She nodded. Her blonde hair was pulled up into a messy bun, and her face was clear of makeup. It wasn’t often that I saw Alexandra without her armor, but the moments I did, I felt like I was truly seeing my best friend.
While our lives were often glamorous, they were also very public, which left us with expectations we had to live up to. While she didn’t have a board to win over, she had the public.
“Is your assistant still hardcore crushing on him?” Alexandra asked with a giggle.
I nodded, “I felt bad telling her about this whole fake dating fiasco. She was so sad,” I explained, recalling the awkward conversation. “Once I explained it was purely business, she was okay—even praised the idea.”
“I’ve met him once, and even I could understand the appeal.”
I rolled my eyes, “You seem to be forgetting about your long-term boyfriend that you insist you love.”
Alexandra glared and threw a throw pillow at me. “A girl can look, and Maverick doesn’t mind. Hell, he would probably agree if he saw Rome. He’s cute,” Alexandra mused. “Cipriani, is that Italian?”
I nodded as I flipped through the personnel file I had on Rome. It was concerningly extensive, but when it came to my brother, he was nothing if not thorough. “His parents immigrated from Italy when they were eighteen, and Rome was born only a couple of months later.” From the timeline, I concluded it was an accidental pregnancy and a rushed marriage between his parents, but they seemed to be genuinely in love if the photos were anything to go by. Though there weren’t many of the three of them.
“What’s he like?”
I rolled my eyes just thinking about Rome. “Annoying, loud, flirty, inappropriate.”
Alexandra laughed hard and stole the file from my hands, replacing it with the tabloid of me and Rome. “If he’s so intolerable, why do you still have him work for you?”
“Because he’s good at his job.” Which, in my mind, was reason enough. I didn’t like the majority of my subordinates. I mean, who did? But I could respect their intellect and their ability to do their job well.
Alexandra hummed as she flipped through the file. I knew what she was reading over. I basically had it memorized with how many times I had read through it. It went over his childhood, growing up in the Bronx surrounded by cousins, aunts, and uncles. It went over the death of his father and his mom’s subsequent marriage to her second husband, Mateo Romano. There were pages upon pages of his years as an ArmyRanger, and every detail of his comings and goings since his retirement from active duty.
When I had first dived into the pages, I had hoped to find a flaw with Rome that would give me reason to fire him. There was none. On paper, Rome was perfect.
Which somehow made him even more annoying.
“Do you have a comment?” I asked after a few minutes of Alexandra smiling as she flipped through the file.
She smirked, but didn’t answer.
I sipped my own wine, and my gaze fell back on the skyline outside my penthouse windows.
I loved my apartment, but after Rome’s comment, I was starting to see it in a new light. It was all clean lines, modern furniture, shiny surfaces, and not a hint of my real life on its walls. It looked like a showroom the majority of the time, but it helped me to uphold the image of a successful businesswoman. It’s all I had ever wanted to be, but I did wonder if I had lost myself in the process of getting here. Or if I had never found myself in the first place, and instead had been forcing myself into a mold made for someone else.
“Should I repaint?”
Alexandra looked at me, confused, “You spent three months selecting the perfect shade of black for your walls. I will not suffer through that again.”
I huffed a laugh, “There’s no color in here. I was thinking I should decorate, or at least buy some pillows to liven up the place.”
“Did you hit your head or something?” Alexandra joked. “Maybe Rome really did drive you crazy.”
I waved off her comment, “Ignore me. I’m going through a phase.”
She shrugged her shoulders and refocused on Rome’s file, “So how do you plan on convincing everyone of this relationship?”
I took a sip and shrugged, “Melissa has a whole plan. We didn’t do anything to cause the rumors, but the press was convinced anyway. I don’t think it will be too hard.”
“It helps that he’s so easy to look at,” Alexandra explained as she held up a picture of Rome that she pulled from the file.
I plucked it out of her hands to get a better look. It was of Rome’s Ranger team. There were four men standing tall, dressed in camouflage, with various weapons swung over their shoulders. They were all covered in dirt and no one was smiling, but there was a light in Rome’s eyes. I saw that light in every photo I had seen of him, as if there was a permanent happiness that followed him around.
The next few months, or however long Melissa had planned, while faking dating Rome, were going to be interesting, to say the least. I could barely tolerate him, and now I had to pretend to be in love with him. At least he could charm the socks off anyone; the board was bound to be swayed by him.
The position I was forced into made me feel out of control. The board believed I was too cold and uncaring to do my job. The fact that my solution was Rome only added to the problem. I wished that my work ethic and the financial reports were enough to prove my abilities, yet they still needed more.
