Wife for Now

“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-star 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.

Unless he’s hiding it from you. Unless he knows you have feelings for him, so he makes sure to hook up on the down-low. Unless…

Okay, so there’s a possibility he has hookups. But nobody long-term, not in all the time I’ve been here.

“So…” I narrow my eyes, trying to follow Luke’s train of thought. “You want me to pretend that we’re married, so you’ll win the bet.”

Luke grins. “Now you’re getting it. Since Paul’s wedding is in just a couple of weeks, I don’t have much time left to beat him to the punch.”

I sigh and cross my arms, pretending to deliberate, or at the very least to be hesitant about this proposition. But deep down, I already know what I’ll say. I can’t remember a single time I’ve managed to say no to this man. Especially not when he’s looking at me the way he is now, with that huge, charming grin of his, his gaze focused on me like I’m the only person in the whole wide world he sees.