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“I’m –,” she frowned. “This is complicated.”
He came to sit beside her. “Why?”
“Well, it’s my sister’s wedding for one. We’re about to tell a whopping lie to my family.”
“Not a whopping lie. A tiny, harmless fib. And I’m sure they’d understand if they knew how upset you’d been at the prospect of seeing your ex again.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” she said with a feeble laugh. “My parents are as moralistic as you can get. Lies don’t wash with them. They’d think this was crazy.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Then we’ll have to make sure they never find out the truth. What else?”
She dug her toe into the carpet, pushing it forward a little way. “Well, how do we convince them?”
“You mean, how do we act when we’re with other people?”
She nodded jerkily.
“We act like a couple.”
“I’ve only ever had one boyfriend, and he wasn’t particularly demonstrative.”
Luca stared at her, a frown on his handsome face. “You’ve only had one boyfriend?”
“Ashton,” she confirmed with a small nod.
“You haven’t seen anyone else?”
“We got together when I was twenty one – straight out of uni,” she defended.
He lifted his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, so you must have friends in relationships. You’ve watched movies. You can imagine the sorts of things that will make our relationship plausible.”
That was the problem. She had seen movies. Way too many romantic movies when Ashton had been playing golf or polo, and images of those movies were filling her mind now, making her imagine all sorts of things with Luca Montebello! Things she had no business imagining for many reasons, not least of which was the fact he was her boss. Her very hot, very bachelor-ish boss.
“Okay, maybe not,” he laughed, standing and skirting around the edge of the bed to his bedside table. He opened it on a hunch, then pulled out a small bottle of scotch, bringing it back to Bronte. “Well, it’s a wedding, so there’ll be dancing. I’ll put my arm around you. We’ll sit side by side. You’ll laugh at my stories.”
“What if people ask questions?”
“What kind of questions?”
“Like, ‘how did you two meet’? Or, ‘What’s a spectacular specimen of masculinity who could have any woman in the world doing with a plain Jane like Bronte’?”
He made a noise that was something like a laugh, except rich with dismissive disbelief. “Here, drink this.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re freaking out and it will calm your nerves.”
“I am freaking out.” She stood up restlessly, taking the tiny bottle and passing it from one hand to the other.
“First of all, we’ve already covered the fact that you’re smart and intelligent so I presume that’s just false modesty – which surprises me, Bronte, because I wouldn’t have thought you went in for that.”
“It’s not –,”
He put a hand out, curling his fingers around her wrist. “I said drink it, don’t treat it like a football.”
She stopped passing the bottle between her hands and looked down at it as though seeing it for the first time.
“As for the questions,” he said. “We’ll keep the answers vague. How did we meet? That’s easy. Through work. Stick as close to the truth as possible.”
