I hang my head sheepishly. “Right, yeah. That was today. But he proposed to me yesterday.”
Emerson scrutinizes me with his dark, intense eyes.Smolderinggets said a lot about his eyes. He’s one of thosemen who makes everyone feel seen, right down to their skin, in the best way possible.
I felt so special that his eyes, his smolder, were real for me. Like I was better than everyone else because he actually saw me, it wasn’t just his resting face.
But I never loved him. Never even questioned if I loved him.
“You don’t look like a blushing bride-to-be,” he observes.
“I said no.”
“Hmm. So you don’t want to marry him.”
I squirm in my seat because, as much as he states it as a fact, I know it’s a question, and it’s a question he already knows the answer to.
“It’s complicated.”
He lifts his water glass, swirls it like a glass of wine, but the restaurant only has plain water and a cooler stocked with Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite.
“Isn’t it always?”
“Is it?”
Emerson looks me dead in the eye and says, “Molly decided to marry me because her agent thought it would help her career if she could use my last name. She gave me a very compelling argument for why I wouldn’t want to be fodder for top bachelor lists while launching a production company. Here we are.”
I shake my head and sip my Coke to keep from laughing. “Sounds like me.”
“Oh? Is Sinclair trying to get himself removed from the eligible bachelor lists, too?”
I snort. “I don’t even know if he’s on those lists.”
“I assure you, he is.”
“Huh.”
I stare down at the selection of fried food in front of me. It’s good. I need to eat. But it’s hard to get myself to do when my stomach’s full of bees and I’m missing . . .
Everything.
“Was this video some terrible tactic, then? Engagement warfare?”
“A little, I guess. But he recorded it a month ago. He just didn’t send it to me until today.”
“Ah, so he biffed the proposal, then.”
“You know I don’t like big fusses. I don’t need a fancy proposal.”
Emerson’s sly grin would have charmed my pants off a year ago, but it doesn’t do anything for me anymore except make me feel silly in a purely platonic way. “So hereallybiffed the proposal, then.”
“Yeah, I guess that ‘really’ was what I needed there. He stupendously screwed it up. Like, he didn’t even ask me. He told me?”
Emerson grimaces.
“Yep.”
Emerson scratches his chin in the most theatrically thoughtful way before dunking a bit of pakora in tamarind chutney and popping it in his mouth. “He loves you.”
I want to play dumb and get him to say why he thinks that, but it would just be an ego stroke. “He does, yeah.”
