About Last Night
Not a lot. More than he had in the bank, but only because he’d used his savings to purchase the building in Greenwich last year, thinking it made more sense to own the property and rent out the other flat than to become a tenant himself. He couldn’t give her fifty thousand pounds, but he could get it for her. His father would write a fifty-thousand-pound check to the V&A if Nev asked him to. Or, rather, he would if Mother didn’t stop him.
Unfortunately, Evita wasn’t in the mood to do her second-born any favors just now. Not until he brought home an appropriate fiancée for her to coo over.
He sipped his whiskey, thinking. When Judith had said, You should hit him up for a donation, he’d thought she was joking. She hadn’t been joking.
Cath would never do it, though. She didn’t want his money. She needed it, but she didn’t want it.
The question was, how could he get her to take it? If he simply handed her a check for fifty thousand pounds, she’d tear it up. She insisted on paying her share of everything, leaving neat stacks of pound coins on his kitchen table whenever they split a take-away meal. She’d only accept small gifts from him. It was important to her that their relationship be reciprocal. If she were to take fifty thousand pounds from him, it would only be because she thought she’d given him something of equal value.
Cath needed money. He needed a fiancée.
Actually, no. He needed a wife.
“What are you smiling about?” she asked, slightly grumpy.
He studied her from across the table. The blue light of the bar turned her top purple and cast an otherworldly glow over her pale skin. She was a faerie woman,
small and lovely and full of terrible power beyond his ken. He’d been wanting to buy her dinner for weeks, needing to declare to the world at large that this woman belonged to him. He was crazy about her. And he wanted, of all things, to take her home and introduce her to his parents.
It was mad. Mother would dislike her on sight. Worse, she’d make the weekend difficult for Cath, who would in turn hate everything about Leyton. Nor would Cath appreciate the deception, though Mother and Winston absolutely deserved it.
Utterly mad. But there was brilliance to the idea, as well. Because if he pulled it off, he’d manage to help Cath while sending a long-overdue message to his mother that he no longer intended to play along with her schemes.
Whether or not he could pull it off remained an open question. He looked Cath over, head to toe. Her short black skirt. Shiny heels. Her blouse, red as a phone box and sexy as hell. She wouldn’t do at all. But he could fix that.
“Do you trust me, love?”
She hesitated a great deal longer than he’d have liked, but she gave him the answer he’d hoped for. “Yes.”
“Excellent. Because I need a favor.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Tell me again why I’m doing this.”
Nev was driving them along the A25 toward Hertfordshire. She hadn’t even known he had a car. Though of course he did, and of course it was elegant and understated, and he drove it with cool self-assurance. That was Nev—confident, competent, and crisp as a fall apple.
She, on the other hand, was freaking out.
“It’s going to be fine, Cath. Relax.” He dropped his hand to her thigh and squeezed it through the fabric of her dress. Her very expensive brown raw-silk sheath dress that would be terribly wrinkled by the time they arrived, because she hadn’t realized it wasn’t the right thing to wear in the car. She’d never had a dress like this before. Everything she owned contained at least a small amount of polyester.
She was in way over her head here.
Screwing her eyes shut, she concentrated on Nev’s hand on her leg. It was warm, heavy, and alive, and her body responded with the heat his touch always aroused. If he could keep one hand on her at all times, she might make it through the weekend.
No such luck. He returned his hand to the wheel to change lanes, and she tried in vain to smooth out her wrinkled lap. The rings on her left hand caught her eye, and just like that she broke out in a sweat. It was what theater people called “flop sweat.” The sweat of the doomed.
Nev had given her the rings after work a few nights earlier. He didn’t make a ceremony of it, just tossed the jewelry boxes into her lap before leaving the room to pour her a whiskey, but the instant she lifted the lid on the engagement ring, she wanted it. Wanted this whole thing to be real with an intensity that horrified her.
The ring was a beautiful art deco cabochon sapphire set in platinum and surrounded by tiny diamonds. Exactly the sort of thing she might’ve chosen for herself if she’d been a girl who got sappy over engagement rings. Which she wasn’t. It was just that this particular one was very pretty. And he must have gone to some trouble to pick it out for her—and spent more money on it than she wanted to think about. It felt special in a way that frightened her so much, she’d put it back in its box without comment and refused to look at it again until he reminded her to wear it this morning.
She didn’t want to be married to Nev. She didn’t want to be married ever again, to anyone.
Except one tiny part of her did.
She definitely didn’t want to pretend to be married to Nev, but she was on her way to spend a long weekend with a household of strangers doing exactly that.
She had a bad feeling the whole episode was going to end in another tattoo.