I pass?”
He fought the urge to stutter. “You look—” Unbelievable. Amazing. So different that his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “Very good. Perfect.”
“I took you for the sunglasses and miniskirt type.”
And who knew her legs were so long, so shapely?
He covered his shock at her perception of his taste in women with a nervous laugh. “You maxed out Riccardo’s credit cards, didn’t you?”
She glanced back at Pete, who pulled suitcase after suitcase out of the car. “He told me to, but I didn’t. You don’t grow up a foster child without getting some mad skills with money. It would have killed me to pay full price for some of these things. Besides, clearance racks sometimes have the best clothes.”
She made a little motion with her fingers for Pete to bring her luggage to the plane, then she headed for the steps. Mitch watched her walk up the short stack and duck into the fuselage, vaguely aware when Pete walked up beside him.
“Who knew, huh?”
“Yeah.” Mitch didn’t have to ask what Pete was talking about. His Plain Jane assistant looked like she’d stepped off the cover of a magazine. Her high-heeled sandals added a sway to her hips. Sunglasses made her look like someone who summered in the Mediterranean.
Pete said, “Better get going.”
Realizing he was standing there gaping like an idiot, he walked to the steps and climbed into the plane. Lila sat on one of the four plush, white leather seats that swiveled and looked like recliners. He stopped.
She peered up at him over her sunglasses. “The pilot told me to sit anywhere and buckle in.”
“Pedro?” The good-looking one? Why did that make his chest feel like a rock?
She shrugged and pulled an e-reader out of her oversize purse. “I don’t know. The guy with the great smile.”
It was Pedro. He might not be a millionaire businessman who came from a family with a vineyard, but pilots made a tidy sum, especially private pilots. And the man was a flirt.
He told himself he only cared because Lila was supposed to be his fiancée, and she couldn’t use this trip to cruise for dates. “When we get to Spain, you can’t be noticing the great smiles of other men.”
She laughed. “Jealous?”
“No.” The rock from his chest fell to his stomach. He wasn’t jealous. This was a make-believe situation. Great hair, sexy body, flirty sunglasses or not, this was still Lila. “I’m saving myself a ton of grief with this ruse. Not to mention that I’m getting the focus off me and onto the happy couple where it belongs. I do not want to spoil my brother’s wedding.”
He sat on the seat across the aisle and buckled in. Pulling a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, he swiveled his chair to face her and said, “Riccardo came up with this last night.”
She glanced around as if confused. “Where is Riccardo?”
“He took a commercial flight so he could get there ahead of us to pave the way for our story. He’s going to tell everyone I’m engaged. He’s going to pretend to have let it slip and tell my mom and Nanna they have to behave as if they don’t know because I wanted to surprise them.”
She frowned. “That’s weird.”
“No. It adds authenticity to the story. Makes it more believable.”
“Ah.”
That one syllable gave him a funny feeling that tightened his shoulders and made his eyes narrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She laughed. “It just meant I understood.” She laughed again. “You’re cranky in real life.”
“Yeah, well, you’re...” She was a knockout in real life. How had he not noticed this? He couldn’t remember a damned thing she’d worn to work, which meant it had to be nondescript—nothing worth remembering. Her hair had always been in those odd chopstick things. And her glasses? Thick as Coke bottles.
“You’re different too.” He finished his thought with a bunch of lame words that didn’t come out as much of a comeback.
And that was another thing. When had she gotten so sassy?
He opened the folded sheet of paper. “Riccardo decided that we should stick with the fact that you’re my assistant.” He glanced up and saw her watching him intently, clearly wanting to get her part down so she could play it. He relaxed a bit, though it did send an unexpected zing through him that she’d taken off the sunglasses. She must be wearing contacts on her smoke-gray eyes. Very sexy smoke-gray eyes that tilted up at the corners and gave her an exotic look.
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, the whole thing started with a long chat one night when we were working late.”
She caught his gaze. “We never chatted.”
“Yeah, I know.” And he suddenly felt sorry that they hadn’t. “But this is make-believe, remember?”
She smiled slightly and nodded.
He sucked in a breath, not liking the nervousness that had invaded him. If he couldn’t even read the facts off a sheet, how was he going to perpetuate this charade?
“After our long talk, we started eating dinners together on the nights we were working late.”
“Hey, we did do that!”
“But we talked about work.”
She bobbed her head. “Yeah, but because we actually did eat dinners together we have another bit of authenticity.”
Her answer softened some of the stiffness in his shoulders. “Sí. Good.” He pulled in a breath and read a little more of Riccardo’s story. “Then we started going out to dinner.”
She leaned her elbow on the armrest. “We certainly took our time.”
He looked up, met the gaze of her soft gray kitten eyes. “I think Riccardo is trying to show we didn’t act impulsively.”
“God forbid.”
He wasn’t sure why, but that made him laugh. “Stop. Riccardo’s already telling this story and we have to stick to it.”
“What if we came up with a totally different set of circumstances? What if we said that one day you ravaged me at work, and we started a passionate affair but we changed the story for Riccardo because we didn’t want him to know we couldn’t keep our hands off each other?”
All the blood in his veins caught fire. He could picture it. If she’d come to work looking like this he might have ravaged her.
He pulled his collar away from his throat. The plane’s engines whined to life.
“Let’s just stick with Riccardo’s story.”
*
