a chair. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. I know my aunt and she’s all but admitted as much, though if she’d been half as good at skirting the truth with Forsythe as she was with me, we wouldn’t be in this mess. That tells me she very deliberately spilled the beans.”
“This is crazy,” Melanie said. “She can’t just manipulate us into doing what she wants. We’re two reasonable adults who are perfectly capable of making our own decisions, and we’ve decided that we’re completely unsuited.” She met his gaze. “Haven’t we?”
“That was the way we left it this weekend,” Richard agreed.
“Then all we need to do is tell her that.”
“I did.”
“And?”
He dragged the paper out of the trash and waved it in her direction. “This was her response. She’s obviously not giving up.”
“She’s your aunt. Do something.”
Richard gave her a rueful look. He’d never been any good at thwarting Destiny when she was on a mission. It was smarter to give in than to wait to be mowed down. Maybe Melanie would have a better tactic.
“Any suggestions?” he asked.
He waited as her expression turned thoughtful, then forlorn.
“None,” she said finally. “You? You know her better than I do. Surely you can think of something to get her off this tangent.”
Short of strangling her, there weren’t a lot of viable options, even fewer he could live with. It struck Richard that they were simply going to have to play this out. He felt only minimally guilty that he didn’t feel nearly as bad about that as he probably should. Still, he managed a resigned air as he said grimly, “Then we have absolutely no choice. We give her what she wants.”
Melanie stared. “Huh?”
He grinned. “I thought you were quicker to catch on to things.”
“Not this,” she admitted. “This seems a little out there, like a publicity stunt that’s doomed to failure.”
“It’ll work. Trust me,” Richard said, injecting a note of certainty into his voice.
“Let me be sure I have this straight,” Melanie said, as if she were grappling with a Nobel Prize caliber physics theory. “You’re suggesting that you and I pretend to be together to get Destiny to back off?”
Watching the flash of heat in Melanie’s eyes, Richard began to warm to the idea. The part of himself he’d been struggling to ignore all weekend long was ecstatic about this new strategy, despite its obvious risks. In fact, he had no intention of looking too closely at the risks.
“That is exactly what I mean,” he said, trying not to sound too eager.
Melanie looked doubtful, not disgusted. He took that as a good sign.
“Won’t she be hard to convince?” she asked.
Richard considered his aunt’s insightful nature. “Very hard,” he agreed. In this case, that might work to his advantage. It would buy him some time to see if these odd feelings of his when he was around Melanie really meant anything. Since he’d never experienced anything quite like them before, he couldn’t be sure.
“Then where are we going to draw the line?”
Richard studied the woman seated on the edge of her chair, bright patches of color in her otherwise pale cheeks. “We might have to be a little flexible on that.”
Melanie shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said adamantly. “Couldn’t you just hire me, the way she asked you to? Wouldn’t that satisfy her?”
“Sweetheart, I think it’s fairly clear by now that that was just a smoke screen. Heaven knows why, but she won’t be happy till we’ve walked down the aisle.”
Horror registered on Melanie’s face. “I am not marrying you.”
“No kidding,” he said, more than ready to agree with her on that. Not even he was prepared to carry this charade to that extreme, but a few weeks of getting close to Melanie and giving Destiny what she so clearly wanted held a certain undeniable appeal. “I think we can draw the line there. No marriage.”
“No sleeping together, either,” she added, giving him a hard stare. “I want to be clear about that, too.”
“We might have to negotiate on that one,” he said, feeling a whole lot better about things. Maybe he could turn this into a win-win situation instead of a disaster, after all. “So, Ms. Hart, you’re hired.”
She blinked in confusion. “As your new marketing person?”
“No. As my fiancée-to-be. No pay, but there will be a lot of perks.”
“You want me to market myself to your aunt as your fiancée?” she asked, her expression incredulous.
“Fiancée-to-be,” he corrected. “For starters.”
“Whatever,” Melanie said dismissively. “Isn’t that a huge leap? She can’t possibly think we’re engaged or even about to be engaged. We’ve just barely met, and she knows that first meeting did not go well at all.”
“Ah, but last weekend,” Richard said, affecting a tone of pure rapture.
“Oh, stuff a sock in it,” Melanie said irritably. “She won’t buy an engagement this quickly. She’s too smart for that. She might think I’m dumb enough to fall for you in ten seconds flat, but she’s bound to know that you’re not the type to fall in love at first sight. Heck, you’ve probably already told her that I’m not your type.”
He flushed at that. “Doesn’t matter. Destiny is a romantic at heart,” Richard said. He’d never noticed that about his aunt before, but her meddling was giving him whole new insights into her personality quirks. “She wants us together. If we go out a few times, let her catch us kissing from time to time, then say we’re engaged in a week or two, trust me, she won’t look any deeper.”
“This is crazy,” Melanie said again. “There has to be some other way besides lying to your aunt.”
He gazed into her eyes. “Let me be clear about something. This isn’t just about my aunt, Melanie. After Forsythe’s column, we have to convince the entire world that you and I fell madly, passionately in love and can’t bear to be apart.” He gave her a wry look. “It was the last thing either of us expected, of course.”
“Of course,” Melanie said with a decidedly sarcastic edge to her voice.
He picked up his pen and made a note to start arranging some family get-togethers, then glanced at Melanie, who looked as if she might be about to explode. “We’re all set, then, right?”
She stared at him incredulously. “No, we are not all set. I hate this.”
“I’m not crazy about it myself, but I can’t see any other solution. We have to make it real. People will forgive a prospective candidate a lot if there’s love involved. They’re not so forgiving of sleazy affairs.”
She was shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Do you have a better plan to extricate us from this?”
She regarded him with an undeniable hint of desperation in her eyes, then sighed. “No.”
He took pity on her. “I’ll let you stage a bang-up scene when you dump me,” he offered, fairly sure that a chance to humiliate him would appeal to her baser instincts. It might make her feel better about letting him back her into this corner, which, frankly, was more fun than he’d had in ages. Maybe he did owe Destiny, after all.
As he’d predicted, Melanie looked intrigued by the prospect of getting even. “In public?” she bargained.