The rest of the meeting went smoothly. I was feeling confident that we could win this contract.
“So, a meeting with the big boss, huh,” Avery said after Stacy and the intern, Kitty, left.
“You’ll need to put on a good performance,” I told her. “We cannot lose that contract.”
“I am the perfect fake fiancée,” she said. “But first we need to make it through the weekend.”
Four o’clock came too soon. I didn’t know how my brothers were going to take my announcement. At worst, they would realize this was all a ruse. At best, they would be angry I had hidden the relationship for so long. But so what? Several of my brothers had been secretive with their girlfriends until it blew up in their faces. Fortunately, this was a carefully calculated relationship. Avery and I were leaving emotion out of it.
“Ready?” I asked her as she packed up her laptop.
“Are we taking the train?” she said as I picked up her weekend bag.
“My car is here,” I said, leading us to the elevator.
“When are we going to break this to the employees?” Avery asked.
“I’m not making a big announcement,” I said. “They’ll figure it out eventually.”
“You don’t think the Harris & Schultz CEO will be put off by your dating an employee?” she wondered, chewing on her lip.
I suddenly wanted to kiss her.Control yourself.
“We’ll have to come up with a good story.”
“Yes, we need a romantic story that isn’t ‘I was horny and a workaholic and the only wandering pussy available was my assistant, so I bent her over my desk and fucked her.’”
The image was a sledgehammer in my brain. “You need to watch your language around my little brothers,” I said irritably.
“Sorry,” Avery said.
I held her still as the elevator stopped at the parking-garage level of the building.
“We do need to get our story straight. My brothers, especially Garrett, are like dogs chasing cars if they think you’re hiding something from them.”
“Oh, you saved me from a mugger,” she said, clapping her hands. “Or, I know, my car broke down on a bridge, and no one would stop to help me except for you. Or how about, my pet rabbit escaped, and you lured him in with chicken and caught him?”
I frowned. “Rabbits aren’t carnivorous.”
“This one is. He’s a New York City rabbit.”
“We can’t go too overboard with details. Garrett will pick it apart. We’ll just tell them that we worked together, we spent a lot of late nights at the office, and one thing led to another. It’s simple, and considering several of my brothers have started relationships with former employees, they can’t give me too much grief.” I checked my watch. It was a stainless steel grand complication, though not as expensive as the one Avery wore on her wrist.
“You always wear that around your father?” I asked her.
“Is it going to embarrass you with your family?”
They would see it, and the ruse would be up.
“Maybe you shouldn’t wear it to meet them.”
She sighed and took it off. “Of course. I forgot how materialistic you billionaires are—three-hundred-dollar T-shirts, five-thousand-dollar dinners, and million-dollar cars…Is that yours?” she asked as we stopped in front of a black McLaren Lotus.
While several of my brothers were car collectors, I had never gotten into that hobby. “I won this car at a charity auction.”
She held out the hand. “Keys. Gimme.”
“You’re not driving,” I said, going to the passenger side and opening it for her.
