Was he joking? He had to be joking. I nearly choked on my donut when I heard him say we should get married. We just met again like five minutes ago and he was already proposing? How in the world did he get laid with so many girls if his pickup lines were this freaking stupid?

Granted, any girl would love to be in my shoes right now. I mean, come on, this is Daxter! He’s the hottest guy on the planet! If my mind wasn’t so preoccupied with his proposal I’d be thinking of how he could lay me down on hot sand and lick my skin from my belly to my lips… but no, I was too busy wondering if he had completely lost all common sense.

I took another look at him. He was indeed a hot looking man. Daxter always had chestnut hair but he let it grow long and neatly brushed it back, letting it flow with elegance and style. It paired neatly with the bright blue ocean of his eyes. However, while his style was soft and endearing his body was built like a machine; lean for efficiency but ripped with muscles. I could only guess at how often he must have spent working out at the gym.

“Hold on a minute, you were being serious?” I just had to ask to make sure.

Daxter nodded and his hands started waving around as he tried to explain, “Look, it’s not going to be real. I mean, in their eyes and the public’s eye it’ll be real. We’ll do the whole wedding thing and all the papers. However, that doesn’t mean you have to love me or treat me as your husband. We could never speak to each other and it’ll be fine.”

“So kind of like a fake marriage but it’s not?” I asked him. “It’s all for show? I still don’t see how this benefits either of us.”

He took a donut, dipped it in coffee, took a bite and then drank a bit before he continued on. “Well, one of the reasons why my family doesn’t trust me is because they think I’ll spend all the money on girls. That would have been true before. If I marry you then they’ll see I’m trying to be serious for once.”

“I get it,” I finally saw what he was getting at. “Once they see you’re being a bit serious about your personal life they’ll start to trust you with their business too. What’s in it for me?”

This is where Daxter really dropped the bomb on me. “If you marry me, I get to keep my family’s wealth. That means you have unlimited access to all that money too.”

Woah.

For a moment I had to breathe in everything he was telling me. It was like I suddenly got run over by a bus, except I somehow survived and won the lottery too. There was a lot to soak in with his offer but there was also one little monkey wrench in there: getting married.

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” I asked him. I learned in the strip club that a girl should never offer her goods without a down payment. He may not be asking for me to strip and fuck him but he was asking to use me, and in my book that was just about the same thing.

“Here,” he said as he flipped out his wallet. He wrote a check signed for three thousand dollars. “Take this. Use it for whatever bills you still have. If it’s not enough then come back to me but I’ll only give more if you agree to my plan. It’s a fake wedding anyway, what do you have to lose?”

I chuckled, almost to a sarcastic point, and told him, “A whole lot. Just think what people would say about me if we suddenly hooked up and got married on a whim. They’d call me a gold digger.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be too far from the truth,” he told me and I smacked him on the head with my spoon.

“Shut up,” I joked but at the same time, I was trying to be a little more serious. “Look, I appreciate the offer and the money but you can’t possibly be serious, right?”

Daxter looked at me with such big sad, puppy eyes it was like I stepped on his favorite toy or something. “I’m dead serious. Let’s do it. If it doesn’t work out we can get divorced and I’ll give you a million dollars for the trouble. Come on, it’s a win-win situation for both of us.”

I swallowed hard and looked at him for a long while. One million dollars even if it doesn’t work out? Unlimited access to everything he has if it does work out? I could pay all my bills, send some money home and start my own business so I wouldn’t have to rely on him forever. I could quit my job at the strip club and even offer Hannah a job once I got things going in the right direction.

“I am going to kick myself in the mouth for this,” I whispered to myself. I then looked at him and said, “This is crazy. This is absolutely bat-shit crazy. We haven’t seen each other in half a decade and the first things you do is stare at my tits and then ask me to marry you in exchange for mountains of cash. You know what the craziest thing about it is?”

“What?”

I exhaled, shut my eyes and then calmed my nerves before I looked at him once more and said, “The craziest thing here is that I accept your offer. Let’s get married.”

Daxter’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. He had this really big smile on his face and I honestly felt a little moist between the legs when I saw him sit up straight and flex his muscles. Damn it, why was he such a gorgeous man? The way his eyes glittered just made me want to fall over and kiss him. I was almost willing to forget how insane and abrupt this plan was.

“Thank you!” he told me as he grabbed my hands and gave them a squeeze. “We have to get started as soon as possible. We don’t want to waste time or else my dad will sign the inheritance away.”

I bit my lip and pondered what the next step was. “What do we do now?”

“We have to make an announcement,” he told me. “We can organize something like an engagement party at Mercury Wild.”

I was taken aback a little, “Mercury Wild? That’s an expensive joint, right?”

Daxter nodded and gave back a wicked grin, “I know the owners, Trevor Wild and his wife, Jasmine. They’re actually really good friends of mine. You know, just a while back Mercury Wild wasn’t as successful as it is now. Everything changed because of his wife. It’s starting to make me really believe there’s a woman behind every man’s success.”

“That’s awfully profound but also a little cliché, don’t you think?” I asked him. “But I guess you’re right. If we need to announce it then that’s the place to do it. What else do we need to do?”

“Get a ring, start finishing all the paperwork and then move you into my place,” Daxter told me.

That’s when the blood drained from my face and my jaw dropped. “Wait, I thought it was just a fake marriage?”

He shrugged and reasoned out, “Well, we have to make it look real. It won’t seem real if we still live in separate homes. If you prefer, we can say we sleep in the same bedroom and all but I’ll give you your own room if you want.”

“L-let’s talk about all that later,” I tried to shift the topic and munched down on what remained of my meal. “Let’s get the engagement party done first and see where that leads us.”

He nodded in agreement, and I gulped down my coffee as one question remained cycling in my head throughout the rest of the day: what in the world did I get into now?