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Broad shouldered, muscular, with stubble on his square jaw adding a roughness to features that might have otherwise been considered pretty.
“Please don’t tell me you’re Danielle Kelly,” he said, crossing his arms over that previously noted broad chest.
“I am. Were you expecting someone else? Of course, I suppose you could be. I bet I’m not the only person who responded to your ad, strange though it was. The mention of compensation was pretty tempting. Although, I might point out that in the future maybe you should space your appointments further apart.”
“You have a baby,” he said, stating the obvious.
Danielle looked down at the bundle in her arms. “Yes.”
“You didn’t mention that in our email correspondence.”
“Of course not. I thought it would make it too easy for you to turn me away.”
He laughed, somewhat reluctantly, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “Well, you’re right about that.”
“But now I’m here. And I don’t have the gas money to get back home. Also, you said you wanted unsuitable.” She spread one arm wide, keeping Riley clutched firmly in her other arm. “I would say that I’m pretty unsuitable.”
She could imagine the picture she made. Her hideous, patchwork car parked in the background. Maroon with lighter patches of red and a door that was green, since it had been replaced after some accident that had happened before the car had come into her possession. Then there was her. In all her faded glory. She was hungry, and she knew she’d lost a lot of weight over the past few weeks, which had taken her frame from slim to downright pointy. The circles under her eyes were so dark she almost looked like she’d been punched.
She considered the baby a perfect accessory. She had that new baby sallowness they never told you about when they talked about the miracle of life.
She curled her toes inside her boots, one of them going through a hole at the end of her sock. She frowned. “Anyway, I figured I presented a pretty poor picture of a fiancée for a businessman such as yourself. Don’t you agree?”
The corners of his lips tightened further. “The baby.”
“Yes?”
“You expect it to live here?”
She made an exasperated noise. “No. I expect him to live in the car while I party it up in your fancy-pants house.”
“A baby wasn’t part of the deal.”
“What do you care? Your email said it’s only through Christmas. Can you imagine telling your father that you’ve elected to marry Portland hipster trash and she comes with a baby? I mean, it’s going to be incredibly awkward, but ultimately kind of funny.”
“Come in,” he said, his expression no less taciturn as he stood to the side and allowed her entry into his magnificent home.
She clutched Riley even more tightly to her chest as she wandered inside, looking up at the high ceiling, the incredible floor-to-ceiling windows that offered an unparalleled mountain view. As cities went, Portland was all right. The air was pretty clean, and once you got away from the high-rise buildings, you could see past the iron and steel to the nature beyond.
But this view... This was something else entirely.
She looked down at the floor, taking a surprised step to the side when she realized she was standing on glass. And that underneath the glass was a small, slow-moving stream. Startlingly clear, rocks visible beneath the surface of the water. Also, fish.
She looked up to see him staring at her. “My sister’s work,” he said. “She’s the hottest new architect on the scene. Incredible, considering she’s only in her early twenties. And a woman, breaking serious barriers in the industry.”
“That sounds like an excerpt from a magazine article.”
He laughed. “It might be. Since I write the press releases about Faith. That’s what I do. PR for our firm, which has expanded recently. Not just design, but construction. And as you can see, Faith’s work is highly specialized, and it’s extremely coveted.”
A small prickle of...something worked its way under her skin. She couldn’t imagine being so successful at such a young age. Of course, Joshua and his sister must have come from money. You couldn’t build something like this if you hadn’t.
Danielle was in her early twenties and didn’t even have a checking account, much less a successful business.
All of that had to change. It had to change for Riley.
He was why she was here, after all.
Truly, nothing else could have spurred her to answer the ad. She had lived in poverty all of her life. But Riley deserved better. He deserved stability. And he certainly didn’t deserve to wind up in foster care just because she couldn’t get herself together.
“So,” she said, cautiously stepping off the glass tile. “Tell me more about this situation. And exactly what you expect.”
She wanted him to lay it all out. Wanted to hear the terms and conditions he hadn’t shared over email. She was prepared to walk away if it was something she couldn’t handle. And if he wasn’t willing to take no for an answer? Well, she had a knife in her boot.
“My father placed an ad in a national paper saying I was looking for a wife. You can imagine my surprise when I began getting responses before I had ever seen the ad. My father is well-meaning, Ms. Kelly, and he’s willing to do anything to make his children’s lives better. However, what he perceives as perfection can only come one way. He doesn’t think all of this can possibly make me happy.” Joshua looked up, seeming to indicate the beautiful house and view around them. “He’s wrong. However, he won’t take no for an answer, and I want to teach him a lesson.”
