, hardly able to draw my eyes away from Andrew, who looked somehow even better than he had the last time that I'd seen him. “Emma, remember, we said we were going to go have a picnic after we had our meeting with the nice man here.”

Emma folded her arms across her chest, pouting. From the way her lower lip wobbled, I could tell that we were minutes away from waterworks. If that.

I wished I had a granola bar or something else in my purse that I could give her, but I hadn't been able to afford granola bars or other snacks in ages now. I felt a stab of guilt and looked towards Andrew, wondering what he was making of all of this. He was as stoic as ever, though, with his arms folded across his own chest in a pose that mirrored Emma's.