Bargaining with the Bride Read online

  "What does this mean for your experiment?"

  "I see no reason why we can't continue."

  "And what about work?"

  "What about it? I wanted to have sex with you before, I see no reason for my action to change now that I have."

  She nearly choked on her coffee, "You what?"

  "Come on, don't tell me you didn't know."

  "That's exactly what I'm telling you."

  "And Natalie never said anything about it?"

  "Who listens to Natalie?" She spluttered, trying to find that last part of her mind that might be able to think straight. "So, had you been planning this for a long time? Like, did you do this whole thing to get close to me?"

  "No, that would be insane."

  "Says the man who moved into my house without telling me. And just left in the middle of a make-out session. And—"

  "I get the point. But no, that's not why I did this. I did this because you're my friend and valued employee. The fact that I did nothing about how much I wanted to pull your tight skirts up to your waist had to do with your relationship status, not anything else."

  Her thighs ached at the thought of his touched her. Bending her over her desk in the office. Or over his and fucking her while they both stared out his huge, glass wall, panting and trying their hardest not to scream.

  Suddenly, she was all too aware of the heat spreading through her cheeks. She swallowed hard.

  "Okay." God, it sounded dumb. So dumb that she wanted to run somewhere and hide.

  "I should mention that now that you're single, I don't feel inclined to remain so restrained."

  "No?" Was it her or was the air getting thinner in the room? Harder to breathe?

  "And I should also mention that I know you're attracted to me."

  "Presumptuous."

  "Not after the way you screamed my name last night." He grinned, and something dark and sinful glinted in his eyes. Something that made her heart beat that much faster.

  "You don't know—"

  "Oh, but I do. I notice everything about you. When you walk away from me, you shake your hips just the slightest bit more. Like you want me to watch you walk away—"

  "I do not—"

  "And when you have coffee with me in the morning, you bend over my shoulder to put the coffee in front of me. I can feel your breasts brush against me. Smell your perfume."

  "Aren't you reading too much into it?" She asked, trying her best to make sure he didn't note the tremor in her voice.

  "No. And you know that." He crunched into a piece of toast. "The good news is, it didn't go unnoticed. I swear, every time you put my coffee in front of me I wanted to pull you into my lap."

  "Garret, I—" He head was spinning. Where was this coming from? What could she—

  "This is me putting my cards out on the table," he shrugged. "Now it's your turn."

  She blushed, imagining trying to explain the way she thought about him. And, the more she thought it through, she had.

  Even before their plan had been a seed of a thought in her mind, it had been Garret she'd thought of when she was alone. And when he walked into the office, a powerful suit framing those broad shoulders of his...

  But she could tell him that. She didn't have the nerve.

  She'd simply have to show him.

  She stood from the table, and then slowly unfastened each of the buttons on his discarded shirt. When it finally fell to the floor and she was naked in front of him, she smiled.

  He stared at her like she was the beautiful thing he'd every seen.

  "Come upstairs. I'll show you what's been on my mind."

  * * *

  Afterward, Garret lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling while trying to calculate the odds of his good fortune. They were limitless, and with Rachael next to him, he felt beyond unstoppable.

  Not only would she help him score this account with Matchware, but she'd bring some much needed, long-lost fun to his life.

  Being a fake husband in exchange hardly seemed like a fair bargain anymore.

  "I guess I can't wear white to the wedding now that you've defiled me." She rolled over and grinned and it took all of the energy he had left not to pin her down and bury himself inside her all over again.

  She was just so beautiful with the light catching strands of her golden hair as she moved. Stunning.

  And his.

  "Why not? We're faking everything else."

  "Good point." She laid her head on his chest, and for a while they lay in silence, each thinking their own private thoughts.

  "Are you going back to work today?" she asked.

  For what felt like the first time in his life, he felt unsure of the answer. He wanted to lay here all day. Talking to Rachael, learning about her, and then falling into her again and again until they fell asleep together.

  But he couldn't do that.

  He had numbers to configure and experiments to develop. A board meeting with brooks. A staff meeting with Natalie. A company to run.

  And still, with Rachael right here, none of that seemed to matter.

  "Stay," she whispered it so softly that he wasn't sure he'd heard her at first.

  "I can't. You have things to do for the wedding, anyway. Isn't that why you took the week off?"

  "I took the week off to have sex with you."

  "I think not."

  "Well, I modified my reasons. I'm a grown-up. I can do what I want."

  "I'll be home tonight." Every second he stared into those deep eyes of hers, he hated himself more for saying it.

  He should get someone to fill in for him. Just for the week. Just...

  But lying to himself wouldn't help. He had to go, and the longer he stayed, the deeper the guilt would go.

  Without another word, he shuffled from the bed and pulled on his clothes.

  "Check my reports, okay?" she asked.

  "You got it."

  "And if your assistant sends me any more surveys, I'm going to strangle both of you in your sleep."

