AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He shook his head. “And I still don’t understand what the problem is, exactly. You don’t need to know that much more about me.”
“Right, right,” she said. “I guess I know a little more than I did before. I mean, I know your net worth now. I know the name of your company and how many employees it has. I know your last name, your age, and your eye color… If anyone asks me to do a Wikipedia page on you, I’ll be all set.”
He scowled a little. “Why do you want to know me so bad, anyway? It’s not like we even like each other.”
She shrugged a little and regarded him thoughtfully. “You want me to pretend to like you, though.”
“I want you to pretend to be my fiance.”
She gave him a slightly disgusted look. “Same thing, Richard.”
He fell silent, preferring to look at the scenery instead of having this conversation. Suddenly, he felt her hand in his and he started to jerk away. She held him fast, though.
“We’re in public,” she said with clenched teeth. “Don’t you want this to look good just in case one of your people see us?”
He relaxed and blew out a long breath. “Fine.”
After another lapse of silence, Stella said, “You know, there was one interesting thing in your big binder of Richard factoids.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“The name of the horse you had when you were a kid. Skippy.”
He looked down at her quizzically. “What’s so interesting about that?”
She smiled gently. “I had a teddy bear with the same name.”
He didn’t know how to take that or if he should think that meant something more than a coincidence. So, he said, “You ride your teddy too?”
She laughed. It was short and high like a bicycle bell. “No,” she said. “But it was the one thing that was different about everything else in that binder. It’s something I can spin a story around at the party.”
He paused, curious to know what she meant. “Like…what?”
She sighed and thought for a moment. “Well, I’m supposed to be a second cousin twice removed from the Durand family, right? So, let’s say I had a horse named Skippy too and that was the first thing we bonded over. Discussing our horses.”
He didn’t hate that idea. He nodded and said, “Okay. Sounds believable enough.”
She smiled up at him and a strange warm feeling came over him. He turned away from her. “So,” she said, “tell me about this party.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. Etiquette. That sort of thing.”
He thought for a moment. There were so many things that were second nature to him because he’d grown up in the environment. He didn’t know where to start. He thought a little longer about it and decided on what to do when she first arrived.
“Well, someone will probably take your wrap when you arrive. That’s your jacket or coat.”
She scowled. “I know what a wrap is.”
“Okay…well, after that you’ll be introduced to people at the party. My stepmother will probably parade you around a little to try and rattle your cage. See if you slip up and tell her that you really bag groceries at a grocery store or something.”
She laughed shortly. “Okay. Tell me about Rebecca.”
“She’s my father’s wife.”
“Right,” she dragged out the word a little. “I got that from the binder. Tell me about her, though. What you know.”
“There’s not much to know,” he says. “She married my dad when I was fifteen or sixteen and she is in her twenties, I think.”
