Page 114 of Charming Deception

“I know what you meant.”

“No. You don’t. I just meant I never thought I’d see the day that Jamie gets engaged. To anyone. He hates marriage.”

I don’t know why that stings so much.

Jameson told me himself that he’s not getting married. And Nicole rattled off a lot of gossip about him to me, mostly the names of famous women he’s been spotted with in public. And I’m not dense. It’s pretty clear my fiancé is a playboy.

Or he was, before he got engaged to me like two seconds ago.

I’d let the whispers of his past all just slide off, though. He’s not with other women now, so what does it matter?

But it hits differently, hearing that he “hates marriage.”

It really shouldn’t.

He already told me there would be no fairy-tale wedding at the end of this engagement. In one year, we go our separate ways.

I’ll be a millionaire, he’ll still be a billionaire, and we’ll both be single.

It’s so unromantic… the glitzy diamond on my finger suddenly feels colder and weirdly cheaper than it did before.

Chapter 26

Jameson

“So what’s the purpose of this dinner?” Graysen inquires. “You want to break it to us that you’ve failed your challenge while we all have full stomachs?”

I’m dressed for dinner and waiting for Megan in the foyer outside my home office when I decide to call my oldest brother. I’m now wondering if that was a mistake.

“I used to like you, Graysen. It’s a shame that’s changing.”

He gives a harsh sigh that says I don’t have time for this. “It’s been a tough year, little brother.”

It has been. Losing Granddad, and transitioning to running the whole Vance empire without him at the helm, has been hard on all of us. It’s Graysen, though, who carries most of the burden of taking over at the helm, aka working twenty-four seven.

But even he needs to eat, hence my idea to do this over dinner. It’s the only way—other than starring in some scandal in the press—that I can claim his full attention for any length of time.

I force the words out because I’ve decided it will be better if I give him a heads-up. “I just want to share the happy news of my engagement with my beloved siblings face-to-face.”

Graysen’s silence is long. “Engagement?”

“Yes. I took your advice, if you could call it that.” I refuse to acknowledge that he gave me an order and I followed it. “Cole Hudson’s sister is now my fiancée. I wanted to prepare you beforehand. So you can back me up in front of the others.”

“This is sudden.”

“No more sudden than your engagement. How long did you romance Sonia before you popped the question?”

He doesn’t even bother answering that because he didn’t romance his fiancée at all.

Instead, he says wearily, “And how do I know you’re not sleeping with her?”

“I am sleeping with her. I want it to look real for the staff. But I’m not having sex with her. You can trust me.”

“Can I?” His tone reminds me that he won’t be babysitting me on this. That it’s up to me to deliver on this, like the man I am. The man he helped raise.

“You saw us together,” I say dryly. “We have zero chemistry.”

I hear his almost inaudible sigh of surrender. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Jamie.”

---