Dinner with Bettina Lynhurst? As what, a couple?
“Uh...it’s not hard. No. See? Easy.” Jason glared at her so hotly she shoved the door wide. “You better come in.”
How had everything become so complicated?
He brushed past her as if she wasn’t even standing there and flung open the closet to sift through her clothes. “Where’s that gold top I brought you? Bettina likes it. You should wear it with the white cropped pants and your Stuart Weitzman sandals.”
She put a palm on his arm to still his near-frantic rooting through her stuff. “As sexy as it is for a guy to expend so much effort to put clothes on me, chill out for a second. I don’t want to go to dinner with your mom, like we’re a happily married couple. There’s no point in it. We’re about to sign divorce papers. I’m going back to Houston.”
“About that.” He turned to face her and in the close confines of the closet, the smell of his soap and his skin melded into something wholly Jason and wholly delicious.
She didn’t want to notice the way he smelled, not with the calculating glint she caught in his gaze. “What about it? Don’t you dare tell me I have more stuff to do before you divorce me after all. If the secret is out, my job is over. I’m not of any use to you any longer.”
“Not true. I can’t divorce you. Not yet.”
She shook her head before he’d stopped talking. “You have to. It’s over. Avery messed up your plans, and while I’m sad I don’t get to tell her off, what else can I do here?”
“Bettina likes that I’m married. She actually said she can consider retiring now and would gladly turn over the reins to me since I’ve settled down.” In a totally surprising move, he took her hand and curled her fingers around his, as if they often held hands while talking. “Avery’s plan, whatever it was, backfired. Don’t you see?”
It dawned on her, though how her brain still functioned with Jason’s fingers brushing hers was mystifying. “You mean she did it to make you look bad. She thought Bettina would take it as an act of irresponsibility.”
“Exactly. But she didn’t. The opposite, in fact.”
The unsettled feeling in her stomach turned into one big knot of foreboding as she connected the dots. “Let me get this straight. Your mom is all set to retire and name you as the new Lyn CEO because you got married. So you’re not going to sign the divorce papers. Because it benefits you to stay married.”
“In a nutshell.” He dropped her hand. “I’m asking you to be my wife, out in the open. We’ll make an announcement and everything, and you’ll move into my condo. Once Bettina follows through with handing me the CEO job, then I’ll divorce you.”
“No. No way.” She couldn’t spit it out fast enough, especially since her heart was screaming “Yes, yes, yes” to being Jason’s wife for real, for as long as it lasted. “Not for anything could you convince me this is a good idea.”
It was too open-ended, too real, too rife with possibilities for her to get used to the arrangement, and then where would she be? Trying to forget Jason after a whole new level of intimacy.
He smiled and it did dangerous things to her pulse. “I’ll give you whatever amount of money you were going to get as a loan from your father. Name it.”
She didn’t hesitate. “A hundred thousand dollars.”
“Done. And now you don’t have to tell your family that you messed up in Vegas. Think about it. No loan. All you have to do is fake this marriage well enough so my mother feels warm and squishy about retiring.”
Crap. She’d thought he’d say no to such an outrageous sum and now she was stuck. “I can’t... You want me to live with you? What are you saying, that we’ll sleep in the same bed and stuff? Pretend we’re in love?”
Her throat tightened. How long could she keep that up before it became a reality?
Forever. She’d have to keep it up forever because she was not falling in love with Jason. It was too dangerous.
“No to the first, yes to the second. I have a spare room.”
“Of course. Sleeping with your wife is way over the line.” She hadn’t meant for that to come out so sarcastically.
Was she actually disappointed that he wasn’t using their marriage as an excuse to play husband and wife to the fullest? Separate bedrooms actually made a sick sort of sense. It was tawdry to trade sex for a hundred thousand dollars and she’d deck him if he had suggested it.
But what if he’d suggested something totally different? Like the two of them having some kind of normal relationship full of making love and fun and togetherness. Falling asleep wrapped in each other’s arms and sharing secrets in the dark. That she would have agreed to in a heartbeat because it meant he felt all the same confusing, scary things she felt.