Four
Danielle was still feeling wobbly after her interaction with Joshua down at the barn. She had touched a horse. And she had touched him. She hadn’t counted on doing either of those things today. And he had told her they were going to have dinner together tonight and he was going to give her a crash course on the Grayson family. She wasn’t entirely sure she felt ready for that either.
She had gone through all her clothes, looking for something suitable for having dinner with a billionaire. She didn’t have anything. Obviously.
She snorted, feeling like an idiot for thinking she could find something relatively appropriate in that bag of hers. A bag he thought had scabies.
She turned her snort into a growl.
Then, rebelliously, she pulled out the same pair of faded pants she had been wearing yesterday.
He had probably never dealt with a woman who wore the same thing twice. Let alone the same thing two days in a row. Perversely, she kind of enjoyed that. Hey, she was here to be unsuitable. Might as well start now.
She looked in the mirror, grabbed one stringy end of her hair and blew out a disgusted breath. She shouldn’t care how her hair looked.
But he was just so good-looking. It made her feel like a small, brown mouse standing next to him. It wasn’t fair, really. That he had the resources to buy himself nice clothes and that he just naturally looked great.
She sighed, picking Riley up from his crib and sticking him in the little carrier she would put him in for dinner. He was awake and looking around, so she wanted to be in his vicinity, rather than leaving him upstairs alone. He wasn’t a fussy baby. Really, he hardly ever cried.
But considering how often his mother had left him alone in those early days of his life, before Danielle had realized she couldn’t count on her mother to take good care of him, she was reluctant to leave him by himself unless he was sleeping.
Then she paused, going back over to her bag to get the little red, dog-eared dictionary inside. She bent down, still holding on to Riley, and retrieved it. Then she quickly looked up scabies.
“I knew it,” she said derisively, throwing the dictionary back into her bag.
She walked down the stairs and into the dining room, setting Riley in his seat on the chair next to hers. Joshua was already sitting at the table, looking as though he had been waiting for them. Which, she had a feeling, he was doing just to be annoying and superior.
“My bag can’t have scabies,” she said by way of greeting.
“Oh really?”
“Yes. I looked it up. Scabies are mites that burrow into your skin. Not into a duffel bag.”
“They have to come from somewhere.”
“Well, they’re not coming from my bag. They’re more likely to come from your horses, or something.”
“You like my horses,” he said, his tone dry. “Anyway, we’re about to have dinner. So maybe we shouldn’t be discussing skin mites?”
“You’re the one who brought up scabies. The first time.”
“I had pretty much dropped the subject.”
“Easy enough for you to do, since it wasn’t your hygiene being maligned.”
“Sure.” He stood up from his position at the table. “I’m just going to go get dinner, since you’re here. I had it warming.”
“Did you cook?”
He left the room without answering and returned a moment later holding two plates full of hot food. Her stomach growled intensely. She didn’t even care what was on the plates. As far as she was concerned, it was gourmet. It was warm and obviously not from a can or a frozen pizza box. Plus, she was sitting at a real dining table and not on a patio set that had been shoved into her tiny living room.
The meal looked surprisingly healthy, considering she had discovered his affinity for Pop-Tarts earlier. And it was accompanied by a particularly nice-looking rice. “What is this?”
“Chicken and risotto,” he said.
“What’s risotto?”
“Creamy rice,” he said. “At least, that’s the simple explanation.”
Thankfully, he wasn’t looking at her like she was an alien for not knowing about risotto. But then she remembered he had spoken of having simple roots. So maybe he was used to dealing with people who didn’t have as sophisticated a palate as he had.
She wrinkled her nose, then picked up her fork and took a tentative bite. It was good. So good. And before she knew it, she had cleared out her portion. Her cheeks heated when she realized he had barely taken two bites.
“There’s plenty more in the kitchen,” he said. Then he took her plate from in front of her and went back into the kitchen. She was stunned, and all she could do was sit there and wait until he returned a moment later with the entire pot of risotto, another portion already on her plate.
“Eat as much as you want,” he said, setting everything in front of her.
Well, she wasn’t going to argue with that suggestion. She polished off the chicken, then went back for thirds of the risotto. Eventually, she got around to eating the salad.
“I thought we were going to talk about my responsibilities for being your fiancée and stuff,” she said after she realized he had been sitting there staring at her for the past ten minutes.
