“Relax.” He smiled. “I can handle her.”
If anyone could, he could. But I wasn’t sure anyone couldhandleVivian Lennox. She was a force of nature, just like her eldest son. “She scares me.” I smirked when he laughed. I was only half-kidding. I loved Viv, but couldn’t imagine having her as my mother-in-law. I considered myself a strong woman, but I knew she’d steamroll me to get what she wanted.
“She scares me too sometimes,” he said, winking. “But don’t tell her I said that, she’ll use it to her advantage to try and bully me.”
The thought of anyone bullying Rhett was laughable. Especially his five-and-a-half-foot mama. “My brother didn’t seem too surprised when you popped the question. You told him you were going to?” I wished he’d told me so I could have been better prepared, and maybe breathed through it.
“I hinted at it.” He took a sip of his hot chocolate, making me shift when he licked the whipped cream off his lips. I told myself I was going to resist him tonight, but he didn’t make it easy. “I figured I owed him that much.”
I hated that we were lying to our family and friends, and I knew Rhett did too, but if I’d had another option, I would have taken it. “How did he react when you told him we were a couple?”
“He was surprised at first.” He glanced at the screen. “But I guess it was believable. He knows there’s always been… something between us.”
Since I’d never been afraid to dive in to the deep end, I said, “Yeah, that kind of complicates things, doesn’t it?”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “What do you mean?”
I gestured between us with my free hand. “Spending all this time together, getting so close, it might blur the lines… given our history.” We needed to keep reminding ourselves and each other this was fake, because I was terrified it could start to feel too real, the more time we spent together.
He was giving me that soul-searching look that always made me fidget, when he asked, “And you’re afraid of that?”
“Aren’t you?” I heard the trace of panic in my voice that I was trying so hard to suppress.
“I’m not afraid of anything, Briar.”
I believed him. Rhett was fearless. Maybe he could teach me how to be brave because right now all I could think about was how I was going to go on pretending I wasn’t falling for him.
ChapterEight
Rhett
Briar argued when I insisted on driving her to and from work, but when I promised we were closing in on her stalker, and she might be rid of me even sooner than she’d hoped, she finally gave in.
I hated that she seemed so anxious to be rid of me, because I was settling into a life of domestic bliss with her like it was meant to be.
I was still in a foul mood when Jake tapped on my office door after I’d been staring at my computer screen for ten minutes while my thoughts wandered to Briar… and how incredible she’d looked when I dropped her off at work. She was wearing a black wrap dress that hugged her curves like a second skin and four-inch heels. Apparently, she had appointments lined up with several doctors to discuss a new treatment option her company had developed. I could only imagine all the times doctors had hit on her when she walked in to their offices to make her pitch. Except now she was wearing a huge diamond on her left hand… and that made me a hell of a lot happier than it should have.
“Hey,” Jake said, smirking when I scowled at him. “It’s only nine o’clock. I thought I could catch you before someone pissed you off.”
I gestured to the file in his hand. “Is that what I think it is?” Jake had promised me a full report on Briar’s ex and I’d demanded a paper and digital file so I could go over it with a fine-tooth comb. I didn’t want to miss a single detail.
“Yeah.” He tossed it on my desk. “Got some good dirt on him. Shouldn’t be too hard to put him away.” He chuckled as he sank down in the guest chair across from my huge mahogany desk. “Stupid bastard’s been embezzling from the company he’s been working for the past year. For someone who specializes in cyber security, he didn’t cover his tracks very well.”
I didn’t know if it was fair to judge the schmuck too harshly. We were the best in the business when it came to shit like this. He didn’t have a prayer of hiding anything from us. “Good. I want to see that bastard behind bars.”
Jake studied me for a minute, looking thoughtful, before he said, “That was some proposal last night. And some ring. Was it real?”
I rolled my eyes as I skimmed the file. “Of course it was real, asshole. Where the hell do you think I got it, a gumball machine?”
He grinned before pulling his phone out of his pocket when it buzzed. He scanned it before he said, “That’s some investment, in a fake engagement.”
“Would you shut your mouth?” I glared at the door he’d left half-opened. “As far as the rest of the world is concerned, this is real.”
“You do realize this news is making the rounds, right? Google your name today and the first things that pop up are stories about your engagement.”
I shrugged, trying to ignore the wave of pleasure that washed through me. “That was kind of the point, wasn’t it?”
“So, you’re just going to give up dating until you’re sure Briar—”
