Page 116 of Tuxedos and Tinsel

‘Do I have any choice about these “conditions”?’ he grumbled.

‘I think you’ll see the sense in them,’ she said. This was not going to go all his way. There was danger in this game she’d been coerced into playing and she wanted to make sure she and her loved ones were not going to get hurt by it.

She led him over to the red leather modular sofa in the living area. The apartment in an old converted factory warehouse was owned by one of her roommates and had been furnished stylishly with Andie’s help. She flopped down on the sofa, kicked off the leopard stilettos that landed in an animal print clash on the zebra-patterned floor rug, and patted the seat next to her.

As Dominic sat down, his muscular thighs brushed against hers and she caught her breath until he settled at a not-quite-touching distance from her, his arm resting on the back of the sofa behind her. She had to close her eyes momentarily to deal with the rush of awareness from his already familiar scent, the sheer maleness of him in such close proximity.

‘I’m interested to hear what you say,’ he said, angling his powerful body towards her. He must work out a lot to have a chest like that. She couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to splay her hands against those hard muscles, to press her body against his.

But it appeared he was having no such sensual thoughts abouther.She noticed he gave a surreptitious glance to his watch.

‘Hey, no continually checking on the clock,’ she said. ‘You have to give time to an engagement. Especially a make-believe one, if we’re to make it believable. Not to mention your fake fiancée just might feel a tad insulted.’

She made her voice light but she meant every word of it. She had agreed to play her role in this charade and was now committed to making it work.

‘Fair enough,’ he said with a lazy half-smile. ‘Is that one of your conditions?’

‘Not one on its own as such, but it will fit into the others.’

‘Okay, hit me with the conditions.’ He feinted a boxer’s defence that made her smile.

‘Condition Number One,’ she said, holding up the index finger of her left hand. ‘Hannah never knows the truth—not now, not ever—that our engagement is a sham,’ she said. ‘In fact, none of my family iseverto know the truth.’

‘Good strategy,’ said Dominic. ‘In fact, I’d extend that.No oneshould ever know. Both business partners and friends.’

‘Agreed,’ she said. It would be difficult to go through with this without confiding in a friend but it had to be that way.No one must know how deeply attracted she was to him.She didn’t want anyone’s pity when she and Dominic went their separate ways.

‘Otherwise, the fallout from people discovering they’d been deceived could be considerable,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

She held up her middle finger. ‘Condition Number Two—a plausible story. We need to explain why we got engaged so quickly. So start thinking...’

‘Couldn’t we just have fallen for each other straight away?’

Andie was taken aback. She hadn’t expected anything that romantic from Dominic Hunt. ‘You mean like “love at first sight”?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Would that be believable?’

He shook his head in mock indignation. ‘Again you continue to insult me...’

‘I didn’t mean...’ She’d certainly feltsomethingfor him at first sight. Sitting next to him on this sofa, she was feeling it all over again. But it wasn’tlove—she knew only too well what it was like to love. To love and to lose the man she loved in such a cruel way. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure she wanted to love again. It hurt too much to lose that love.

‘I don’t like the lying aspect of this any more than you do,’ he said. He removed his arm from the back of the sofa so he could lean closer to her, both hands resting on his knees. ‘Why not stick to the truth as much as possible? You came to organise my party. I was instantly smitten, wooed you and won you.’

‘And I was a complete walkover,’ she said dryly.

‘So we change it—you made me work very hard to win you.’

‘In two weeks—and you away for one of them?’ she said. ‘Good in principle. But we might have to fudge the timeline a little.’

‘It can happen,’ he said. ‘Love at first sight, I mean. My parents...apparently they fell for each other on day one and were married within mere months of meeting. Or so my aunt told me.’

His eyes darkened and she remembered he’d only been eleven years old when left an orphan. If she’d lost her parents at that age, her world would have collapsed around her—as no doubt his had. But he was obviously trying to revive a happy memory of his parents.

‘How lovely—a real-life romance. Did they meet in Australia or England?’

‘London. They were both schoolteachers; my mother was living in England. She came to his school as a temporary mathematics teacher; he taught chemistry.’