“By making him think he won?”
“Kind of. That’s where you come in. As I said, he can only see things from his perspective. From his point of view, a wife will stay at home and massage my feet while I work to bring in income. He wants someone traditional. Someone soft and biddable.” He looked her over. “I imagine you are none of those things.”
“Yeah. Not so much.” The life she had lived didn’t leave room for that kind of softness.
“And you are right. He isn’t going to love that you come with a baby. In fact, he’ll probably think you’re a gold digger.”
“I am a gold digger,” she said. “If you weren’t offering money, I wouldn’t be here. I need money, Mr. Grayson, not a fiancé.”
“Call me Joshua,” he said. “Come with me.”
She followed him as he walked through the entryway, through the living area—which looked like something out of a magazine that she had flipped through at the doctor’s office once—and into the kitchen.
The kitchen made her jaw drop. Everything was so shiny. Stainless steel surrounded by touches of wood. A strange clash of modern and rustic that seemed to work.
Danielle had never been in a place where so much work had gone into the details. Before Riley, when she had still been living with her mother, the home decor had included plastic flowers shoved into some kind of strange green Styrofoam and a rug in the kitchen that was actually a towel laid across a spot in the linoleum that had been worn through.
“You will live here for the duration of our arrangement. You will attend family gatherings and work events with me.”
“Aren’t you worried about me being unsuitable for your work arrangements too?”
“Not really. People who do business with us are fascinated by the nontraditional. As I mentioned earlier, my sister, Faith, is something of a pioneer in her field.”
“Great,” Danielle said, giving him a thumbs-up. “I’m glad to be a nontraditional asset to you.”
“Whether or not you’re happy with it isn’t really my concern. I mean, I’m paying you, so you don’t need to be happy.”
She frowned. “Well, I don’t want to be unhappy. That’s the other thing. We have to discuss...terms and stuff. I don’t know what all you think you’re going to get out of me, but I’m not here to have sex with you. I’m just here to pose as your fiancée. Like the ad said.”
The expression on his face was so disdainful it was almost funny. Almost. It didn’t quite ascend to funny because it punched her in the ego. “I think I can control myself, Ms. Kelly.”
“If I can call you Joshua, then you can call me Danielle,” she said.
“Noted.”
The way he said it made her think he wasn’t necessarily going to comply with her wishes just because she had made them known. He was difficult. No wonder he didn’t have an actual woman hanging around willing to marry him. She should have known there was something wrong with him. Because he was rich and kind of disgustingly handsome. His father shouldn’t have had to put an ad in the paper to find Joshua a woman.
He should be able to snap his fingers and have them come running.
That sent another shiver of disquiet over her. Yeah, maybe she should listen to those shivers... But the compensation. She needed the compensation.
“What am I going to do...with the rest of my time?”
“Stay here,” he said, as though that were the most obvious thing in the world. As though the idea of her rotting away up here in his mansion wasn’t weird at all. “And you have that baby. I assume it takes up a lot of your time?”
“He. Riley. And yes, he does take up a lot of time. He’s a baby. That’s kind of their thing.” He didn’t respond to that. “You know. Helpless, requiring every single one of their physical and emotional needs to be met by another person. Clearly you don’t know.”
Something in his face hardened. “No.”
“Well, this place is big enough you shouldn’t have to ever find out.”
“I keep strange hours,” he said. “I have to work with offices overseas, and I need to be available to speak to them on the phone, which means I only sleep for a couple of hours at a time. I also spend a lot of time outdoors.”
Looking at him, that last statement actually made sense. Yes, he had the bearing of an uptight businessman, but he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He was also the kind of physically fit that didn’t look like it had come from a gym, not that she was an expert on men or their physiques.
“What’s the catch?” she asked.
Nothing in life came this easy—she knew that for certain. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for him to lead her down to the dungeon and show her where he kept his torture pit.
“There is no catch. This is what happens when a man with a perverse sense of humor and too much money decides to teach his father a lesson.”
“So basically I live in this beautiful house, I wear your ring, I meet your family, I behave abominably and then I get paid?”
“That is the agreement, Ms. Kelly.”
“What if I steal your silverware?”
He chuckled. “Then I still win. If you take off in the dead of night, you don’t get your money, and I have the benefit of saying to my father that because of his ad I ended up with a con woman and then got my heart broken.”
He really had thought of everything. She supposed there was a reason he was successful.
“So do we... Is this happening?”
