All in an attempt to be unrecognizable.
It wasn’t just enough to go on some site and take shitty, unrecognizable photos of himself. He had to make sure he sold it in real life too. Like an undercover cop.
God, it would be so much easier just to have an arranged marriage. He stood by that.
Ultimately, he didn’t believe in the notion of love. That wasn’t possible for people like him in the current bullshit version of a life that was supposed to be all gold and unicorn farts. Yes- unicorn farts. Because his niece was just as obsessed as the rest of the world and just that morning, she’d happened to draw a unicorn farting out a rainbow.
Most of the world probably agreed with him, given that marriage was hard enough. Celebrities and rich people weren’t expected to maintain the norm.
He’d never wanted to be an average person, but it would have been nice to just have enough to be comfortable. He’d never expected the fame when he set out to help people get healthy and to make sure his parents were taken care of, that they could retire and stop working themselves ragged.
He couldn’t exactly regret the money, but was it a sin to just wish that people could leave him the hell alone for the most part? He should probably just buy a private island and hide away from humanity for the rest of his life.
Which would be tempting, if he knew he wouldn’t go crazy from the whole cabin fever, bush fever, whatever fever. The private island was so much more tempting with someone to appreciate it with. A real someone. A nice someone. Someone who liked cats and plants and was a little geeky.
Trace cleared his throat. His hand hovered over the tablet.
Why not respond? It might be fun. He’d get to play a role. This woman wanted a fake boyfriend. She wouldn’t be trying too hard to fall in love. She wouldn’t be looking into his background or going on sites that combined their photos to figure out what their potential offspring looked like. She wouldn’t have a list of expectations a mile long. She didn’t expect a mansion or to bathe in unicorn tears. Right- he should really get off the whole unicorn thing.
Even from the side, he could tell her profile picture was pretty. He liked her profile name too. TheDarkHorse. So mysterious. So unfeminine. So… different.
Okay, he was shit with descriptors. It was cool. She seemed funny. Legit. Down to earth. Painfully normal. She probably didn’t even own a shovel and if she did, she probably wasn’t looking to go gold digging with. Another bad analogy. It’s even worse than the unicorn shit. No pun intended.
Ha, fucking ha.
Trace hadn’t had fun in a long, long time.
His hands flew as he responded to her message. Even if he eventually regretted it, he was pretty sure he’d enjoy the ride until the horrible crash and burn ending.
CHAPTER 4
Ash
The first thing Ash did, shamefully enough, when her alarm went off at nine the next morning- not because she had anything to do or anywhere to be- but because if she overslept, she’d never be able to fall asleep on time to get up for work the next morning, was to open her laptop.
She was still logged into the dating site, since she hadn’t clicked out the night before. She remembered shutting her laptop and tossing it aside like it was a burning pile of dung.
Her heart leaped up annoyingly before crashing into the pit of her stomach when she eyed the mailbox. It had a single digit over the envelope symbol. One.
She had a message!
She really hoped it wasn’t just some random guy. Her breath came in hard, dizzying pants which caused a cold sweat to break out over her body. Her heart hammered hard and her pulse was so frantic she wondered if it might actually be dangerous for her health.
She could hear her mom in her head, going on and on about how she always got so worked up about the smallest things. Her mom actually had told her that it was possible to have a stroke at any age. Or a heart attack. And then she asked when Ash was ever going to find someone and settle down and have kids. Her mother, who was not a doctor by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how many scraped knees she’d bandaged or how many fevers and belly aches she’d banished, had set in just last week about the whole biological clock. To her twenty-eight-year-old daughter. Clearly, her mom hadn’t got the memo about forty being the new twenty.
Cut it out. Focus. She took a deep breath, the kind from her yoga class that she forced herself to go to once a week. In and out through the nose. Slow. Calm. Feel the earth beneath you… in and out, in and out.