“I’m running a clean shirt to Hope because she changed into the one she keeps at the office after a nervous kid lost his oatmeal. But then she spilled coffee on that one and even though her fancy orthodontist lab coat covers it, it also keeps it from drying.” He waves a hand. “Or something like that. Anyway, she told Mom I was on my way so Mom asked me to grab the spare fob to her car because she thinks the battery’s dying in the one she uses every day.”
“I’ll grab batteries for both while I’m in town.”
“Sounds good.” Aaron starts toward the door, but then he stops and turns back. “Speaking of you not communicating with your only brother—I didn’t hear it from you, but I did hear you went on a date with Cara Gamble last weekend.”
For a second, I think we were spotted at lunch today, but then the last weekend catches in my mind. “It was more like a meeting, but at a restaurant, so there was dinner and wine.”
Aaron tips his head, giving me a wry look. “Like a date.”
“Monday night, I had dinner at a restaurant with the CEO of an international hotel group and we even shared a bottle of wine. I can’t speak for him, but I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a date.”
“Were you totally in love with that CEO in high school?” My brother points a finger at me. “You have a history with Cara, so don’t try to tell me it was just like any other business meeting held over dinner.”
Totally in love.
He isn’t wrong, but when I think about high school, I always focus on Marcus and Gin Gamble, but not Cara. It hurts too much to remember my short-lived romance with her, but thinking about her parents fuels my ambition.
Along with some nasty threats, they told me I wasn’t good enough to stand on their front porch. Now I’m going to own that front porch, even if I have to use Cara to get the sale done.
Luckily, she’s as motivated to see me close on the property as I am because she’ll be free to live her own life. If she has to lie to her mother to make it happen, that’s on Gin. It’s her own fault her daughter’s willing to grab on to the life ring I’m throwing in order to keep from being dragged down by the sinking ship that’s the Gamble house.
But if she agrees to my proposal, I don’t want to have argued too hard against the connection between us. I don’t like lying to my family, but it’s necessary to protect the entire endeavor. And I may as well start now.
“Okay, it was something like a date,” I concede. “It didn’t start that way, but it didn’t take long for it to feel almost like old times.”
I expect gloating or maybe even outright laughter, but Aaron looks skeptical. “For both of you, or just you? Because last I knew that woman wasn’t your biggest fan. And for good reason, I might add.”
I’m glad he’s walking out the door as he finishes talking, so he can’t see the expression on my face. His words hurt, but Aaron doesn’t know why I broke Cara’s heart. And I don’t ever want him to know because it’s too late to change anything. He’ll just feel guilty about something that wasn’t his fault.
And now the ghost of Marcus Gamble is living in my head again, the past pushing the present out of my mind and hardening my resolve. I’m going to get this done.
I’m going to marry the man’s daughter.
And then I’m going to take his house.
Chapter Seventeen
Cara
On Monday afternoon, I find out my supplier has raised the prices on two products I can’t run my business without. Five minutes later, I get a text message from Hayden.
HAYDEN
Are you still thinking?
If he’d sent the message any other day between his ridiculous proposal and me sitting with pen and paper, trying to calculate how to tighten my financial belt another notch, it would have been an easy text to answer. But he caught me in a weak moment and my thumbs hover over the keyboard for a few seconds, itching to grab the lifeline he’s throwing me.
CARA
No matter how much I think about it, I don’t think it can work.
It isn’t a yes, but it also isn’t a definitive no. The idea of telling Gin I’m marrying Hayden Reilly makes my stomach hurt, and no matter what he says, I don’t see the ruse playing out the way he’s so certain it will. And yet, I can’t bring myself to reject the proposal out of hand.
I thought about Hayden yesterday, while I was standing next to my mother in the cemetery for our annual Father’s Day visit to my dad’s grave. The Gambles have a private, fenced area within the larger grounds, which seems unnecessarily showy to me. I don’t like these visits for his birthday and other important dates, preferring to remember my dad in small, happy ways—remembering his laugh, or seeing a tractor and remembering how obsessed he was with them. But my mother insists and it feels like a thing a good daughter would do, so I go.
Yesterday, though, there was anger. Anger at my dad for putting us in this position. Anger at my mother for keeping us in it. I’d looked around, trying to get my emotions under control, and saw the area by the outer fence where members of the Reilly family were laid to rest. Hayden’s father is there, having been killed in a workplace accident sometime right before he’d started middle school. And once I’d thought of Hayden, his proposal popped back into my head and lingered there while Gin talked to the slab of marble with my father’s name engraved on it.
HAYDEN
