“Nicholas,” Harold gently chided, “you know what a difficult position it puts me in to go between you and your father.”
“This is her life, Harold,” Nick replied unapologetically. “And stop looking at me like I’m the one who started this! Did you know that my dad actually made copies?!”
Harold flushed guiltily. Yes, he was aware. What was more, I was sure he had kept one or two for his private collection. The little bastard...
“Ahem...”
Perhaps it was the fact that I had caffeine coming out of my ears, or perhaps it was just because I had handled Nick’s schedule for so long—but I found myself stepping up to the plate.
“Harold,” I said briskly, “you already promised to talk to Mitchell about extending the length of the engagement, and we’re going to hold you to that. And as for this party—let’s just call it what it is. An engagement party. Just like we promised,” I flashed Nick a pointed look, “to get engaged.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, before his lips twitched up into a small grin.
“Fake engaged.”
I resisted the urge to laugh.
First we were fake boyfriend and girlfriend (as I had made a point to consistently remind him), now we were fake engaged. The word had ceased to hold any meaning.
“Yeah,” I flashed him a smile, “fake engaged.”
Harold stared between the two of us, completely baffled by our private little joke. But one way or another, that joke had somehow put Nick back on his side. He wasn’t about to question his good fortune now. Not when he was about to need it so badly.
“That’s right!” he said jovially, trying to join in on the fun. “Fake engaged!” When the two of us turned to him with a blank stare, he cleared his throat and moved on quickly. “At any rate, we should throw the party as soon as possible. Like Nicholas said, you’ve already been introduced as a couple, and we’re only talking about a three month time table before the company merger. We’re going to want to capitalize on every second of it.”
“Well how fast do you think you could throw something like that together?” I asked skeptically, watching as he reviewed his notes.
On a professional level, I was actually curious. Things like this didn’t happen very often in Manhattan. Not on this scale. I could hardly imagine the legwork involved.
The smug candor fell away, and for a moment, Harold was all-business. His spectacled eyes tightened as he turned over the pages on his clipboard, lost in thought.
“Well, the club books up months in advance, but I know for a fact that everything at the end of the week can technically be bumped,” he muttered under his breath. “We also know that everyone we’d want to invite is already in town, because they flew in for the exhibition...”
His eyes drifted clean out of focus as he made predictions, assessments, and hemmed away details on the fly. A second later, he returned to the land of the living.
“How about the day after tomorrow?”
Okay...props where they were due. Even I couldn’t put something together that fast.
“That’s...that’s really soon,” Nick said nervously. His eyes shot to mine, and he tried rather unsuccessfully to smile. “To announce our engagement to the entire world...”
Normally, I would be right there with him. Normally, I would be having a silent panic attack at the mere prospect of perpetuating such a massive international lie. But strangely enough, the second I had the date in my head—I had become abruptly calm.
Call it the publicist in me, but this was almost starting to feel like familiar ground.
“It’s going to be fine,” I replied, slipping into same tone I had used to reassure him a thousand times before. “We’ll head down to the club, let the press do all the talking for us, then be back here before you know it. We’re not really engaged, and we’re not really getting engaged, so think of it as nothing more than another great party.”
Even the infamous Harold Oates gave me a fleeting smile, as Nick started nodding quickly—taking a deep breath to steady himself.
“Okay...the day after tomorrow it is.”
Our eyes met across the kitchen, and I gave him a wink.
“Splendid!” Harold clapped his hands together in delight, his mind racing a million miles a minute as he started hammering out the details. “In that case—I have a hell of a lot to do. Tell me, Nicholas, would you prefer ice sculptures to a live orchestra? I’m sure the club could find a way to accommodate both, but if we want to maximize the space to the best of our—”
“Harold?” I cut him off sweetly. Nick was at the end of his limit, and I wasn’t going to listen to the insufferable man for another second. “I’m sure you can take it from here.”
He trailed off mid-sentence and glanced between us. Then down at his notes.