Surely Lily dated a lot. She simply never mentioned it. In fact, she rarely talked about herself. He could only assume that she didn’t have a serious boyfriend right now. She never complained about working late and she was always doing her Friday night visit to the bookstore she liked so much. It was silly, but a few weeks ago, Noah had been dateless and bored on a Friday night, so he’d gone for a run and accidentally on purpose ended up there. He’d peeked in the window, but couldn’t see the corner she’d talked about. He’d also been too embarrassed to walk in. So he’d pretended his shoelace was untied and jogged back to his apartment, realizing how stupid the whole thing had been in the first place. What would he have said if she’d seen him? I always go for runs in neighborhoods that are totally out of the way from where I live.
“And don’t forget, Lily’s a tough cookie,” Sawyer said. “I’m not as concerned about it as I was when we first started working on the Grand Legacy project and you couldn’t keep your eyes off her or your tongue off the floor.”
“You act like I’m the horniest guy you’ve ever met. Have you not noticed how stunning she is?”
“I noticed. Believe me. I’ve noticed. As have lots of our clients.”
The worst part…or the best part, Noah couldn’t decide, was that Lily didn’t seem to know it. Or if she did, she didn’t seem driven by it or obsessed by it. She simply seemed comfortable in her own skin, which Noah found very sexy.
“Okay. Well, I guess I’m going to go back to work with my fake fiancée. This is officially the craziest thing I’ve ever done, just so you know.”
“I don’t want to be a jerk about it, but this was your own doing. I appreciate your willingness to make it right. It’ll all be fine. We’ll do the deal with Hannafort and you and Lily can quietly break up. I doubt it’ll even be on his radar at that point. But we need to remove any doubt he has now.”
“Got it.” Noah reached for the door.
“Wait. There’s more. We need word of the engagement out before we leave and Lily is also going to need a ring. Everyone will want to see the ring.”
Noah groaned in frustration. “How do we go about announcing an engagement? Do we call the society page?”
“I don’t think we have time for that. I’ll talk to Kendall. We’ll figure out a way to leak it to the press.” Sawyer’s wife, Kendall, was a PR master. She’d done a brilliant job on the reopening of the family’s historic hotel, the Grand Legacy.
Noah stifled another sigh. “Let me know.” As he walked down the hall, he noticed that Lily was not at her desk. He rounded into his office. She was putting things away in his filing cabinet. He came to a dead stop. He didn’t say a thing. Lily had this habit when she was standing, but concentrating on something—she’d step out of one pump and balance on her opposite leg, rubbing the back of her calf with her bare foot. Up and down, over and over until she was finished with the task. It was one of the many inexplicably sexy things she did.
Maybe this fake engagement had a bright side. Maybe this was the chance to get Lily out of his system. His brother couldn’t say a thing about holding hands, long embraces, or kisses now. And if those things continued behind closed doors, and Lily wanted him, too, clothes could come off and he could finally know what it was like to make love to her, to have her hands all over him, and at the end of the weekend, they could part ways on the romantic front. It was perfect.
A little too perfect.
Noah couldn’t escape the notion that his plan sounded like something his dad would do. He was not his father, and he would do anything he could to prove it. That meant he would have to be doubly careful and keep things especially chaste between them, all while trying to create the illusion that they were hopelessly in love. He had no idea how he was going to pull this off.
Lily whipped around, surprise in her eyes. She dropped down onto her bare foot and pressed her hand to her chest. “You scared me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to startle you, but you were so deep in concentration.”
Lily worked her foot back into her black pump. “You could tell?”
“Yeah. You do that thing with your foot when you’re focused.”
Her cheeks turned the most gorgeous shade of pink, like cherry blossoms in spring, except brighter and more vibrant. It made him want to embarrass her more often. “I do?”
Noah swallowed hard. He hadn’t had time to get used to the fact that it would be okay for him to say something about this now. Before, a topic like this was best avoided. “I did. I’ve noticed it for a while now. I’m sorry if that bothers you.”