"Get in the car," I commanded between clenched teeth.
To her credit, she didn't fight me. Just ducked her head and quickly scurried into the passenger side of the Jag I'd left parked sideways in the dirt.
We drove back to the Benton in dead silence.
And Sunny wisely didn't say a word when we pulled into the private garage and took my elevator back up to the penthouse.
As soon as we walked through the door, she bent down to pull the heels she'd been wearing all night off her feet. But I walked straight to the kitchen counter, where the contract still lay, and bit out, "Name your terms."
She let out a full-body sigh as she straightened up, her heels hanging from two fingers. "Wow, Cole, seriously?"
"That's been your problem since we met," I informed her. "You continuously fail to grasp how serious I am."
I set the contract back on the counter, plopped a monogrammed pen on top of it, and repeated, “Name your terms, Sunny."
"Okay, so we're doing this." Sunny gave me a weary shake of her head, as if she couldn't be more disappointed in me. "We're having this fight after the night I just had—the nightyoujust put me through."
"The night you put yourself through," I shot back, baring my teeth. "You were supposed to come home with me after that dinner. Instead, you ran off and made me fetch you?—"
"Fetch me?" Her eyes flared wide with outrage. "Like a dog, you mean. You think I'm some dog—some sex doll that you own?"
"Like a fiancée! A fiancée I'm sworn to protect until this deal is done," I roared back at her. "What were you thinking? Ditching me to run back to somebody who left you vulnerable to an attack?"
"Run back to who?" Sunny had the temerity to shake her head at me, like she had no idea who I was talking about.
"Your fighter ex? The guy you went to instead of coming home to me?"
"First of all, this isn't my home," Sunny insisted. "This is the prison you set up for me after locking me out of the hotel room I rightfully requested and having my landlord evict me—I mean, who does that? You forced poor Vinny to break at least ten different tenant laws."
“It doesn't matter how your creepy landlord feels about the situation.” I shrugged. A small, miserable part of me was soothed that she appeared almost as upset as I’d felt when I realized she'd gone to support her ex in a fight. "I told you I didn’t want you living here."
“Yeah, you did, and so what?” Sunny answered. “I’m a grown woman, Cole. I can do what I want. You don’t own me.”
Not yet, I thought darkly before returning to the subject. "You are in violation of the Conduct part of your NDA. In what universe do you think it's okay to be seen out in public with your ex-boyfriend?"
"The universe where he wasn't my real boyfriend!"
I stopped. Crooked my head. Then jutted my chin forward to ask, "What?"
"You aren’t my first fake dating situation, okay?" Sunny folded her arms defensively."When Tony was still on the amateur circuit, he used me as a beard for years to cover up his real relationship with Cherenity."
I stared at her.
"Cherenity is a drag queen. She hosts the?—"
"I know who she is." I furrowed my brow but admitted, "We've been thinking about poaching her for a Drag Bingo scheme similar to the one we run at the Benton New Orleans."
"Oh, that's awonderfulidea!" Sunny's face lit up. "She and Tony could use the money. He's thinking about retiring soon, and I know he wants to adopt. But wait, would she still be able to sing? Because it would be a shame not to use that voice of hers?—"
I raised my hand to stop her right there. "So what you're trying to tell me is that you lied to my grandmother about your boyfriend, too. In fact, you didn't truly have a boyfriend before me."
"Well, you're not truly my boyfriend, either," she pointed out carefully. “And yes, I had a major boyfriend before you. Two years ago. He was super nice and charitable. We actually met while he was campaigning outside of Trader Joe’s on behalf of a local homeless shelter. But eventually, he decided the optics of him dating a showgirl weren't great, and he dumped me, um..."
She raised her eyes to the ceiling to calculate. "Yeah, I guess that would be over two years ago now."
So, Rich Harrison is the real ex, I noted to myself. Moreover,"You've been fake dating a gay boxer, and you haven't had sex in two years?"
"Yes, goodbye sex two and a half years ago," she confirmed. "And both Tony and his real partner prefer the term queer since Cherenity uses she/her pronouns."