  "Noted. Though, I should point out that was your part of the deal. If you didn't want to follow through, I could always—"

  She threw a pillow at his head and he ducked. "Okay, okay. No more surveys."

  12

  Rachael's phone clanged beside her head, muffled by her pillow.

  She must have fallen asleep with the damn thing in her hand again, texting frantic instructions of Natalie to make sure everything was still in order by the time she returned from her vacation.

  Normally, it wouldn't have bothered her, the constant attention to the company. But now, with Garret lying beside her every night for the past two weeks, every time it rang she had the distinct urge to chuck the thing at the wall and watch it splinter into a million pieces.

  Not because she was drawn to it. That was a problem, sure. But it was more the way Garret looked at it when she got a new message from the office. In an instant, he would shift—go from playing with Tesla to sitting bolt upright, his brow furrowed like they were already mid-business meeting.

  She pushed the thought aside and shifted beneath the sheets just as the last strains of her ringer sounded.

  Tonight was the rehearsal dinner, and if she was going to face her mother for a full hour, she was going to need all the rest she could possibly get.

  She closed her eyes and shoved the pillow over her face, blocking out the rays from the early morning sun, but then the ringer sounded again, so loud this time that she shot upright and sent the pillow flying across the room.

  She reached for the damn thing and clicked the “answer” button before checking the caller ID.

  Big mistake.

  "Hello?" She said on a yawn.

  "Rachael? Do you mean to tell me you're still in bed at this hour?" Her mother sounded like someone had just insinuated cream and eggshell were the same color. Positively scandalized.

  "No," she bit back a second yawn and said, "but...I'm not near a clock. What time is it?"

 
; "Eight thirty in the morning."

  She rolled her eyes, "Right."

  "That aside, we have a problem."

  "We do?" She stepped from the bed, only half listening. But when she turned, her heart dropped into her stomach.

  Garret was gone.

  He was supposed to be here. Had agreed to take the day before the wedding off in order to help her with the rest of the plans.

  All week, she'd been looking forward to today. Had hoped that they could spend all morning wrapped up in the blankets, not thinking about work or her family or anything. Just each other...

  But she was getting ahead of herself. Maybe he was downstairs. Maybe—

  "Rachael," Her mother's sharp tone cut into her thoughts.

  "Huh?"

  "What are we going to do about this?"

  She searched for a way to pretend she'd been listening, but came up empty. "About what?" Even as she asked the question, she winced.

  "Honestly, sometimes I don't know where you girls came from. About your dress. It's...a disaster. To put it lightly." She sniffed.

  "Did something happen to it?" She gripped the phone a little harder. Partially from concern, and partially because she really should have known better than to think her mother would be harmless in her involvement with the dress.

  "The lace—did you want it with so much lace? Is this how my money was spent?" She asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It looks like an enormous doily. Honestly, wouldn't a nice satin be more flattering? I think you ought to come down here and straighten them out."

  She held her hand over the receiver, and then let out a long sigh. "It's supposed to look that way, mother. Thank you for your help, but I have to go."

  She could sense her mother rearing up to argue, so she rushed to end the call.

  After tossing her cell onto the bed behind her, she scurried downstairs, only to find Tesla napping lazily on the windowsill.

  "Where's Garret?" she asked the dog, but he only looked at her with lazy eyes then turned his attention back to the front yard.

  "Great,” she murmured, and then moved onto the front steps.

  His car was gone.

  Which, of course, meant he could only be in one place.

  Even as she pulled into her normal parking space, she knew she had no reason to be at the office. Nobody was expecting her. Natalie had been handling everything as smoothly as ever. Hell, she couldn't even claim she'd forgotten something in her desk.

  As far as the wedding details...she could make something up. A question about the cake or the flower arrangements or something. But what sort of fake bride consulted her fake groom about their fake wedding the day of the rehearsal dinner?

  Still, that didn't stop her from wanting to see him and find out what he was up to. She could come up with something stupid along the way, surely. All that mattered was that she could see him. After she'd made her way up the elevator and through the lobby, she headed toward her office, partially from force of habit and partly because the place soothed her.

  There, she'd have a little more time to come up with an excuse. There, she could—

  She stepped through the threshold of her door and stopped short.

  Her normally pristine desk had one red folder sitting atop it. Even from this distance, she could spy the big, black letters printed across the front

  "Confidential."

  What girl could pass up a good mystery?

  She closed the door behind her, and then sat in her chair, running her fingers over the cover of the folder before opening it.

  This could be the break through she and Garret had been working toward. It could all be right here...

  She flipped the cover open to find a thick packet of papers held together by a paper clip. The first page was plain enough, but just reading it made her stomach do a back flip.

  She read the words over again, making sure it wasn't some bizarro misunderstanding.