“There will be papers for you to sign, but yes. It is.” Any uncertainty he’d seemed to feel because of Riley was gone now.
He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a small, velvet box. He opened it, revealing a diamond ring so beautiful, so big, it bordered on obscene.
This was the moment. This was the moment when he would say he actually needed her to spend the day wandering around dressed as a teddy bear or something.
But that moment didn’t come either. Instead, he took the ring out of the box and held it out to her. “Give me your hand.”
She complied. She complied before she gave her body permission to. She didn’t know what she expected. For him to get down on one knee? For him to slide the ring onto her fourth finger? He did neither. Instead, he dropped the gem into her palm.
She curled her fingers around it, an electric shock moving through her system as she realized she was probably holding more money in her hand right now than she could ever hope to earn over the course of her lifetime.
Well, no, that wasn’t true. Because she was about to earn enough money over the next month to take care of herself and Riley forever. To make sure she got permanent custody of him.
Her life had been so hard, a constant series of moves and increasingly unsavory uncles her mother brought in and out of their lives. Hunger, cold, fear, uncertainty...
She wasn’t going to let Riley suffer the same fate. No, she was going to make sure her half brother was protected. This agreement, even if Joshua did ultimately want her to walk around dressed like a sexy teddy bear, was a small price to pay for Riley’s future.
“Yes,” she said, testing the weight of the ring. “It is.”
Two (#ua1f8a811-e73c-5aa7-845b-669e96871dfd)
As Joshua followed Danielle down the hall, he regretted not having a live-in housekeeper. An elderly British woman would come in handy at a time like this. She would probably find Danielle and her baby to be absolutely delightful. He, on the other hand, did not.
No, on the contrary, he felt invaded. Which was stupid. Because he had signed on for this. Though, he had signed on for it only after he had seen his father’s ad. After he had decided the old man needed to be taught a lesson once and for all about meddling in Joshua’s life.
It didn’t matter that his father had a soft heart or that he was coming from a good place. No, what mattered was the fact that Joshua was tired of being hounded every holiday, every time he went to dinner with his parents, about the possibility of him starting a family.
It wasn’t going to happen.
At one time, he’d thought that would be his future. Had been looking forward to it. But the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all clearly hadn’t caused the loss.
He was happy enough now to be alone. And when he didn’t want to be alone, he called a woman, had her come spend a few hours in his bed—or in the back of his truck, he wasn’t particular. Love was not on his agenda.
“This is a big house,” she said.
Danielle sounded vaguely judgmental, which seemed wrong, all things considered. Sure, he was the guy who had paid a woman to pose as his temporary fiancée. And sure, he was the man who lived in a house that had more square footage than he generally walked through in a day, but she was the one who had responded to an ad placed by a complete stranger looking for a temporary fiancée. So, all things considered, he didn’t feel like she had a lot of room to judge.
“Yes, it is.”
“Why? I mean, you live here alone, right?”
“Because size matters,” he said, ignoring the shifting, whimpering sound of the baby in her arms.
“Right,” she said, her tone dry. “I’ve lived in apartment buildings that were smaller than this.”
He stopped walking, then he turned to face her. “Am I supposed to feel something about that? Feel sorry for you? Feel bad about the fact that I live in a big house? Because trust me, I started humbly enough. I choose to live differently than my parents. Because I can. Because I earned it.”
“Oh, I see. In that case, I suppose I earned my dire straits.”
“I don’t know your life, Danielle. More important, I don’t want to know it.” He realized that was the first time he had used her first name. He didn’t much care.
“Great. Same goes. Except I’m going to be living in your house, so I’m going to definitely...infer some things about your life. And that might give rise to conversations like this one. And if you’re going to be assuming things about me, then you should be prepared for me to respond in kind.”
“I don’t have to do any such thing. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the employer, you’re the employee. That means if I want to talk to you about the emotional scars of my childhood, you had better lie back on my couch and listen. Conversely, if I do not want to hear about any of the scars of yours, I don’t have to. All I have to do is throw money at you until you stop talking.”
“Wow. It’s seriously the job offer I’ve been waiting for my entire life. Talking I’m pretty good at. And I don’t do a great job of shutting up. That means I would be getting money thrown at me for a long, long time.”
“Don’t test me, Ms. Kelly,” he said, reverting back to her last name, because he really didn’t want to know about her childhood or what brought her here. Didn’t want to wonder about her past. Didn’t want to wonder about her adulthood either. Who the father of her baby was. What kind of situation she was in. It wasn’t his business, and he didn’t care.
