Joss was crazy, thinking that they could get away with a fake engagement. They’d be under scrutiny every minute they were together at the office. She knew how little fuel the gossip furnace needed to keep it alight. But every time she convinced herself of how terrible an idea it was, she remembered the happiness on Edward’s face and the eagerness to please his father on Joss’s.
She had to admit to being intrigued.
Joss was a powerful man. A director—now the MD—of a vast luxury group of department stores, with a presence on every continent, property in every major European shopping capital. He was notorious for the coldness of his personal life—the wife and the marriage that he’d neglected, and the transactional nature of the dates he took to industry functions. The women he dated were always clients and colleagues, there to further a business deal or a conversation, and they always went home alone.
She’d always seen something else in him. Something more. Something in the way that he joked with his father in a way he didn’t with anyone else. Being so close to Edward, she’d seen their father-son relationship up close. Seen that Joss might not be the cold-hearted divorcee that everyone had him pegged as.
And now he’d invented an engagement just to please his dying father, and her curiosity was piqued again.
The two men didn’t have much time left together—and they both seemed happier with this alternative reality than with real life. Who was she to judge? Who was she to tell them they were wrong? If she hadn’t been personally involved she’d be telling them to do whatever they had to do in order to enjoy the time they had left together. But to say that she was ‘involved’ was putting things mildly—and this was way personal. She’d be as responsible as Joss if the truth came out and Edward’s heart was broken in his last few weeks or months.
And maybe all of this was academic. Because it assumed that they stood a chance of getting away with this charade. Making everyone believe that they were in love. Well, it wouldn’t be too hard to convince on her side, she supposed, given the attraction that she’d been hiding for years.
Through the break-up of his marriage—that time of dark black circles under his eyes and an almost permanent blank expression on his face—she was the only one who had seen him lean back against his father’s office door after he’d left a meeting, composing his features and erasing all emotion before he went and faced the rest of the office. And in the time since, he’d been working non-stop—not competing with his colleagues but seemingly competing with himself.
It was hard to pinpoint when she had realised she had a heck of a crush growing. Perhaps after the dip in her stomach when she’d won a hard-earned smile, or when they’d argued in the boardroom and he’d held up his hands in concession to her point, never mind that he was a director and she an assistant.
Or when he’d walked in on her today, half-dressed in his father’s office, and her whole skin had hummed in awareness of him. She’d had to hide the blush that had crept over her cheeks when his fingertips had clasped the zip and pulled it down—something she’d fantasised about more times than she wanted to admit, even to herself.
But nothing that she had done so far had worked in trying to get herself to forget him.
Perhaps it was time to do something different. She had proved that ignoring this thing wasn’t going to make it go away. Maybe getting closer to him was the key. It was easy to maintain a crush, a fantasy, from afar. When you didn’t have to deal with wet towels on your bed or dirty dishes left on the table. Maybe what she needed was some old-fashioned exposure therapy.
Because what did she really know about Joss, beyond what she saw when he was occasionally in the office? If there was one sure way to test a romance it was for a couple to move in together.
Was she completely losing her mind thinking that this was even a feasible idea—never mind a good one?
The doorbell rang, shocking her out of her internal debate. Good, she was getting sick of the sound of her own thoughts. At least with Joss here she would have a sparring partner.
She jogged down the stairs to the street-level door, trying to ignore the familiar flip of her heart at the sight of him. Not that he was looking his best—he had clearly come straight from the office. His shirt was creased, his collar unfastened and his tie loosened.
And then she remembered again how his day had been a thousand times worse than hers and had to resist the urge to pull him close and comfort him.
‘Hey—you found it okay?’
‘Yeah.’ He waved his phone vaguely at her. ‘Just a little help from this. I’ve not been here since I was a kid.’
‘Of course—your dad used to stay here back then. I’d forgotten you must have been here too.’
She stepped back so that he could get through the door. From her little cobbled mews she could barely hear the traffic from the main road nearby, muffled by the square of white stucco pillared houses around the private, locked garden. She showed Joss upstairs to her apartment—a legacy of the time when the building would have had stables downstairs and living quarters for servants of the wealthy above, all tucked away behind the grand mansions on the square.
Eva loved the understated elegance of her home, with clipped bay trees at the door, original cobbles paving the passage and soft heritage colours on the doors and windows.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Joss said as he reached the top of the stairs and crossed to the living room, where great tall windows flooded light in one side of the room. ‘Have you been living here long?’
‘Since I started at Dawson’s.’
Joss looked intrigued. ‘I thought my dad had got rid of this place.’
‘He had—sort of,’ Eva said, reaching for a bottle of wine and raising a glass in question at Joss.
He nodded and reached to take it from her when it was full.
‘He realised it was mostly sitting empty while it was a company flat, so he decided to rent it out. When I started working for the company I was stuck for somewhere to stay. Your dad didn’t have a tenant at the time, and needed someone to house-sit, so he offered me this place.’
Joss raised his eyebrows. ‘Lucky you.’
‘Yeah, I don’t like to move a lot, and he offered me a long-term lease. I like it here.’
‘So I’m going to have a hard time convincing you to move in with me?’
Eva snorted, and winced at the sting of wine in her nose.
‘That part’s non-negotiable,’ she confirmed. ‘This is my home and I’m not leaving it.’
‘So you’re coming round to the rest of it? Good.’
She should have given him an outright no—told him there and then that there was absolutely no way she was going along with his ridiculous scheme. But somehow, with him here in her home, in her space, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. All of a sudden she wasn’t sure about anything.
That was what happened when the only stable part of your life upped and threatened to leave. It had sunk in on her short walk home from the office that she could be about to lose her job—the first point of stability she’d ever had in her life. The safe place that she’d built for herself in the twelve years that she’d been with the company.
She would have thought she’d have been used to it by now. She’d had her whole childhood to practise, after all. Every time her mother or her father had shipped out, or they’d all packed up and moved to another army base, she’d told herself it was the last time she’d care. The last time she’d cry.
She’d not managed to stick to her word until the final time. The time her mother hadn’t come home at all.
Her father had packed her off to boarding school then, not long after