even as chaos raged inside. Her heart was beating too fast and too loud, and a dark ache was swirling over her skin like a riptide. In an effort to break the spell of his gaze, she pressed her nails hard into the palms of her hands.
‘You can’t just tell someone you’re marrying them,’ she said carefully. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’
The tension in the room quivered, as though she had somehow pressed her foot onto an accelerator pedal, and her eyes flickered involuntarily across to where Rollo sat, examining her with detached curiosity.
‘It does if you want your brother to keep his job. And, more important, to stay out of prison.’
She was out of her seat and leaning across his desk before she had even realised she was moving, her whole body shaking with shock and anger.
‘You unspeakable pig!’ Her voice rose. ‘That’s blackmail—’
‘Yes, it is.’
He wasn’t even embarrassed! Furiously, she glanced around for something blunt and heavy.
‘Why are you getting so bent out of shape about this?’ He stared at her calmly.
‘Why? Why? Maybe because it’s weird and wrong.’ Heat was blistering her skin. She couldn’t keep the shake out of her voice. ‘You’re cynically exploiting this situation for your own ends.’
He frowned. ‘You’re being melodramatic. You and I marrying will be mutually beneficial. As to the morality of blackmailing a thief and a liar, I’m not sure we have time to tackle that right now, so why don’t you just calm down and sit down?’
He lifted his arms behind his head and stretched out his shoulders.
‘Sit down,’ he said again, and this time there was no mistaking the authority in his voice. ‘I didn’t explain myself properly. I need to marry you, but in essence you’ll just be playing the part of my wife.’
She felt a rush of hope. ‘You mean like in an advert or something? For your business?’ He stared at her in silence.
‘No. Not like an advert. We’re going to have to marry legally.’
Daisy searched his face, looking for answers, for a way to escape the certainty in his voice. ‘Why can’t we just pretend?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘That won’t work. It can’t just look like we’re married. It has to be legal.’
‘But no one needs a wife that badly,’ she said almost viciously. ‘Not at two o’clock in the morning.’
He shrugged. ‘I do.’
‘But why?’
‘That doesn’t concern you.’ The certainty in his voice had hardened to granite.
She stared at him, sensing that somewhere a door was closing, a key was turning. Soon there would be no way out of this mess.
She felt her temper flare. ‘Fine. But I’m not marrying anyone—especially you—unless you tell me why you need a wife.’
It wasn’t just curiosity. She needed to assert herself. Needed him to know that she wasn’t just some puppet on a string.
She folded her arms in front of her chest. ‘I don’t need details. Just keep it short and simple.’
She held her breath as his eyes narrowed into knifepoints, and she knew he was gauging how much he needed to tell her. Finally he shrugged and met her gaze, cool and back in control again.
‘I’m trying to close a deal. For a building I want to buy. The owner is old-fashioned...sentimental. He’ll only sell to someone he trusts. Someone he believes shares his values. I need him to trust me and for that to happen he needs to see my warmer, softer side. Marriage is the simplest way to demonstrate that to him.’
She breathed out slowly. There was a kind of warped logic to his argument.
‘But surely I can’t be your only solution? What if you hadn’t found me in your office? What would you do then?’
His eyes were watching hers. ‘But I did find you. And you’re perfect.’
Her heart thudded against her ribs and she felt her cheeks grow warm. ‘I—I am?’
Rollo felt his groin grow hard, his body responding not only to her tentative question but to the flush of colour in her cheeks, the pulse jerking at the base of her throat. She was like a flint striking, sparking against him, catching fire.
And fire burned.
Ignoring the twitch of lust in his groin, he breathed out slowly. ‘Yes. You’re single. And you’re an actress. But primarily, and most important, I can trust you to be compliant.’
Daisy knew she had gone white.
‘Compliant?’ Her hands were trembling.
‘Out-of-work actresses are ten a penny. But I need someone I can depend on. And as your brother’s freedom and future are in my hands I’m confident I can rely completely on your discretion.’
He sounded so calm and controlled that she thought she might throw up. Was this how people got to the top in business? By turning every situation to their advantage no matter what the collateral damage?
‘But, of course, if you’d rather take your chances with the police...’
He let his sentence drift off as Daisy stared past him. She felt bruised, battered and beaten.
‘How long would it be for?’ she said dully.
‘A year. Then we’d go our separate ways and the slate would be wiped clean.’
She flinched inside. He made it sound so simple. The perfectly packaged, one-use-only relationship. An entirely disposable marriage. And maybe it was that simple for him, for clearly his brain worked in an entirely different way from hers.
Her heart contracted. But it was so different from the marriage she’d always imagined. Given her failed romantic history, she knew she was more likely to win a starring role on Broadway, but what she wanted was a relationship based on love and trust and honesty. Just like her parents’.
Only that was the polar opposite of what she and Rollo would have if she agreed to this stupid fake marriage.
The thought made her feel utterly alone.
Pushing back her shoulders, she lifted her head, a flare of defiance sparking inside her. ‘And you’re okay with that?’ she asked flatly. ‘It’s how you always imagined your marriage?’
Leaning back, Rollo swivelled his chair to face the window. He knew that her question was more or less rhetorical. But the blood was beating in his veins with swift, hot, unreasonable fury.
For a moment he gazed out across the city, silently battling the sickening panic and feeling of helplessness stirred up by their conversation. The short, expurgated answer was no—it wasn’t the way he’d imagined his marriage. Not because it would be fake and devoid of feeling, but because he had never once imagined being married at all.
Why would he? He knew for a fact that people weren’t capable of being satisfied with just one partner. And he certainly didn’t believe marriage represented love or devotion.
His mother’s behaviour had proved that to him over and over again, slowly destroying their family and his father in the process.
But marriage to Daisy would be altogether different, he reassured himself. It would be carefully controlled by him and there would be no risk of pain or humiliation, for that would require an emotional dependency that would be absent from their relationship. In fact, their lives need only really intertwine in public.
Feeling calmer, he turned to face her.
‘I can’t say I’ve expended much mental energy on the matter. Personally, I’ve never seen the point of making such