“I thought you should have a chance to eat a meal first.”
“Well,” she said, taking another bite, “that’s unexpectedly kind of you.”
“You seem...hungry.”
That was the most loaded statement of the century. She was so hungry. For so many things. Food was kind of the least of it. “It’s just been a really crazy few months.”
“How old is the baby? Riley. How old is Riley?”
For the first time, because of that correction, she became aware of the fact that he seemed reluctant to call Riley by name. Actually, Joshua seemed pretty reluctant to deal with Riley in general.
Riley was unperturbed. Sitting in that reclined seat, his muddy blue eyes staring up at the ceiling. He lifted his fist, putting it in his mouth and gumming it idly.
That was one good thing she could say about their whole situation. Riley was so young that he was largely unperturbed by all of it. He had gone along more or less unaffected by their mother’s mistakes. At least, Danielle hoped so. She really did.
“He’s almost four months old,” she said. She felt a soft smile touch her lips. Yes, taking care of her half brother was hard. None of it was easy. But he had given her a new kind of purpose. Had given her a kind of the drive she’d been missing before.
Before Riley, she had been somewhat content to just enjoy living life on her own terms. To enjoy not cleaning up her mother’s messes. Instead, working at the grocery store, going out with friends after work for coffee or burritos at the twenty-four-hour Mexican restaurant.
Her life had been simple, and it had been carefree. Something she hadn’t been afforded all the years she’d lived with her mother, dealing with her mother’s various heartbreaks, schemes to try to better their circumstances and intense emotional lows.
So many years when Danielle should have been a child but instead was expected to be the parent. If her mother passed out in the bathroom after having too much to drink, it was up to Danielle to take care of her. To put a pillow underneath her mother’s head, then make herself a piece of toast for dinner and get her homework done.
In contrast, taking care of only herself had seemed simple. And in truth, she had resented Riley at first, resented the idea that she would have to take care of another person again. But taking care of a baby was different. He wasn’t a victim of his own bad choices. No, he was a victim of circumstances. He hadn’t had a chance to make a single choice for himself yet.
To Danielle, Riley was the child she’d once been.
Except she hadn’t had anyone to step in and take care of her when her mother failed. But Riley did. That realization had filled Danielle with passion. Drive.
And along with that dedication came a fierce, unexpected love like she had never felt before toward another human being. She would do anything for him. Give anything for him.
“And you’ve been alone with him all this time?”
She didn’t know why she was so reluctant to let Joshua know that Riley wasn’t her son. She supposed it was partly because, for all intents and purposes, he was her son. She intended to adopt him officially as soon as she had the means to do so. As soon as everything in her life was in order enough that Child Services would respond to her favorably.
The other part was that as long as people thought Riley was hers, they would be less likely to suggest she make a different decision about his welfare. Joshua Grayson had a coldness to him. He seemed to have a family who loved and supported him, but instead of finding it endearing, he got angry about it. He was using her to get back at his dad for doing something that, in her opinion, seemed mostly innocuous. And yes, she was benefiting from his pettiness, so she couldn’t exactly judge.
Still, she had a feeling that if he knew Riley wasn’t her son, he would suggest she do the “responsible” thing and allow him to be raised by a two-parent family, or whatever. She just didn’t even want to have that discussion with him. Or with anybody. She had too many things against her already.
She didn’t want to fight about this too.
“Mostly,” she said carefully, treading the line between the truth and a lie. “Since he was about three weeks old. And I thought... I thought I could do it. I’d been self-sufficient for a long time. But then I realized there are a lot of logistical problems when you can’t just leave your apartment whenever you want. It’s harder to get to work. And I couldn’t afford childcare. There wasn’t any space at the places that had subsidized rates. So I was trading childcare with a neighbor, but sometimes our schedules conflicted. Anyway, it was just difficult. You can imagine why responding to your ad seemed like the best possible solution.”
“I already told you, I’m not judging you for taking me up on an offer I made.”
“I guess I’m just explaining that under other circumstances I probably wouldn’t have sought you out. But things have been hard. I lost my job because I wasn’t flexible enough and I had missed too many shifts because babysitting for Riley fell through.”
“Well,” he said, a strange expression crossing his face, “your problems should be minimized soon. You should be independently wealthy enough to at least afford childcare.”
