I shifted in my desk chair, uncrossing and recrossing my legs, trying to find a comfortable way to sit. ‘I mean about the partner hire. What if we told your dad that Lyons had a sudden change of heart and decided to hire us both, and wow, wasn’t it convenient that we fell in love along the way?’
‘No.’
‘It’s okay. Really. He’s going to be an arsehole about you marrying me anyway, right? If letting him think that we both got the job on merit will take the edge off—’
‘No.’
Jonah looked me dead in the eye. ‘My dad has been trying to cut you down for years,’ he said. ‘Do you think I would really take away your opportunity to rub his nose in what you’ve accomplished?’
I was suddenly very uncomfortable in my chair again.
Then he made it a million times worse by reaching over and touching the back of my hand with one finger, pressing lightly between my knuckles.
‘Thank you, though,’ he said, ‘for offering.’
‘’sokay,’ I managed.
My body was determined to react, but I repressed it as forcefully as I could. God, I was going to have to get myself under control, and fast, or Jonah was going to notice.
‘My dad needs to respect your achievements, Shaw,’ he said. ‘That’s worth more than my pride.’
A couple of nights after Jonah broke the news to his parents that he was marrying an upstart overrated nobody and moving to Tasmania with her on a partner hire, we went round to the Fisher family home for dinner. ‘They insisted,’ he told me apologetically. ‘They seem to think I’m playing some kind of practical joke.’
‘Are you a practical joke kind of family?’
He snorted. ‘What do you think?’
I was genuinely very curious to see where Jonah had grown up. Considering how often his dad liked to use the words ‘vulgar’ and ‘cliché’ when he described the books I studied, the Fisher family home should have been an elegantGrand Designs-esque architectural wonder.
It wasn’t, though. The house our Uber pulled up to in Watsons Bay was a garden-variety McMansion, no different from the other McMansions on the street.
We were both wearing our own variety of armour. I’d pulled my hair back severely, put on my favourite don’t-fuck-with-me black jumpsuit, and sungVigilante Shitquietly to myself as I applied eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man. Jonah had combed his hair back, trimmed his beard and put on a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches.
It was a sultry summer evening – far too hot for him to be wearing tweed. I didn’t think it was the heat, though, that was making him look faintly sweaty as he rang the doorbell.
His dad answered. He stood there for a long moment, looking us both up and down. Instinctively, my right hand curled into a fist.
‘Jonah,’ he said. ‘Ms Shaw.’
‘DrShaw,’ Jonah and I said at the same time.
Over his dad’s shoulder, I caught his mum’s eye. She, at least, had the good grace to look apologetic.
I looped my hand around Jonah’s bicep. Thank God he’d turned down my offer to minimise my accomplishments, because I didn’t think I had it in me not to dunk on this man. ‘Considering I’m marrying into the family, Christian, you can call me Sadie.’
A muscle in Professor Fisher’s jaw twitched. I resisted the urge to smirk.
‘It’s nice to meet you, Sadie,’ Jonah’s mum said, offering me her hand to shake.
That was the most pleasant thing either of them said to me for the entire night – and, notably, pretty much the only thing his mum said at all. If I’d doubted anything Jonah had told me about his family being poison before, I sure as hell didn’t now. No wonder Fiona had ended up where she was. In her shoes, I too might have married the first man who offered if it meant not having to sit around this table.
‘So, tell me how you were hired over my son,Sadie,’ Professor Fisher said as we sat down to dinner.
It was impressive, really, the way he could make my name sound like an insult. He was a hair’s breadth away from bellowingare the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?!
‘She has an outstanding research track record and exemplary teaching performance,’ Jonah said.
‘Did I ask you, Jonah?’
