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Stepping back from her, I slip my phone out of my pocket and pull up the text chain with Cooper.
Sebastian
I need to borrow Alex for a week or so.
Cooper
What do you mean ‘borrow Alex’?
Sebastian
Just that. We’ll be back in the City in about a week. Speak soon.
Cooper
What do you mean?
My gaze lifts to Alex as I slip my phone back into my pocket. It buzzes incessantly and I can just imagine the shit I’m going to be in with Cooper when I see him next. Perhaps I could have just said that it’s to get to know George, but it doesn’t hurt to mess with him a little.
“It’s sorted. You can come with me.”
“Excuse me?” Alex’s eyes widen and her brows inch towards her hairline.
“I’ve cleared it with Cooper.” Sort of. “You can come to Lake Geneva for the week and be my fiancée.”
“Fake fiancée, Sebastian.”
I stalk toward her like a lion stalking its prey. My hands cup her cheeks, my lips inches from her own. “I need you to play make believe and convince the Bennett’s that you are madly in love with me and I with you. When George signs on the dotted line, you can walk away and in return, I’ll make sure your student debts are paid off.”
She looks like a deer caught in a headlights and I don’t miss the way her gaze drops to my mouth. I can feel the heat from her body and smell her unique scent as it wraps around me.
She still wants me, and based on how dismissive and guarded she’s been, she doesn’t like that.
“Don’t fall in love with me,” she blurts out. Her breathing is labored, as if it’s too much to be this close to me.
The laugh that falls from my lips can’t be contained. To think of me falling in love with someone is ludicrous. Love is for the weak. It’s for people that want to lay themselves bare and be ripped to pieces when the person they think they love walks away. Love is just a feeling, and feelings are fickle.
“You don’t ever have to worry about that with me, sweetheart.” I brush a strand of hair away from her cheek, continuing, “I don’t do love.”
My lips brush over hers and as I pull back she follows me. I see the moment what I’ve said registers and the questions that come to the front of her mind as she searches my face for answers she isn’t going to get.
A look I can’t quite decipher flits through her eyes. She averts her gaze, hiding from me as she takes a step back, forcing my hands to drop. She wraps her arms around her waist as if trying to comfort herself. As if my words have somehow hurt her.
“Okay,” she whispers.
If the room wasn’t so quiet, the sound of Chicago traffic a distant murmur, I might not have heard her or the sense of defeat in her tone.
Watching her, stood at the end of the bed, a cloak of sadness wrapped around her, causes a niggle of something that feels suspiciously like guilt to settle into the pit of my stomach.
I have two options.
I either let her go back to New York and clean up the fallout that will come from my lie, or—and this is where I should be a gentleman and go with the former—I force her to go along with my lie and get the property I need to exact my revenge.
The silence is thick in the air. Before I can do anything stupid, like tell her that for her I’d try, I walk to the door, pausing just outside the room.
I never claimed to be a gentleman and I sure as shit am not going to start now.
“Great. I’ll call George and we can head up in the morning.”
