Except Riccardo had been broken to his very core when his fiancée chose her former boyfriend over him and Mitch eventually realized he hadn’t really loved Julia. Because Riccardo knew that, Mitch was not pleased with what Riccardo was hinting.
“I’m over her.”
Riccardo winced. “You know that and I know that, but it isn’t every day that a woman leaves her boyfriend for his brother, and then the jilted brother is asked to be the best man at their wedding. Tongues are going to wag, my friend. Everybody’s going to watch every move you make. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you have no reason to be jealous.”
Righteous indignation whipped through Mitch and he bounced out of his tall-back black leather office chair. If anybody knew Mitch felt nothing but happiness for his brother and Julia, it was Riccardo. It annoyed the hell out of him that his cousin was pushing this nonissue. “I have no reason to be jealous!”
“Your brother is the oldest. He got the CEO-ship of your family’s business. He stole your girlfriend.”
Mitch growled.
“And let’s face it. He’s better looking.”
Mitch tossed his pen at Riccardo, who ducked.
“It’s reactions like that that will have Nanna fussing over you for the two weeks we’re in Spain celebrating this wedding. Do you want to have Nanna hovering?”
Finally seeing what Riccardo was doing, he slowly lowered himself to his seat again. “No.” Oh, Lord. He did not want Nanna hovering. His mother would be bad enough, but his grandmother? If she thought he was having even one iota of sadness over Julia marrying his brother, she’d do everything but spoon-feed him his dessert and make him look pathetic, when he wasn’t. Finding his brother in his bedroom with his girlfriend two years ago hadn’t been upsetting as much as it had been a wake-up call that rippled through his whole life. Losing Julia had put him back into the dating pool where he’d realized maybe their “love” was more about convenience than real emotion. They’d been together so long that staying together just seemed like the right thing to do. Recognizing the mistake he’d almost made in the name of comfort had jarred him. And now he was smarter, sharper, alert to the pitfalls of getting too comfortable with anything.
“Then you have to figure out a way to prove—from the very second you step off the Ochoa Vineyards jet—that you’re not just fine with this wedding. You are happy.”
Unfortunately, his family didn’t seem to see that his brother’s betrayal hadn’t really been a betrayal but a way for Mitch to dodge a big, fat bullet. They didn’t see how it had spring-boarded him to the kind of success he’d always longed for. All they remembered was that the initial shock of it had thrown Mitch into a tailspin. This was what he got for moving an ocean away. They hadn’t seen how quickly he’d bounced back. And when he tried to tell them, they thought he was either attempting to smooth things over or save face.
“The only way Nanna will ever think I’m happy is if I’m married.”
Riccardo frowned. “You can’t get married before your brother. No time.” He stopped. His face shifted and he burst out laughing. “But you could bring a fiancée to the wedding celebrations.”
“Right.”
“No! I’m serious! All you have to do is find a woman to agree to be your fiancée for the two weeks we’re in Spain. You make up a story about how you met. You create some romantic schmaltzy thing about how you proposed. You kiss her a few times in front of Nanna and—” He snapped his fingers. “You’re no longer the rejected brother.”
“Except I’m engaged?”
“No. No. A couple weeks later, you call Nanna. You say you had a fight and you’re not engaged anymore. And you don’t really have to explain too much until the next time you go home.”
He had to admit there was a certain poetry to it. He’d sneaked home to propose to Julia the night he’d found her and his brother in the bedroom of their apartment. They were fully clothed, but there weren’t a whole hell of a lot of reasons why Alonzo would be in her bedroom, except that they were lovers. Alonzo had vehemently denied it. He’d even told Mitch he’d walked in on their first kiss. They weren’t cheating. They didn’t want to hurt him. But it was clear from the way Alonzo protected Julia that Mitch’s brother might not be sleeping with her, but he loved her.
He’d been gobsmacked, but the whole mess had prompted his dad to give him the go-ahead to start the project he’d been angling to try for years: put his family’s wines online. He’d moved to New York for a change of scenery and grown to love the city. He’d also gotten so good at selling his family’s wines that he’d started a second website. That site sold wines from numerous vineyards—and glasses, wine racks, corkscrews, aprons, T-shirts with funny wine sayings, books on wine, books on serving wine, books on hosting wine-tasting parties—anything and everything related to wines. That was the site where he made money. Lots of money. Enough money to bring Riccardo from Spain to New York to help him start three more specialty websites. One sold anything and everything to do with cycling. One sold cooking supplies. One sold anything to do with golf.
All he had to do was pick a topic, find the vendors who made the “best” of whatever he wanted to sell, test their products, rule out the weak, choose the good and create a site. There was enough variety in the duties that he was never bored, and Riccardo was a financial genius. Whatever money Mitch’s websites brought in was invested to make more money. Though they wouldn’t tell their family, they were on track to be worth more than the entire Ochoa family enterprises in as few as three years.
So losing Julia had opened the door for him to become the businessman he was today. The very fact that he wouldn’t go back and change the outcome was proof that everything that had happened was for his benefit.
Still, none of those things would sway Nanna into believing he was happy, and she’d more than hover. She’d make him look pathetic. Worse, his grandmother making a big deal about him would put a real damper on his brother’s wedding. This was supposed to be Julia and Alonzo’s special time, two weeks of celebrating, and if he didn’t do something, his presence could actually ruin it.
But if he didn’t attend the wedding, refused to be best man, people would gossip that he was upset and the whole wedding would be about him not being there.
Either way, Julia and Alonzo’s wedding could become all about him.
He had to fix this.
“So where do we find this woman who’d be willing to pretend to be my fiancée for two weeks?”
* * *
Lila Ross gathered the sheets of paper that flew out of the copier, stacked them neatly, stapled them and headed into her boss’s office. It wasn’t often that she had both Mitch and Riccardo in the same room at the same time. She had to take advantage of this opportunity to get their approval on last month’s income statements, especially since they were leaving the next day for a family wedding.
Reports ready, she shoved her big-frame glasses up her nose and headed for the open door. She knocked twice to let them know she was there, then entered the room talking.
“I have last month’s income statements.”
Mitch
