“You think Wydover had a hand in that article?” I ask Clark.
“Hard to say,” Clark says. “The point is, you have to go. This is the price of admission for her account. I’ll be there. She invited me, too.”
I stare up at the ceiling. Clark’s right. This is the price of admission. Except I hate boats. I hate events. I hate forced socializing.
But I love the idea of the Driscoll account.
Having all of Driscoll’s assets under management will give me more financial power than most governments, but it’s about more than that—there are only a few accounts of that size in the world. Landing one has always symbolized something ineffable to me. Strength. Freedom. Untouchability. But more, somehow—something I can’t put my finger on.
“I guess I can work in my room,” I say.
Clark is watching me. Monitoring my expression in a way that makes me nervous.
“What?” I ask.
“There’s more,” Clark says.
“What more could there be?”
“This Rex in the article, it’s not reality. We know that.”
“Right,” I say.
“I told her how upset you are about what they wrote. How untrue it is, especially that bit about a different girl every night. And…” He pauses ominously, then, “Your fiancée is even more upset.”
I nearly spit out my coffee. “My fiancée?”
Clark winces.
“You didn’t really say that,” I try.
“I panicked. She was unhappy about that article, and she had that Gail Driscoll stare—she needed to hear something that showed they got you wrong, and I just blurted it out.”
I suck in a breath. “Me with a fiancée? Who would buy that?”
“Gail did. She was happy to hear it. She likes you, Rex, and she needed to hear something like that. She wants to believe in you.”
“But it’s not true,” I say. “I don’t have a fiancée, and I never would.”
“I know. I shouldn’t have said it, but I needed to come up with something,” he continues. “And then once I said it, I had to go with it. So, you’re engaged. Deeply in love. You can’t wait to start a family. You’re keeping it under wraps for now. Shielding your fiancée from the media and all of that. You’re very protective of her because she’s not the kind of girl you usually go for. She’s changed your world, and it’s been amazing to see. Gail ate it up.”
I gape at him. “You know Gail hates any kind of dishonesty.” It’s one of the few things Gail Driscoll and I have in common.
“I know,” Clark says. “But you should’ve seen how she lit up.”
“You couldn’t have explained the exaggerations in the piece?”
“She needed something positive. I went with my intuition.”
“So you made up a fiancée of all things? Hey, why stop there?” I bite out. “You should also let her know I’ve been fashioning tiny mobility-assistive devices for underprivileged three-legged kittens. I mean, a fiancée?”
Clark has good instincts about people, but I don’t like this. I’m upfront with what I am. In business, I’m the asshole who gets results. In romance, I’m the asshole who’ll show you a good time. Nothing more.
That’s always been good enough.
I go to the window. Clark knows I want that account with every fiber of my being.
“You’ve had no public dinners or pictures with a woman since Thanksgiving weekend. And now it’s almost March,” he says. “It’s perfect. You met somebody in early December. She’s different. Hates the public eye and all that.”
I watch the snow clouds roll in off the water, thinking miserably of being away from my operations and my team for two weeks.
“You’ve been eating and sleeping this algorithm lately,” he continues. “The timeline works perfectly.”
“Fine. I’ll go on the yacht. Work remotely. Put in a few hours on deck chairs. Show up for dinners and whatever bullshit they’ve got planned. Maybe in a few months we put out a press release where my fiancée broke it off.”
Clark sucks in a deep breath. “So…right. That was my original thought.”
Was his original thought? I turn to find him regarding me warily. “What?”
“Gail invited your fiancée,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“She wants your fiancée to come,” he says.
I blink, disbelieving. “Did you tell her my fiancée is busy?”
“Well.” Again he winces. “I felt like she’d smell the lie if I said that. So I told her I’d check, but I thought she’d be excited.”
“Are you shitting me?”
Clark shakes his head. “You really have to bring her.”
“Who? She doesn’t exist!” I say. “What have you done?”
“It’s fine,” he says. “We’ll find you a fiancée.”
“Find me a fiancée,” I say, disbelieving.
He winces. “Sorry.”
Anybody else who pulled this kind of thing, I’d fire them so fast. But not Clark. It’s not just that he’s been with me since the beginning. He’s a loyal friend. And brilliant with clients. Usually.
“She won’t figure it out,” he adds. “People bring fake dates to weddings all the time. This is a step up from that. We’ll find you an actress to play the part. Tell her not to bother you while you’re working.”
“And what happens when Gail goes to the next Broadway show or goes on Netflix and sees the fiancée I briefly had and then broke up with starring in something? Gail’s not an idiot.”
“A model, then.”
My mind reels with the insanity of it all. “I thought we were going for a camera-shy fiancée,” I say.
“Right,” he says.
“Okay, we’ll figure it out. We’ll put her in another cabin.”
“She can’t be in a different cabin. She’s your fiancée.”
“I won’t be in the same cabin with a beautiful woman throwing herself at me. I don’t like the odds of me resisting that for two weeks. And then I’m stuck in a tiny space with somebody I’ve slept with and don’t want a relationship with? I’d rather be trapped in a Sound of Music sing-a-long.”
Clark nods. He knows that I don’t do sleepovers, I don’t do the same woman twice, and I would never actually bring a woman home. “Maybe if you request a two-room suite, and one side is the office and you sleep in the office…” he says.
“The small-space problem remains,” I say. “Jesus.”
“How about a woman you find annoying?” he tries. “And she stays locked in the bedroom?”
Something in me perks up at that. “That might work. An annoying nobody with the qualities I hate.”
“Though an annoying nobody with the qualities you hate is ninety-nine percent of the human population. We’d have to narrow it down.”
“A female,” I say. “Reasonably hot, but somebody whose personality irritates me so much, I wouldn’t want to touch her with a ten-foot pole.”