He shrugged one shoulder, and I didn’t know if that meant he agreed with me or if he didn’t. It was enigmatic, which was appealing, because I had always loved solving puzzles.
But this was one puzzle I needed to steer clear of.
Right after I found out how he thought I was going to help him break up Craig and Leighton. Because there was no way I was walking away from this conversation without finding out that tidbit of information. “So what is your great plan to destroy your brother’s happiness?”
I noticed him wince slightly at my words before he said, “It’s pretty simple. You and I pretend to date.”
He leaned back as if this explained everything. “Say more,” I instructed. My heart wasn’t just racing now—it was in a full gallop, trying to get out of my chest. Date? This creature who looked like he’d been forged by fallen angels just to tempt all womankind?
Uh, no.
“Craig and I have always been ridiculously competitive with one another. His mother made sure of that.” That bitter tinge was back in his voice, but he shifted his tone into something softer. “If he thinks we’re dating, he will want to steal you away from me. And before you ask, I know that because it’s happened before.”
With Leighton? I wanted to ask but refrained because he no longer seemed like he was in an open and share-y place. Now that I finally knew what he was up to, I wasn’t interested. “Okay. Well, thanks so much for your reluctant and strange offer, but I’m going to have to pass.”
Even if my brain was busy conjuring up an alternate reality where I did pretend to date Marco. I inserted him into my Craig fantasy—walking along the water, sitting on a bench all night talking.
It was kind of scary how easy it was to swap one out for the other.
Another reason I shouldn’t do this. I was in love with Craig.
In. Love.
Marco interrupted my stern self-talking-to. “Why not?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “This is wrong in so many different ways that I would need charts and diagrams to explain it.”
“How so?” He uncuffed his shirtsleeves and started rolling them up his forearms.
His very masculine and strong forearms that made my mouth water.
That was the yummy vegan pizza I was eating, I told my body. That’s what caused the reaction. Not this fine specimen of manhood in front of me.
It took me a second to remember that he had asked me a question that I needed to answer. “Do you really want to sit here and debate the ethics and morality of pretending to date in an attempt to trick your brother into breaking up with his fiancée and dating me?”
He folded his arms, and I had to actually force my eyeballs to not look at his forearms again, sitting so nicely against his chest. Which I’d bet was also pretty nice. Plus, his very broad shoulders. You could build a subdivision on those things.
My inappropriate train of thought was brought to a halt by his response. “There’s no morality involved. We wouldn’t be doing anything wrong or hurting anyone.”
But I would have to . . . pretend to be Marco’s girlfriend, keeping my apparently rebellious hormones in check （because no matter how much I wanted to lie to myself, my body was not this excited about a cheese-less pizza）。 I couldn’t imagine how any of this would even work.
“Come on,” he cajoled me. “You could help me save Minx and get Craig out of a bad situation. Let’s kill two birds with one stone.”
“Let’s not. Nobody needs to be murdering birds. We don’t do that in my family,” I said reflexively.
I should shut this down. Thank him for helping me to get home and returning my car, and then go back to my regular life.
Instead I found myself echoing his words. “A bad situation?”
Marco nodded. “It’s easy to see how this is going to go. Craig’s trust fund is going to be depleted. His heart is going to be broken. You’d be keeping him from having to say my first wife and having trust issues with women going forward. That’s a kindness.”
It was such a stretch, but I found myself wanting to go along with it. I still protested, though. “I don’t think your plan will work. It’s done. They’re getting married. What can we do?”
He smiled. “That’s the spirit! What can we do?”
Deliberately misunderstanding my words was not as cute as he thought it was. “Even if your plan would work, which based on what you’ve told me, I don’t think it would, I don’t want to be responsible for breaking up an engagement. That seems wrong. And like it would bring a lot of bad karma into my life. Which I do not need right now.” I did not want to get the universe involved. I was messing up my life just fine all on my own.
“This relationship of theirs isn’t going to last. They’ve only been together for a couple of months. We would just be helping to speed things along.”
“My grandparents dated for six weeks, got married, and have been together for almost fifty years. It can happen.”
“How many decades ago was that?” he countered. “The world was different then.”
“Fine.” Whether or not people could be happily married after knowing each other for only a short amount of time was irrelevant to this discussion. “You should know that I’m a terrible liar. I have an obvious tell. It’s that everyone knows when I’m lying.”
“I’m excellent at it,” he said.
“I don’t know if that’s something you should be proud of.”
“Unfortunately, it was necessary.” A shadow passed over his face, but he tried to smile through it. “That’s easy enough to take care of. We’ll actually date. Like, today for example. I asked you to lunch; you came.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet. He grabbed a hundred-dollar bill and put it on the table. “And now I’ve paid for our food. All of which makes this an official date. And we can spend time together and keep ‘dating.’ Being comfortable with one another, getting to know each other, that will help sell all of this. It will feel real and not like a lie.”
I threw up both of my hands. Was he going to argue with every point I made? “There’s no guarantee of success here. There are too many variables. It’s unpredictable.”
“What’s the alternative?” he asked. “You do nothing—you know the inevitable outcome. A hundred percent odds that you don’t get to be with Craig. But if you do something, go along with my plan, you could potentially affect the end result for the better. This is your chance to conduct a real-life experiment. Find out whether or not I’m right.”
I still wasn’t quite sold, but he was making a good amount of headway. “I don’t like things I can’t control.”
“Nobody does. Although there is something to be said about injecting a little chaos into your life to change things up. We could have some fun together. And in the end, you could wind up with the guy you’re in love with.”
He made that chaos sound enticing. I tried my last protest. “I need to spend time looking for a new job. I don’t really have the time to pretend to date you.”
“I actually have a solution for that. KRT Limited can bring you on as a consultant. I checked, and they haven’t used their full consultant budget for Minx this year, and we’ll lose that money if we don’t hire someone.”