Not only that, she would actually be able to make decisions about her life. About what she wanted. When Joshua had asked her earlier today about whether or not she would go back to Portland, it had been the first time she had truly realized she could make decisions about where she wanted to live, rather than just parking herself somewhere because she happened to be there already.
It would be the first time in her life she could make proactive decisions rather than just reacting to her situation.
“Right. So I guess we should talk about your family,” she said, determined to move the conversation back in the right direction. She didn’t need to talk about herself. They didn’t need to get to know each other. She just needed to do this thing, to trick his family, lie...whatever he needed her to do. So she and Riley could start their new life.
“I already told you my younger sister is an architectural genius. My older brother Isaiah is the financial brain. And I do the public relations and marketing. We have another brother named Devlin, and he runs a small ranching operation in town. He’s married, no kids. Then there are my parents.”
“The reason we find ourselves in this situation,” she said, folding her hands and leaning forward. Then she cast a glance at the pot of risotto and decided to grab the spoon and serve herself another helping while they were talking.
“Yes. Well, not my mother so much. Sure, she wrings her hands and looks at me sadly and says she wishes I would get married. My father is the one who...actively meddles.”
“That surprises me. I mean, given what I know about fathers. Which is entirely based on TV. I don’t have one.”
He lifted a brow.
“Well,” she continued, “sure, I guess I do. But I never met him. I mean, I don’t even know his name.”
She realized that her history was shockingly close to the story she had given about Riley. Which was a true one. It just wasn’t about Danielle. It was about her mother. And the fact that her mother repeated the same cycle over and over again. The fact that she never seemed to change. And never would.
“That must’ve been hard,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I bet he was an ass. I mean, circumstances would lead you to believe that he must be, right?”
“Yeah, it’s probably a pretty safe assumption.”
“Well, anyway, this isn’t about my lack of a paternal figure. This is about the overbearing presence of yours.”
He laughed. “My mother is old-fashioned—so is my father. My brother Devlin is a little bit too, but he’s also something of a rebel. He has tattoos and things. He’s a likely ally for you, especially since he got married a few months ago and is feeling soft about love and all of that. My brother Isaiah isn’t going to like you. My sister, Faith, will try. Basically, if you cuss, chew with your mouth open, put your elbows on the table and in general act like a feral cat, my family will likely find you unsuitable. Also, if you could maybe repeatedly bring up the fact that you’re really looking forward to spending my money, and that you had another man’s baby four months ago, that would be great.”
She squinted. “I think the fact that I have a four-month-old baby in tow will be reminder enough.”
The idea of going into his family’s farmhouse and behaving like a nightmare didn’t sit as well with her as it had when the plan had been fully abstract. But now he had given names to the family members. Now she had been here for a while. And now it was all starting to feel a little bit real.
“It won’t hurt. Though, he’s pretty quiet. It might help if he screamed.”
She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I have a feeling your mom and sister might just want to hold him. That will be the real problem. Not having everyone hate me. That’ll be easy enough. It’ll be keeping everyone from loving him.”
That comment struck her square in the chest, made her realize just what they were playing at here. She was going to be lying to these people. And yes, the idea was to alienate them, but they were going to think she might be their daughter-in-law, sister-in-law...that Riley would be their grandson or nephew.
But it would be a lie.
That’s the point, you moron. And who cares? They’re strangers. Riley is your life. He’s your responsibility. And you’ll never see these people again.
“We won’t let them hold the baby,” he said, his expression hard, as if he’d suddenly realized she wasn’t completely wrong about his mother and sister and it bothered him.
She wished she could understand why he felt so strongly about putting a stop to his father playing matchmaker. As someone whose parents were ambivalent about her existence, his disregard for his family’s well wishes was hard to comprehend.
“Okay,” she said. “Fine by me. And you just want me to...be my charming self?”
“Obviously we’ll have to come up with a story about our relationship. We don’t have to make up how we met. We can say we met through the ad.”
“The ad your father placed, not the ad you placed.”
“Naturally.”
She looked at Joshua then, at the broad expanse of table between them. Two people who looked less like a couple probably didn’t exist on the face of the planet. Honestly, two strangers standing across the street from each other probably looked more like a happily engaged unit than they did.
She frowned. “This is very unconvincing.”
