“I see.” Relief flooded Eli, the corners of his mouth lifting in a grin. “And you want me to tell Harry you’re not interested in dating Nicholas?” he guessed.
“I’ve already told Uncle Harry I’m not interested,” she informed him. “It didn’t faze him, and I suspect he’s working on a scheme to push me and Nicholas together even as we speak.”
Eli’s smile disappeared.
“I’ve watched Uncle Harry interfere in Tommi’s and Bobbie’s love lives,” Frankie went on. “And I’m convinced the only way to stop his matchmaking is to convince him that I’m taken. That’s where you come in.”
Eli blinked. “That’s where I come in?” he repeated.
She nodded decisively. “I have zero interest in getting married—and the general consensus of opinion in the family is that you don’t, either. Which makes you the perfect person for my plan.”
Eli narrowed his eyes over her thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I’m following you. Maybe you should give me the abbreviated version.”
Frankie waved her hands expressively, her expression wry. “I’m sorry—let me back up. The other night at Harry’s house when he was telling me all the reasons I should want to date and perhaps marry Nicholas Dean, you were standing across the room holding Ava. I’m afraid I used you to distract Harry and asked him why he didn’t suggest you as a potential husband. He told me he doubted you would marry. He said you seemed perfectly happy with your life as it was. Well …” She shrugged. “The moment Harry said that, I realized you were the perfect person for me to date, because neither of us wants to get married. When Harry kept droning on about all of Nicholas’s good qualities, I had a brainstorm.”
“A brainstorm,” Eli repeated. He realized belatedly that he kept repeating her statements and told himself to stop.
“Yes, exactly.” She leaned forward, her brown eyes gleaming with determination. “Which brings me to the reason I came to see you today. I need to convince Harry I’m madly in love and deeply committed to someone so he’ll stop trying to pair me up with single men. But I’m not in love, and there’s no one on my horizon. So I need someone to pretend to be involved with, while you,” she continued, pointing at him, “would like Wolf Construction to win the contract for the new HuntCom building. So … my proposal is that we team up. If you’ll pretend to be involved with me, I can almost guarantee Uncle Harry will move Wolf Construction to the top of the list for the contract. He’s already narrowed it down to you and Nicholas, and he as good as admitted to me that he’s inclined to award contracts to family or close family friends.”
“You want me to date you in order to get Harry to give my company a contract?” Eli asked, his tone neutral.
“Not exactly,” she told him. “I’m only suggesting that we both have something to gain—and frankly, I need a pretend-date/boyfriend as fast as possible. Harry, my mother and sisters already know and adore you, so they won’t bat an eye if it’s you I claim to have fallen madly in love with. If I introduce someone new, they’re going to be more skeptical. I want Harry off my back. Heaven knows what trouble he can stir up for me.” She shuddered.
Eli stared at her for a long moment. He didn’t want her believing he was the kind of man who would use her to gain a lucrative construction contract. On the other hand, there was no way he’d let her be courted by Nicholas Dean.
Not that Dean was a bad guy. He was, in fact, everything Harry thought he was—smart, successful and played a mean game of pool. Just the kind of man a woman could easily fall in love with.
Which was why there was no way in hell Eli was going to let him near Frankie, not if he could help it. He knew he was being territorial, but he couldn’t seem to help it.
Probably because I want to be the one burning up the sheets with Frankie, he thought. In fact, he realized with a start, he’d felt that way for months.
And it was time he did something about it.
“Well,” she said expectantly, interrupting his thoughts. “Will you do it?”
“Yeah,” he said with a slow drawl. “I will.” He stood, bending to cup her elbow and lift her from the chair. “Let’s go get some coffee and talk about the details.”
He hustled her out of the office and down the street to Zena’s Café before she had time to change her mind.
“So,” he said when they were seated in a booth with steaming mugs in front of them, “how do you envision going forward with this campaign to fool Harry?”
“I thought we’d keep it simple,” Frankie told him. “We can work out a list of events Harry is likely to attend. Then we can appear together and pretend to be in love while Harry’s watching. Hopefully, it won’t take long to convince him. Once he accepts that, he can cross me off his matchmaking list and sign your company contract for the new HuntCom campus, and we can go back to our normal lives.”
“Harry’s pretty shrewd—I’m not sure he’s going to be as easy to convince as you seem to think,” Eli told her. “He didn’t get his reputation as a shark in the financial world by being dense.”
“But that’s business.” Frankie propped her forearms on the polished wood tabletop and leaned forward. “When it comes to personal relationships, Harry can be amazingly unaware. Look at the women he married—disasters, every one of them.”
“You’ve got a point.” Eli shrugged. “It’s hard to argue with his marital record. The only good thing about Harry’s ex-wives is that he stopped getting married after making four bad choices.”
“Exactly.” Frankie nodded decisively. “I truly anticipate he’ll accept our romantic smoke screen as fact. I don’t think he’ll look deeper.”
“Nevertheless,” Eli told her. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. Remember,” he cautioned her, “it’s not just Harry we have to convince. Your mother or sisters are likely to be attending the same functions as Harry. If we’re not believable, they’ll never buy it. Cornelia’s not going to be easy to fool—especially when it comes to one of her daughters. And if Cornelia knows we’re faking, she’s likely to tell Harry.”
Frankie frowned, unconsciously winding a lock of hair around her forefinger in a gesture Eli had noticed her make before when she was deep in thought.
“You’re right,” she murmured. She looked up at Eli, her brown eyes alive with bright determination, gold flecks swimming in the chocolate-brown depths. “So we can’t let her know we’re pretending. Think you can pull it off?”
Her tone matched the challenge in the quick curve of her lips.
“Absolutely.” He lifted a brow, tossing the challenge back at her with a slow smile. “The question is, can you?”
She laughed, shrugging in a quick, elegant shift of her shoulders beneath the tailored blue suit jacket. “A woman learns to fake being interested in a guy before she’s out of junior high school. It’s a rite of passage.”
“Yeah?” Startled and intrigued, Eli lifted an eyebrow in inquiry. “Why in junior high?”
“Because at my school, that was the first year of boy-girl dances, and every girl wanted a date. Unfortunately, the girls outnumbered the boys two-to-one. Which meant there was a lot of competition for invitations to the school functions.”
Eli swept a slow, appreciative gaze over her face, hair, down her throat and the swell of her breasts beneath the cream blouse she wore under her suit jacket. The table edge prevented him from going lower, and he returned to meet her eyes. “I bet you never had to compete for a date. I’m guessing the boys were lined up next to your school locker, waiting for you to choose.”
She