to get herself to forget him.
Perhaps it was time to do something different. She had proved that ignoring this thing wasn’t going to make it go away. Maybe getting closer to him was the key. It was easy to maintain a crush, a fantasy, from afar. When you didn’t have to deal with wet towels on your bed or dirty dishes left on the table. Maybe what she needed was some old-fashioned exposure therapy.
Because what did she really know about Joss, beyond what she saw when he was occasionally in the office? If there was one sure way to test a romance it was for a couple to move in together.
Was she completely losing her mind thinking that this was even a feasible idea—never mind a good one?
The doorbell rang, shocking her out of her internal debate. Good, she was getting sick of the sound of her own thoughts. At least with Joss here she would have a sparring partner.
She jogged down the stairs to the street-level door, trying to ignore the familiar flip of her heart at the sight of him. Not that he was looking his best—he had clearly come straight from the office. His shirt was creased, his collar unfastened and his tie loosened.
And then she remembered again how his day had been a thousand times worse than hers and had to resist the urge to pull him close and comfort him.
‘Hey—you found it okay?’
‘Yeah.’ He waved his phone vaguely at her. ‘Just a little help from this. I’ve not been here since I was a kid.’
‘Of course—your dad used to stay here back then. I’d forgotten you must have been here too.’
She stepped back so that he could get through the door. From her little cobbled mews she could barely hear the traffic from the main road nearby, muffled by the square of white stucco pillared houses around the private, locked garden. She showed Joss upstairs to her apartment—a legacy of the time when the building would have had stables downstairs and living quarters for servants of the wealthy above, all tucked away behind the grand mansions on the square.
Eva loved the understated elegance of her home, with clipped bay trees at the door, original cobbles paving the passage and soft heritage colours on the doors and windows.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Joss said as he reached the top of the stairs and crossed to the living room, where great tall windows flooded light in one side of the room. ‘Have you been living here long?’
‘Since I started at Dawson’s.’
Joss looked intrigued. ‘I thought my dad had got rid of this place.’
‘He had—sort of,’ Eva said, reaching for a bottle of wine and raising a glass in question at Joss.
He nodded and reached to take it from her when it was full.
‘He realised it was mostly sitting empty while it was a company flat, so he decided to rent it out. When I started working for the company I was stuck for somewhere to stay. Your dad didn’t have a tenant at the time, and needed someone to house-sit, so he offered me this place.’
Joss raised his eyebrows. ‘Lucky you.’
‘Yeah, I don’t like to move a lot, and he offered me a long-term lease. I like it here.’
‘So I’m going to have a hard time convincing you to move in with me?’
Eva snorted, and winced at the sting of wine in her nose.
‘That part’s non-negotiable,’ she confirmed. ‘This is my home and I’m not leaving it.’
‘So you’re coming round to the rest of it? Good.’
She should have given him an outright no—told him there and then that there was absolutely no way she was going along with his ridiculous scheme. But somehow, with him here in her home, in her space, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. All of a sudden she wasn’t sure about anything.
That was what happened when the only stable part of your life upped and threatened to leave. It had sunk in on her short walk home from the office that she could be about to lose her job—the first point of stability she’d ever had in her life. The safe place that she’d built for herself in the twelve years that she’d been with the company.
She would have thought she’d have been used to it by now. She’d had her whole childhood to practise, after all. Every time her mother or her father had shipped out, or they’d all packed up and moved to another army base, she’d told herself it was the last time she’d care. The last time she’d cry.
She’d not managed to stick to her word until the final time. The time her mother hadn’t come home at all.
Her father had packed her off to boarding school then, not long after she’d begged him to leave the army, to stop moving her around and give her some stability. She’d taken herself straight off to university after school, and from there straight into business, landing in Edward’s team and working her way up to be his executive assistant.
Her parents had never managed to give her the stability she’d craved, so she’d found her own—with Dawson’s. It was a family business, its history stretching into the last century and the one before that. The company had been around long before Edward, and she had no doubt that it would continue without him.
But how was it ever going to feel the same after he was gone? And what else was going to change?
The succession plans that had been approved by the board had appointed her as Joss’s new EA—she was tied to the job role, not to the holder—but once his father was gone Joss had no reason to stick with that decision. She could be out through the door as soon as Edward was dead.
An engagement to the heir apparent—even a fake one—was another tie to the company. To the family. Another bond to the life that she’d built for herself. An obstacle between her and everything falling away. Was that completely crazy? Maybe. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.
‘Here.’ She passed Joss a bowl of potatoes and a salad. ‘Can you stick these on the table? The chicken will be just another minute.’
He took the bowls from her and glanced at the pan on the hob.
‘That looks amazing. You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, though. We could have ordered something.’
She shrugged. ‘It was no trouble. I’d have been cooking for myself anyway.’
‘You cook like this every night?’
She narrowed her eyes as she tried to work out his angle. ‘Are you asking if that’s part of the deal?’
‘I’m making conversation. At least, I’m trying to.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head as she grabbed a couple of plates and started serving up. ‘Everything just feels so...weird. I can’t get my head around it.’
‘It doesn’t need to be weird.’
‘Joss, this afternoon you asked me to pretend to be your fiancée. Now you’re asking me to move in with you. How can it be anything but weird?’
‘Because
