“That depends,” he said, finally glancing up at me with one eyebrow arching slightly.
“On what?”
“On whether I’ve been up to anything exciting enough to write about.”
I gestured toward the paper. “Well, what are they saying about you today?”
That eyebrow lifted a fraction higher. “I was pictured with a rather beautiful mystery woman leaving that dinner two days ago. Any guesses who that could’ve been?”
“I wonder,” I said slowly, leaning back in my seat and crossing one leg over the other. “If she’s smart, that mystery woman probably regrets not charging you a fee for the publicity.”
He laughed, folding the newspaper, but not putting it down. “You wound me. I would have paid. I offered, remember?”
“Yes, you do seem like the type who throws money at problems until they go away.”
“Not problems,” he corrected lightly. “Experiences.”
“Right, and what would you classify me as?”
For a moment, he just looked at me like he was trying to decide something. Finally, a slow grin spread across his lips. “The woman of my dreams.”
I rolled my eyes, but I felt it anyway, that small, irritating flicker of amusement I was starting to associate with him. “God, I think you suffer from a chronic case of flirtation sickness.”
“You still came with me.”
“That’s because I wanted a holiday. It had nothing to do with you.”
“Good. This is why you’re perfect.” He looked at me. “No complicated entanglements.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and he grinned like he’d just won something. After that, however, we chatted for a while, falling into a rhythm that felt too familiar for the short length of time we’d actually known each other, but it was nice.
Until I asked the question that had been burning at the tip of my tongue ever since he’d shown up at my office that day. “What’s your game plan here, Jesse? You needed arm candy for that dinner and you, what, wanted company for your trip? Why exactly are we pretending to be together?”
A light went out in his eyes, his expression suddenly completely serious. I had a feeling he didn’t get this way very often, so it made me frown when he pursed his lips and inhaled a deep breath, perhaps even looking a little uncertain about himself right now.
“I didn’t just want company for the trip,” he began, swiping his tongue across his lips before he brought his gaze back to mine, those blue eyes now utterly devoid of humor or even mischief. “If we want people to buy that you’re my girlfriend, we need people to see us together.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “What exactly does that entail?”
“We pretend to be serious for a little bit, and then, when the time is right, I’m going to leak a proposal.”
I blinked at him, rapidly and far too many times for it to be anything resembling natural. “You’re going to do what?”
“Right around the time of Alex and Jane’s big gala, which is where the formal announcement is going to happen, I’m going to let the press know anonymously that you and I are engaged. I told you about this.”
“I know, but now that it’s actually happening, it’s a lot. An engagement is a lot more than accompanying you to a dinner and on a trip.”
He watched me carefully, like he was wondering if I was going to make a run for a parachute and jump right out of the plane, but eventually, he nodded his agreement. “Yeah, I know. Will you do it, though?”
“What happens after?” I asked, suddenly curious as to whether he’d thought this through at all. “It’s one thing to be photographed together for a few weeks and then to slide a fake ring onto my finger, but what then?”
He shrugged. “We’ll figure it out, but it won’t be a fake ring. It’ll be a real one. A big one, just like I promised. And you can keep it after if you want, but to answer your actual question, we’ll stage a breakup and that’ll be it. The media will paint me as a playboy again, probably speculate as to how exactly I broke your heart, and you walk away clean. I’ll make sure of that.”
I tilted my head, considering him for a long moment. It sounded like he was perfectly fine with the press painting him however they wanted, which seemed odd. He was walking into this thing willingly, asking me to go along with it, and in the end, he was planning to take a devastating blow to a reputation that had only just begun to recover.
“What is all this for, exactly?” I asked. “Why would you want to stage a relationship, knowing from the start that it’s only going to end with you looking like the bad guy?”
Something unsettled flickered across his eyes, but he shrugged like it didn’t even matter. “That’s easy. I don’t want to.”