  CASE STUDY 22-BE7Z

  Subjects: Garret Adams (Herby Subject #45G7-0) & Rachael Ford (Hereby Subject #78-BH72)

  Logically, there was no reason to be surprised. This had been the deal, hadn't it? She'd filled out all the forms, knowing that they'd be processed and entered into the system.

  Still, there was something about seeing their names, put together so coldly and scientifically. Like it was all just some experiment.

  Which, in truth, it was.

  She flipped past the first few pages. They were all the regular bullshit forms, filled with her own commentary and test results. In fact, it looked standard in nearly everyway.

  Except for one thing—this packet had a "Section Two"

  She flipped through the pages to find more details, but the more she read, the dryer her throat became. On every page was some new chart or statistic. On the last was a pie chart

  "Sexual positions by preference"

  There it was. Everything they'd done together in the past two weeks. All the numbers crunched and laid out in color-coded slivers.

  He had done this himself? Or worse, had he given all this information to someone else to look over?

  She checked for a name, but instead found a bunch of coding numbers. There was no way of telling who'd seen the thing and who hadn't.

  Perfect.

  What was next? Was he about to hook her to some monitors and measure her refractory period or something?

  She took the file and slid it into her bottom drawer, then locked it for good measure. The last thing she needed was one of the secretaries to come in looking for a stapler and instead find some steamy bar graphs.

  Between her parents' visit and what she'd just read, her dignity had already taken enough of a beating.

  The only question was what to do now. She'd see him tonight. It was the rehearsal dinner, after all. She couldn't very well spend all night beside him, pretending she didn't feel hurt and violated.

  Like every time he'd slept with her, he couldn't wait to roll over and record the results of their coupling.

  Still, what did she have any right to say?

  "I can't believe you did exactly what you told me you would do? I can't believe you went through with your end of the bargain?"

  Sure, sex hadn't been part of it, but if he had access to that sort of data and it could help the company...

  She wanted to bang her head against the wall until it cracked down the middle.

  There was no right answer here. No way out.

  Maybe the best thing to do would be to leave, wait until he got home, and pretend she'd never seen the file to begin with. They didn't need to worry about all this right now; not with the wedding tomorrow.

  Yes, that was the right thing to do.

  She would just go home and by Sunday, her biggest concerns would be dealt with.

  She took a deep breath and strode past the rows of cubicles on her way back to the elevator. Luckily, most everyone was still in a mid-morning meeting, so nobody was around to spot her.

  Yep, the place was totally silent save for the giggling of the secretaries in the break room.

  As she walked past, though, she caught a snatch of conversation and froze in her tracks.

  "I always suspected with their late nights and their early mornings that something was happening, but it has never been so clear before." One of the girls was whispering.

  "Stop it, Millie. Garret isn't Brooks. He'd never sleep with an employee without it actually meaning something."

  "Yeah, maybe that explains it. She's hardly here for a year and she's promoted three times? The only people I know who work the ladder that quickly are usually working something else."

  She should leave. It couldn’t possibly help to listen to the rest of this petty gossip. And that's exactly what it was. Petty gossip. It didn't mean anything at all.

  So why couldn't she move?

  "Some women are just like that. They cheat and steal and use their bodies to get what they want. It's a shame for all of us—it makes us
all look like sluts." The voice which apparently belonged to Millie tsked.

  A new voice chimed in. "I've been trying to get details out of Natalie for weeks. Even after the memo went out, she hasn’t changed her tune."

  "That much I believe." Millie laughed.

  "What can you expect? The sluts stick together. It's in their code or something." Another woman hissed.

  Anger roiled in Rachael's stomach. That was enough.

  It was one thing to talk about her and Garret. They could call her whatever they wanted and disregard all the work she did to get to her place in the company.

  But Natalie?

  She deserved better than that.

  Squaring her shoulders, Rachael stepped around the corner and walked into the break room, trying her best to remain as casual as possible.

  "Good morning, ladies." She grinned like they'd all just shouted compliments at her, and then beamed even wider when she spotted the shocked discomfort on their faces.

  "How's the coffee today?" she asked, ignoring the pointed silence as she picked up the carafe.

  She poured a cup, fixed it, and then took a sip. She could practically hear the gears in their mind whirring, questioning how much she'd heard or if she'd heard anything at all.

  "It's a little bitter, I think," she said casually, then poured it down the drain and left her mug in the sink. "Would one of you mind getting that for me? Thanks so much." And with that, she strode from the room, all too aware of their eyes on her retreating back.

  It was the perfect exit. So smooth and suave and classy.

  Or, at least, it would have been if she hadn’t run straight into Garret’s huge, muscular chest on her way out of the kitchen

  He caught her wrist, then released it, his dark eyes widening as he took her in. “Rachael. You were supposed to be—“

  “I am. I had a question for you, but it can wait.”

  “I have time,” he smiled at her and her stomach twisted.

  Wasn’t it bad enough that she had to worry about the contents of that stupid folder? Now he had to look so…so happy to see her in front of all these snide bitches?