he said when they were seated in a booth with steaming mugs in front of them, “how do you envision going forward with this campaign to fool Harry?”
“I thought we’d keep it simple,” Frankie told him. “We can work out a list of events Harry is likely to attend. Then we can appear together and pretend to be in love while Harry’s watching. Hopefully, it won’t take long to convince him. Once he accepts that, he can cross me off his matchmaking list and sign your company contract for the new HuntCom campus, and we can go back to our normal lives.”
“Harry’s pretty shrewd—I’m not sure he’s going to be as easy to convince as you seem to think,” Eli told her. “He didn’t get his reputation as a shark in the financial world by being dense.”
“But that’s business.” Frankie propped her forearms on the polished wood tabletop and leaned forward. “When it comes to personal relationships, Harry can be amazingly unaware. Look at the women he married—disasters, every one of them.”
“You’ve got a point.” Eli shrugged. “It’s hard to argue with his marital record. The only good thing about Harry’s ex-wives is that he stopped getting married after making four bad choices.”
“Exactly.” Frankie nodded decisively. “I truly anticipate he’ll accept our romantic smoke screen as fact. I don’t think he’ll look deeper.”
“Nevertheless,” Eli told her. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. Remember,” he cautioned her, “it’s not just Harry we have to convince. Your mother or sisters are likely to be attending the same functions as Harry. If we’re not believable, they’ll never buy it. Cornelia’s not going to be easy to fool—especially when it comes to one of her daughters. And if Cornelia knows we’re faking, she’s likely to tell Harry.”
Frankie frowned, unconsciously winding a lock of hair around her forefinger in a gesture Eli had noticed her make before when she was deep in thought.
“You’re right,” she murmured. She looked up at Eli, her brown eyes alive with bright determination, gold flecks swimming in the chocolate-brown depths. “So we can’t let her know we’re pretending. Think you can pull it off?”
Her tone matched the challenge in the quick curve of her lips.
“Absolutely.” He lifted a brow, tossing the challenge back at her with a slow smile. “The question is, can you?”
She laughed, shrugging in a quick, elegant shift of her shoulders beneath the tailored blue suit jacket. “A woman learns to fake being interested in a guy before she’s out of junior high school. It’s a rite of passage.”
“Yeah?” Startled and intrigued, Eli lifted an eyebrow in inquiry. “Why in junior high?”
“Because at my school, that was the first year of boy-girl dances, and every girl wanted a date. Unfortunately, the girls outnumbered the boys two-to-one. Which meant there was a lot of competition for invitations to the school functions.”
Eli swept a slow, appreciative gaze over her face, hair, down her throat and the swell of her breasts beneath the cream blouse she wore under her suit jacket. The table edge prevented him from going lower, and he returned to meet her eyes. “I bet you never had to compete for a date. I’m guessing the boys were lined up next to your school locker, waiting for you to choose.”
She threw back her head and laughed, the throaty musical sound stroking over Eli as if she’d touched him.
“Not hardly,” she said when she stopped chuckling, her eyes dancing. “When I was thirteen, I wore braces, was skinny—straight up and down without a curve in sight—spent most of my time with my nose buried in a book, and last but not least, I was taller than any boy in my class. So, no … I wasn’t exactly the most desirable date on anyone’s list.” She lifted her cup and sipped, eyeing him with amusement.
“No kidding?” Bemused, he stared at her. “I’m trying to imagine you as a skinny thirteen-year-old with crooked teeth, and it just doesn’t compute.”
“I’ll show you one of my seventh-grade class pictures sometime. Trust me—I’m not lying. In fact …” She considered for a moment. “It’s entirely possible that the reality of my thirteen-year-old nerdiness was much worse than I’m describing.”
Eli laughed, charmed by her candid comments. “Why don’t I remember you at thirteen?” he asked.
“Because you and Justin were freshmen in college that year and really busy—I hardly saw Justin that year, except for dinner on Christmas Day,” Frankie told him.
“That’s right,” Eli mused, thinking back. “First year at the UW was crazy busy. Now I wish I’d taken time to visit at Christmas. If I had, I could have seen you in braces.”
“You didn’t miss much,” she said dryly. “How about you? I’m guessing you weren’t a skinny nerd with braces when you were thirteen.”
Eli considered. “You’d have to ask the girls in my class whether they thought I was a nerd,” he told her. “I didn’t have braces, but I earned good grades and I was certainly a lot skinnier than I am now.”
“I bet you were cute.” She sighed. “If you’d been in my class, I’m sure you would have had girls lined up outside your locker.” She eyed him with curiosity. “And I bet you have girls lined up outside your condo now. It just occurred to me to wonder—do you have a lady friend who’s going to be upset with our pretend love affair?”
He shook his head. “No. If I did, I wouldn’t have agreed.”
She sipped her coffee and eyed him over the rim. “I know it’s none of my business, but after listening to the occasional comment from Justin, I’ve always assumed you’re usually dating someone. I’m glad you’re currently available, because it certainly makes my plan to fool Uncle Harry much easier, but why are you unattached?”
Eli didn’t want to tell her that even if he’d been dating someone, he would have untangled himself immediately. There was no way he’d let Harry maneuver her into dating and maybe marrying Nicholas Dean. He didn’t want to look too closely at the reasons he felt so strongly about Frankie dating Dean, but he accepted that he did.
“I suppose the truth is, I haven’t had time to think about dating lately. I’ve only been back at work full-time for a couple of months.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Her brown eyes warmed with sympathy. “I knew you were hurt at work last year, but I hadn’t realized you’d only recently recovered.”
“It took a while,” he said. “I fell off a scaffold on a construction site and broke my left leg.” He shrugged. “It was a clean break, but there were complications requiring two more surgeries—I was housebound and unable to work most of the year. Plus, I was in physical therapy off and on for months. The end result was that I was rarely in the office—or anywhere else, for that matter,” he added. “Practically the only social function I went to that year was your birthday party at Harry’s house. I was between surgeries that month.”
Her lashes lowered, screening her eyes, and faint color tinted her fair skin. “No wonder you aren’t involved with someone at the moment,” she said, lifting her gaze to his once more. “You haven’t had time.”
“No.”
