Conveniently Engaged To The Boss. Ellie Darkins

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       CHAPTER TWO

      EVA CHECKED ON the food and resisted glancing at her reflection in the window. She didn’t want Joss to think that she’d made an effort, so she’d not touched her hair or her make-up since she’d got home, and had just thrown on jeans and a comfy jumper. She always wore her skinnies and a cashmere sweater for a Friday night in—that was perfectly plausible.

      She didn’t even want to think about how the conversation over dinner was going to go, but she had to. Had to be prepared—set out in her own mind, at least, what was and wasn’t going to be on the cards.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