Page 45
It’s a joke … right?
Finn watches me with a flicker of gold in his eyes and his bottom lip pulled between his teeth. He hasn’t moved, hasn’t budged a muscle. His attention sits squarely on me, reading every emotion that crosses my face.
He’s entirely too serious to be kidding around, and way too calm to be serious.
“I’m sorry,” I say, a half laugh carrying the words. “What did you just say?”
He wipes his hands down his thighs. “I suggested that you do it. You pretend to be my fiancée.”
Nope. I heard him right.
The man has lost his damn mind.
He can’t possibly be serious. I’ve been trying to reestablish the boundaries of our current situation. Now he wants to catapult over it and pretend to be getting married?
“I know it sounds crazy,” he says, smiling nervously as I grip the back of the chair. “But I thought a lot about it, and it really is the simplest solution. It solves a lot of problems.”
I stare at him, taking a moment to find my voice in the haze. “Let me get this straight. You sat down and thought this through, and the simplest solution was to pretend to be engaged to me?” I point at myself, both brows raised. “The woman who has spent the last week or more reminding you that we aren’t even dating.”
His eyes sparkle as if he’s not surprised by my reaction, and he might be a little amused.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “That was my conclusion.”
“How many times have you been tackled? Because I think it’s been one too many.”
He chuckles.
Nothing about this is funny. Not a piece of it is entertaining. He was supposed to stop by to discuss a business decision before we went out to dinner, and then, hopefully, we’d find our way back to the bedroom. We weren’t supposed to be discussing marriage—pretend or not.
“Can I explain myself?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Can you? I mean, this seems like the kind of thing that only makes sense when you’re drunk in Vegas.”
His chest bounces as he laughs.
I sit as my knees start to wobble from the adrenaline coursing through my system. “Talk. Explain. Let’s get it over with so we can go back to reality.”
“Okay,” he says, clearing his throat. “I know this is asking a lot of you.”
“You think?”
He grins. “So, I want to sweeten the pot.” He rests his elbows on his knees, pinning me to my seat from across the room. “If you’ll do this with me, I’ll give you half of the endorsement money.”
“What?” My eyeballs nearly fall out of my head. I clutch my chest as if my heart might stop beating from shock. “What did you say?”
“As I said, Chuck seems to think I can bring in a few million dollars with this engagement—which is crazy, I know. I agree. But if you’ll do half the work, I’ll give you half the money after I pay Chuck and the government.”
I’m too in shock to even blink. “You’d give me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Are you kidding me?”
“Nope. And I was just thinking about how that would be such an easy way to fund Someday Now. I mean, if you have to fundraise the startup costs, it could take years, Pop. Why not let corporate America pay for it? They’re going to use my fame to make more money. Why not use it to your advantage, too?”
Words seem too far away to grasp, which feels weird to me.
I try to squash the bubble of excitement rising in my chest at the thought of getting a jump-start on the foundation. The information that Ann sent over said exactly what Finn is saying—I need operating money and program money … and I don’t have either.
Getting my hands on that amount of cash would be a huge accelerant.
“This feels illegal,” I say finally, shaking my head.
