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“If you intend to be intimate with me, you will need to be focused on pleasing me.”
“That sounds a little bit like your personal fantasy, Mr. O’Hare.”
Devin turned away from a very meticulously spread piece of toast on jam to frown at me. “No, Julia, I can’t say it’s ever been a fantasy of mine to have to put a young woman with a bad attitude back in her place. Some men may feel differently but you’ve chosen wrong in this case, if that was what you were hoping for.”
“It’s not like I chose you. This is basically a fix-up from my parents.”
Devin burst into unexpected and wholehearted laughter—the most dramatic reaction I’d gotten from him the whole time we’d been together, which probably wasn’t that surprising given the circumstances.
When he continued sniggering, provoking nervous coughs from my parents, my shoulders started to hunch. “Why is it so funny?”
“I’m just picturing all the other inadvisable fix-ups your parents could have gotten you into over the years with their history. It’s practically a pilot for a sitcom there. Maybe I should look some of those guys up, ask them if they’d like to take you on instead—”
I punched him in the arm. “Stop that!”
Then I wasn’t able to take back my hand.
With my wrist still secured, Devin uncurled my fingers. “This isn’t your high school playground, Julia.” His voice dropped after a glance behind. “This arrangement isn’t going to be of any use to either of us if you can’t keep yourself under control. I’m not interested in having to discipline you publicly, but you have to stay on my side or there’s nothing I can do.”
“Discipline?” I spoke too loudly, even though he’d been trying to speak quietly. It didn’t help that, even though I realised he was trying to be diplomatic in the presence of my parents, when he used his voice like that it just sounded sexy. It was messing with my common sense.
“I don’t mean it in some kinky whips-and-straps way, I mean in the sense that people who are capable of engaging with one another as adults will engage in various contracts, and when those are violated in a particularly shameful way, there needs to be some sort of punishment.”
That was when I realised, not for the first time this morning, that I was being an idiot. Time for resolution number two: I was not going to say or do anything to set Devin off until we had a contract drawn up and signed that marked out the parameters of our arrangement.
“You’re so obsessed with contracts,” I told him. “Where’s ours, anyway?” I was going to play it like this was something I’d already been thinking of, naturally.
“We can make a start on that today,” Devin said. “I’ll arrange for us to meet with my mother.”
“Your mother?” I almost shrieked. So much for keeping myself under control.
“She has a lot of contacts in the legal industry and she’s the only person who I trust to be absolutely on my side, so we need her involvement. Besides, I’m going to have to ask her if you can have the use of one of her properties until the wedding. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave you here.”
A whole place to myself—just one of the ‘properties’ they had hanging around for spares, apparently. That should have been front-page news at any other time, but with this announcement of Mrs. O’Hare coming on the scene, it belonged somewhere around the sports section.
“You really think it’s a good idea to just… tell her everything?”
“She’s not going to lay off on her questions unless I do. She actually expects honesty.”
I didn’t think the mothers of any of the friends I’d tried to make ever really liked me. Mrs. O’Hare was not likely to be the exception.
“So.” Devin put his arm over my shoulders and started steering me back towards the table. I’d just been standing there staring down at my fruit and yoghurt like it didn’t belong to me. Which felt about accurate, since in Devin’s absence I would definitely have tucked into buttered toast with jam and some bacon and eggs. “After we conclude our delightful meeting here, you will be getting dressed and coming with me to our central house. You should start thinking about what you’d like to wear.”
“It’s black for funerals, isn’t it?” I thought from how he was looking now that our house was a slip on Devin’s part. He didn’t want me to know how tangled up with his mother his life was. Considering her house to be his house still in some way: pretty tangled. And the only reason to hide that from me was because there was trouble to be had there.
“Oh, my mother isn’t going to kill you,” Devin promised. “I learned everything I know from her. Her philosophy is to keep her enemies alive, so they can suffer for a more extended period of time.”
“I’ll wear black,” I said.
“What’s this about mothers?” asked Daddy, who could always spot an opportunity to shift the heat onto someone else.
“Looks like I’m going to be welcomed into the family,” I said, like I didn’t have a single concern about this.
Mum and Daddy exchanged glances, like they were looking forward to me coming crying back to them in twenty-four hours’ time begging them to fix this for me. I wasn’t sure why when it was pretty clear they didn’t have the faintest idea how to do that, but that was my parents for you… always a little bit more confident than they had any right to be.
Chapter Ten
“She’s going to judge you,” said Devin after we’d been driving for maybe ten minutes.
