“I’m dreading the wedding—I don’t have a great relationship with my family,” I said. I could hear the tension in my own voice. I always sounded like that when I spoke about them, which was one of the reasons I never did.
“James.” She put her hand on mine again. “None of the guys who come to us have good relationships with their families. None of the girls at work do, either. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Trust me,” she said.
The fact that she understood put me at ease. Until I thought about it some more, and then the fact that it put me at ease made me uneasy.
“So,” she said, “back to the wedding.”
“I’m the best man,” I said. “I think Todd did that to make sure I’d show up. My mother informed me that I had to come to every non-stop event. Evie really wants this week to be a big lead-in to the wedding. There’s a dinner tonight and an endless series of brunches, cocktail hours, and photo shoots that we have to attend. Then Friday night is the rehearsal dinner at Il Pastorne. And Saturday the wedding is being held at Trinity Church. Then we’re off to Eleuthera for a week with the happy couple, my parents, some cousins, and some friends.”
“It all sounds very proper,” Audrey said. She sounded impressed.
“It’s going to be a complete cluster fuck,” I said.
She nodded at me. “I have a family. Mine’s probably messed up in a different way than yours, but I get it, James.”
I swallowed the rest of my bourbon, hard. “I hired you because I didn’t want to deal with questions from them about why I’m still single,” I said. “I broke up with someone a few months ago. I’ve decided to take a break from dating and just concentrate on work. My family’s beside themselves that I’m almost forty and not married. They’re worried about not having any heirs.” I smiled at her grimly. “So I hired you to bear the brunt of the misery with me.”
“I’m on it,” she said, upbeat and optimistic. “I’ll do whatever you ask. You tell me how you want me to be. This is all about you. Your comfort. Your experience. I’m a buffer.”
She was a pretty hot buffer, but the fact that I thought so was something that I was going to keep completely and solely to myself.
There was a reason I stayed away from women I liked. And I’d learned it the hard way.
Audrey
James was quiet for a minute after he told me about his family. We were stuck in midday traffic on Massachusetts Avenue. I watched the brownstones crawl by as I sat, lost in my thoughts.
I couldn’t figure out whether it was good luck or bad that James Preston was gorgeous. And that he had feelings and people he was worried about dealing with. It made him seem too human.
Family made him vulnerable, and we had to deal with his family. I didn’t know what he was normally like, but right now, he seemed nervous and quite possibly afraid of the next two weeks.
I couldn’t have that, for a couple of important reasons.
First, we had to win this. We were going to be the perfect couple. His family was going to be completely fooled, and I was going to be paid lots of money for exactly that. I believed, like Elena, that James Preston was my golden ticket. I was going to make him happy these two weeks, and I was going to play my part perfectly. Then he’d recommend me to all of his jet-setter friends, and I’d be sucking rich cock for the rest of my life. And then I could make everything okay, at least for my brother. For me? I could survive just about anything. The fact that I was here, right now in this hired car, was living proof of that.
Second, I didn’t want to care about James Preston. He was a John. The Johns were a nameless, faceless group of men that I preferred to block out. I’d cultivated only a fuzzy memory of the men who’d rented me, and I liked it that way. That was the only way I could sleep at night and meet my own eyes in the mirror each morning.
“So, is graphic design something you did?” James asked me, breaking my reverie. “You know, before?”
“Before hooking?” I asked. “Nah. I never went to school.”
“Too excited to jump into your chosen profession?” he asked.
I gave him a quick look: he didn’t appear to be kidding. I supposed he thought he was being kind by being blunt, but really, he was just being an ass. Nobody hooked because it was exciting.
You hooked because you had daddy issues. Duh.
“Something like that,” I said. I decided that every time I found him insulting, I would just look at his head and see a big dollar sign there instead. I hoped he kept saying unattractive things. It would certainly help combat the unwieldy urge I had to check out what he had going on under that suit.
“So, where are we going first?” I asked.
“To my apartment. It’s in the Back Bay. I’m not here much, but I like to have my own place when I am. We’ll get you settled, change, and go meet my family for an early dinner. And drinks. There’s always drinks when you’re with my family.” He paused. “So it’ll be my brother Todd, Evie, and my parents. Celia and Robert. And probably a few cousins, aunts, friends, business associates…”
“Are your parents lawyers, too?” I asked.
“My father is a partner at a major law firm. Has been for years. He moves corporate money around. My mother does charitable work and goes to lots of lunches where she doesn’t eat. She’s really…”
I raised my eyebrows at him and waited.
“Thin,” he said. He turned to look out the window. He was quiet for a beat. “My parents are very proper. They’re into Boston society. They also have family money.” He almost sounded as if he was apologizing.
“Family money?” I asked. “On top of major-law-firm money?”
“Yes, and lots of it,” James said, still looking out the window. “It’s very much a part of who they are.”
I swallowed hard. I had probably never met people as rich as this before. Most of my Johns were wealthy, but all they wanted to do was have sex. Not parade me around for their families. I looked down at my blue dress; it was getting wrinkled in the car. It wasn’t going to do.
“Well, we’ll tell them we met when I was out in California for my internship. You couldn’t resist my…charms,” I said, trying to be brave.
I looked down at my chest in a push-up bra. I was charming, all right.
I continued, “We’ve been dating for a few months, doing the long-distance thing. My family’s from New England—I’ll tell them they’re dead. They can infer that I’m living off my inheritance. And no, I don’t have any other family. So, no one for them to look up, no one for them to ask to meet.”
James snorted. “I doubt they’d bother with all that.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because they aren’t going to be that interested in you once they figure out that you’re not society. You will just be a blip on their highfalutin radar. And they don’t think I’m ever getting married, anyway.”
“So I’m doomed. They’re going to hate me,” I said in a wave of real nerves. “They won’t even know I’m a whore—but I’m still not good enough for you.”