You’d have to play the part of my fiancée when my mother came around or if I needed your attendance at something, but the reality would be that we’d just be roommates. And the beauty of it is that if my mother believes I’m engaged to you, I could get her off my back.”
“That really is a crazy idea,” Josie said.
He smiled sheepishly again and she wished he would stop it. Smiling put lines at the corners of each of his eyes and deep grooves bracketing his supple mouth, and only made him more attractive.
“We could tell my mother that since we really just met we’re going to have an extended engagement,” he continued as if this were actually a possibility. “And who knows how long we could draw it out? No matter how long it is, it’ll give me a break.”
He sounded like he needed one.
Certainly she needed a place to move to…
Josie could hardly believe that last thought had gone through her head.
Was she honestly considering this?
“It’s crazy,” she repeated. Only now what seemed even crazier than his idea was the fact that she might be thinking about doing it.
“I thought being a little crazy was right up your alley,” he commented then, as if he liked that about her.
She’d never considered herself crazy. Spontaneous. Free-spirited. Adventurous. Those were all things she remembered of her parents. Things she liked to keep alive in herself. And even if some people—like Mr. Bartholomew—considered what she did on the spur of the moment or on a whim crazy, what was important to her was that she found her actions reasonable. Or enjoyable. Or beneficial to someone.
Moving in with Michael Dunnigan, pretending to be engaged to him, would be beneficial to him, a little voice in the back of her mind pointed out. It would also be beneficial to her….
“Have you been drinking?” she asked suddenly, wanting to make sure this wasn’t some inebriated lark that he would regret when he sobered up.
“Drinking with Miss Tofu? Are you kidding? She ordered me a shot of some thick green stuff—wheat grass juice of something—but there was definitely no liquor in it. It might have tasted better if there had been.”
She purposely hadn’t invited him to sit down. Or sat herself for that matter. But now he perched a casual hip on the arm of an easy chair as if he were right at home anyway.
Then he said, “It wouldn’t be all that complicated. An occasional meal with my family. Holidays. A wedding or a reunion or a birthday here and there. And you wouldn’t always have to go to everything with me. Sometimes I could just say you had to work or you didn’t feel well or something else came up. The rest of the time we’d go our separate ways. Date. Do our own thing the same as any roommates. Plus my shifts run twenty-four on, twenty-four off, so every other day—and night—you’d have the place to yourself. And think how happy you’d make Mom,” he finished with another of those smiles that weakened Josie’s knees.
And that was the biggest problem with this idea, she thought when it happened. Sparks had already flown between them. She already knew there was an attraction between them. A combustible attraction. An uncontrollable attraction. The kind of attraction that had landed her in bed with him for the most passionate, the most mind-boggling sex she’d ever experienced. How could she now move in with him, be in close proximity to him, play at being in a romantic relationship with him, and keep it platonic?
“I don’t think it would be very wise,” she said in response to her own misgivings.
Which he seemed to read like an open book. “Because of Labor Day weekend. I know, I’ve thought about that. It was pretty fantastic and it would be hard…difficult to avoid the temptation to repeat it. But we’ve already agreed that that isn’t what we want and so far we’ve stuck to it. We haven’t seen each other again. And believe me, I’ve thought about calling you. So I think that if we make a pact just to be roommates, friends—”
“Coconspirators.”
“Okay, coconspirators and partners in crime, and we really put our minds to it, we can keep Labor Day weekend in the past and stay this new course for the future.”
Josie didn’t have time for a rebuttal because there was a loud pounding on her door just then.
She crossed back to it and opened it, too lost in her own thoughts to ask who it was first. But even so she was surprised to find Mr. Bartholomew standing outside in the stairwell. Still looking furious.
“Here,” he said, shoving a sheet of paper at her. “I called my lawyer—”
“At midnight on a Saturday night?”
“If I can’t sleep, neither can anyone else!” the paunchy man in the undershirt snarled. “My lawyer says to put in writing that you’ve broken the lease and either you get out or I can evict you, your dog, and the rest of the occupants of this apartment. So there it is. You’re gone tomorrow or else. Legally.”
Josie had no idea if he was bluffing or not but the landlord turned tail and stormed up the stairs, leaving her with a handwritten paper saying just what he’d told her it said.
So much for trying to cajole him into letting her stay a little longer.
She closed the door but remained facing it for a while, staring at it and considering her options.
She could get rid of Pip.
But she loved the big bull mastiff and she wasn’t going to do that.
She could gamble that Mr. Bartholomew couldn’t really evict her the next day and that maybe she could find a place for them before he actually could throw them out.
But if she was wrong he could very well kick out her three roommates, too, and that wasn’t fair. Besides the fact that she honestly could end up on the street because if the landlord did evict her suddenly she doubted a hotel or the YWCA could let her in with a dog.
Or she could take Michael Dunnigan up on his offer.
She could move into his brownstone, live rent free, and pretend to be his fiancée.
Actually, it didn’t seem as if she did have any options.
“Do you absolutely, positively guarantee that this will be a purely platonic arrangement?” she heard herself say before she’d even turned around to face Michael Dunnigan again.
“I absolutely, positively guarantee it. You’ll never even see me without a shirt on.”
Josie closed her eyes as if that might keep her from seeing the image that came into her head at just the mention of him bare-chested. The image of him in the kitchen between lovemaking sessions over Labor Day, eating out of a carton, nothing on but a pair of boxer shorts, his V-shaped torso a work of art…
“I don’t even want to see you without shoes and socks,” she said almost as if she were in pain.
“Okay. Not even without shoes and socks,” he agreed.
Josie opened her eyes and took a deep breath, sighing it out resolutely. “All right,” she