“What is? Be specific.”
She rolled her eyes at his impatience. “Us.”
She stood up and walked toward him, sitting down in the chair right next to him. She looked at him for a moment, at the sharp curve of his jaw, the enticing shape of his lips. He was an attractive man. That was an understatement. He was also so uptight she was pretty sure he had a stick up his ass.
“Look, you want your family to think you’ve lost your mind, to think you have hooked up with a totally unsuitable woman, right?”
“That is the game.”
“Then you have to look like you’ve lost your mind over me. Unfortunately, Joshua, you look very much in your right mind. In fact, a man of sounder mind may not exist. You are...responsible. You literally look like The Man.”
“Which man?”
“Like, The Man. Like, fight the power. You’re the power. Nobody’s going to believe you’re with me. At least, not if you don’t seem a little bit...looser.”
A slight smile tipped up those lips she had been thinking about only a moment before. His blue eyes warmed, and she felt an answering warmth spread low in her belly. “So what you’re saying is we need to look like we have more of a connection?”
Her throat went dry. “It’s just a suggestion.”
He leaned forward, his gaze intent on hers. “An essential one, I think.” Then he reached up and she jerked backward, nearly toppling off the side of her chair. “It looks like I’m not the only one who’s wound a bit tight.”
“I’m not,” she said, taking a deep breath, trying to get her jittery body to calm itself down.
She wasn’t used to men. She wasn’t used to men touching her. Yes, intermittently she and her mother had lived with some of her mother’s boyfriends, but none of them had ever been inappropriate with her. And she had never been close enough to even give any of them hugs.
And she really, really wasn’t used to men who were so beautiful it was almost physically painful to look directly at them.
“You’re right. We have to do a better job of looking like a couple. And that would include you not scampering under the furniture when I get close to you.”
She sat up straight and folded her hands in her lap. “I did not scamper,” she muttered.
“You were perilously close to a scamper.”
“Was not,” she grumbled, and then her breath caught in her throat as his warm palm made contact with her cheek.
He slid his thumb down the curve of her face to that dent just beneath her lips, his eyes never leaving hers. She felt...stunned and warm. No, hot. So very hot. Like there was a furnace inside that had been turned up the moment his hand touched her bare skin.
She supposed she was meant to be flirtatious. To play the part of the moneygrubbing tart with loose morals he needed her to be, that his family would expect her to be. But right now, she was shocked into immobility.
She took a deep breath, fighting for composure. But his thumb migrated from the somewhat reasonable point just below her mouth to her lip and her composure dissolved completely. His touch felt...shockingly intimate and filthy somehow. Not in a bad way, just in a way she’d never experienced before.
For some reason she would never be able to articulate—not even to herself—she darted her tongue out and touched the tip to his thumb. She tasted salt, skin and a promise that arrowed downward to the most private part of her body, leaving her feeling breathless. Leaving her feeling new somehow.
As if a wholly unexpected and previously unknown part of herself had been uncovered, awoken. She wanted to do exactly what he had accused her of doing earlier. She wanted to turn away. Wanted to scurry beneath the furniture or off into the night. Somewhere safe. Somewhere less confrontational.
But he was still looking at her. And those blue eyes were like chains, lashing her to the seat, holding her in place. And his thumb, pressed against her lip, felt heavy. Much too heavy for her to push against. For her to fight.
And when it came right down to it, she didn’t even want to.
Something expanded in her chest, spreading low, opening up a yawning chasm in her stomach. Deepening her need, her want. Her desire for things she hadn’t known she could desire until now.
Until he had made a promise with his touch that she hadn’t known she wanted fulfilled.
She was just about to come back to herself, to pull away. And then he closed the distance between them.
His lips were warm and firm. The kiss was nothing like she had imagined it might be. She had always thought a kiss must reach inside and steal your brain. Transform you. She had always imagined a kiss to be powerful, considering the way her mother acted.
When her mother was under the influence of love—at least, that was what her mother had called it; Danielle had always known it was lust—she acted like someone entirely apart from herself.
Yes, Danielle had always known a kiss could be powerful. But what she hadn’t counted on was that she might feel wholly like herself when a man fused his lips to hers. That she would be so perfectly aware of where she was, of what she was doing.
