League events where their moms had thrown them together. But then as they’d both become adults, he’d thought the crush would fade.
It hadn’t.
He knew that she wasn’t the girl he’d dreamed about in middle school and high school anymore, but there was another part of him that wanted to claim her. That wanted to know that he had won over the prettiest girl from the Five Families neighborhood. That she was his.
Even just temporarily.
She was watching him cautiously. Almost as if she were afraid to trust him. That hurt.
More than it should have.
Granted, he was coming to her with a harebrained scheme, the kind that make his dad laugh his ass off at him. But she did need a break from the blind dates. And he did need a fiancée. He wasn’t about to get involved with Marnie again and she would be relentless if he didn’t provide a distraction.
“The hospital board has promised to make a decision in two months’ time. So I’d need you to be my fiancée for about three months just so that you can attend the gala after I’m announced chief and the wing is opened,” he said. Three months. That should be enough to convince him that any crush he’d had on her was well and truly dead. He could go back to being her friend and stop having hot dreams about her.
“Three months? Would we live together?” she asked. “I’ve been looking for a job and have some modeling gigs set up so I won’t be in town continuously during that time. Would that be a problem?”
Derek leaned back in his chair trying to stay cautiously optimistic, but it seemed to him that she was almost on board with the idea. “I don’t think so. In fact, I might be able to swing some time off and go with you. It would probably enhance the entire engagement story.”
“Fair enough. What about the bachelor auction? I see you’re already on the list. Would an engaged guy be on there?” she asked.
“Yes, because we were hiding our engagement. You can bid on me and win me now,” he said with a wink.
“If we’re engaged why do I have to bid on you?” she asked with a wink back. “My brother is already into me for a month of babysitting if I win him.”
Derek had to laugh. The bachelor auction might have been one of the Five Families Women’s League’s largest fund-raisers but the men were always trying to get out of it. He just didn’t like the idea of being at the mercy of someone who’d “won” him.
“I’m offering you three months of no blind dates,” he said.
“That’s something that Diego can’t match.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure people would not believe you were dating your brother.”
“Thank God,” she said, laughing. This time there wasn’t the manic edge to her tone that had been there earlier when he’d first mentioned the whole engagement scheme.
“Yes. So what do you say? Are we going to do this?” he asked.
“Where would I live?” she asked.
“With me or not. Your choice,” he said. “What do you want to do?”
He hadn’t thought of anything beyond finding a woman who’d agree and then telling Marnie about her. But now that Bianca had mentioned living with him he knew he wanted her in his house.
Then he immediately had a vision of her in his bed. That thick ebony hair of hers spread out on his pillow, her chocolaty brown eyes looking up at him with sensual demand. Her limbs bare...
“Derek?”
“Huh?” His mind was fully engaged in the fantasy that had taken hold.
“I said, would you mind if I lived with you? I’ve been staying with my folks but we really need our own space.”
He nodded. Living with him worked. “That sounds perfect. What do I need to do to get the place ready for you? Are we doing this?”
She leaned forward and he saw that same concern and uncertainty in her eyes and he realized that fantasies aside, he never wanted to put Bianca in a position where she was anything but a friend to him. He wanted her to be able to count on him. Even if that meant ignoring his own need for her.
“I want to say yes. Can I have the evening to think it over?” she asked, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I want to make sure I haven’t missed any details and I want to run it by Benito. Make sure he’s okay with another man in my life.”
“He’s two, right?”
“Yes, but he and I are very close and I just...after losing his father, I want to make sure he’s going to be okay,” Bianca said.
Derek nodded. He wasn’t going to force her. He was surprised she’d considered his offer and was willing to go along with it as far as she had this evening.
“That sounds fair,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket and checking his calendar. “I don’t have any surgeries scheduled for tomorrow morning so I’m free. Would you and Benito like to come over to my place for breakfast? You can check it out and he can meet me.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Too bad she didn’t seem so convinced of that. He wasn’t too sure how to convince her. This wasn’t like the operating room where he knew all the variables and could make sure nothing went wrong. This was life where he tended to make mistakes, and he really hoped this didn’t turn out to be a big one.
* * *
As she sat there with Derek, Bianca knew that one night wasn’t going to be enough time to ensure she made the right choice. But then a two-year-long engagement to Jose hadn’t really been beneficial in hindsight. This would work. She needed it to.
She had been struggling since she’d returned to Cole’s Hill. She’d stayed in Spain for nine months after Jose’s death and then just after Benito had turned twenty-two months old had decided to come back to Texas but she was no closer to figuring out what was next. She was the first to admit that her knee-jerk reaction of divorcing Jose when she’d found out about his mistress had been just her way of getting out of a bad marriage. She’d never thought beyond hurting him the way he’d hurt her. Now that he was dead, she’d hoped the anger would be gone, but she knew it was still there.
And not working, living with her parents where they had a cleaning staff and wanted to hire a nanny for her, just gave her too much time to think about—dwell on—the past. It was humiliating and not productive.
This idea of Derek’s was a little bit on the crazy side, she knew that, but there was a part of her that really liked it. From certain angles, she saw it as the solution to all of her problems. She wanted to be out of her parents’ house and out from under their overprotectiveness. She could research some career options besides modeling and give her a chance to be the kind of mom to Beni that she wanted to be.
“Yes. That sounds good to me,” Bianca repeated. She realized she might have been staring at Derek. As their eyes met something passed between them that never had before.
A zing.
An awareness.
Oh, no. Had he figured out that she’d been secretly crushing on him for the last few months? How embarrassing. She gave him her cotillion smile—the one she always used to put boys in their place back in the day—and then pushed her chair back. “I think I should be getting home.”
“I’ll walk you back,” he said. “Or we can steal one of the golf carts.”
She shook her head. “I thought we both agreed to never speak of golf carts.”
“No one will suspect a thing,” he said.
“That’s what you thought the last time. And I’m pretty sure that the groundskeeper knew it was us, even though he could never prove it.”