Of the pressure of his lips against hers, the warmth of his hand as he cradled her face, the hard, tightening knot of desire in her stomach that told her how insufficient the kiss was.
The desire that told her just how much more she wanted. Just how much more there could be.
He was kissing her well, this near stranger, and she never wanted it to end.
Instinctively, she angled her head slightly, parting her lips, allowing him to slide his tongue against hers. It was unexpectedly slick, unexpectedly arousing. Unexpectedly everything she wanted.
That was the other thing that surprised her. Because not only had she imagined a woman might lose herself entirely when a man kissed her, she had also imagined she would be immune. Because she knew better. She knew the cost. But she was sitting here, allowing him to kiss her and kiss her and kiss her. She was Danielle Kelly, and she was submitting herself to this sensual assault with almost shocking abandon.
Her hands were still folded in her lap, almost primly, but her mouth was parted wide, gratefully receiving every stroke of his tongue, slow and languorous against her own. Sexy. Deliciously affecting.
He moved his hands then, sliding them around the back of her neck, down between her shoulder blades, along the line of her spine until his hands spanned her waist. She arched, wishing she could press her body against his. Wishing she could do something to close the distance between them. Because he was still sitting in his chair and she in hers.
He pulled away, and she followed him, leaning into him with an almost humiliating desperation, wanting to taste him again. To be kissed again. By Joshua Grayson, the man she was committing an insane kind of fraud with. The man who had hired her to play the part of his pretend fiancée.
“That will do,” he said, lifting his hand and squeezing her chin gently, those blue eyes glinting with a sharpness that cut straight to her soul. “Yes, Ms. Kelly, that will do quite nicely.”
Then he released his hold on her completely, settling back in his seat, his attention returning to his dinner plate.
A slash of heat bled across Danielle’s cheekbones. He hadn’t felt anything at all. He had been proving a point. Just practicing the ruse they would be performing for his family tomorrow night. The kiss hadn’t changed anything for him at all. Hadn’t been more than the simple meeting of mouths.
It had been her first kiss. It had been everything.
And right then she got her first taste of just how badly a man could make a woman feel. Of how—when wounded—feminine pride could be a treacherous and testy thing.
She rose from her seat and rounded to stand behind his. Then, without fully pausing to think about what she might be doing, she placed her hands on his shoulders, leaned forward and slid her hands beneath the collar of his shirt and down his chest.
Her palms made contact with his hot skin, with hard muscle, and she had to bite her lip to keep from groaning out loud. She had to plant her feet firmly on the wood floor to keep herself from running away, from jerking her hands back like a child burned on a hot oven.
She’d never touched a man like this before. It was shocking just how arousing she found it, this little form of revenge, this little rebellion against his blasé response to the earthquake he had caused in her body.
She leaned her head forward, nearly pressing her lips against his ear. Then her teeth scraped his earlobe.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I think it’s quite convincing.”
She straightened again, slowly running her fingernails over his skin as she did. She didn’t know where this confidence had come from. Where the know-how and seemingly deep, feminine instinct had come from that allowed her to toy with him. But there it was.
She was officially playing the part of a saucy minx. Considering that was what he had hired her for, her flirtation was a good thing. But her heart thundered harder than a drum as she walked back to Riley, picked up his carrier and flipped her hair as she turned to face Joshua.
“I think I’m going to bed. I had best prepare myself to meet your family.”
“You’ll be wearing something different tomorrow,” he said, his tone firm.
“Why?” She looked down at her ragged sweatshirt and skinny jeans. “That doesn’t make any sense. You wanted me to look unsuitable. I might as well go in this.”
“No, you brought up a very good point. You have to look unsuitable, but this situation also has to be believable. Plus, I think a gold digger would demand a new wardrobe, don’t you?” One corner of his lips quirked upward, and she had a feeling he was punishing her for her little display a moment ago.
If only she could work out quite where the trap was.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice stiff.
“But, Ms. Kelly, you told me yourself that you are a gold digger. That’s why you’re here, after all. For my gold.”
“I suppose so,” she said, keeping her words deliberately hard. “But I want actual gold, not clothes. So this is another thing that’s going to be on you.”
Those blue eyes glinted, and right then she got an idea of just how dangerous he was to her. “Consider it done.”
And if there was one thing she had learned so far about Joshua Grayson, it was that if he said something would be done, it would be.