Page 2 of Never Say Yes To Your Boss

Okay, wait, what? What the actual shit?

“You need a baby.” I’m becoming a squawking parrot, and it’s not a good look. Neither is my gaping mouth because I can’t quite seem to contain my astonishment.

Quite suddenly, the sweet, calm demeanor is gone, and his control slips, and there’s something in his eyes that is dark and disturbing, and I don’t like it. It sends a chill up my spine, a chill that didn’t come from my numb nether region, but then, with a blink, it’s gone like a magic trick. His face is back to being pleasant planes and angles that are so easy on the eye that it somehow hurts.

“Yes. You see, I had this grandmother. She came from a long line of rich people, and she did what all slick, nefarious, rich, cloak-and-dagger grandmother types with a sick sense of humor and too much money, as well as a healthy sense of family preservation, would do. She made a marriage and baby clause in her will when she died ten years ago. It states that the oldest Anderson son has to be married by the time he’s thirty and produce an heir by the time he’s thirty-two.”

“Well, that doesn’t leave much time for things, does it?” I slap my hand over my mouth. I can’t believe that just came out.

By some miracle, Bradford doesn’t take my head off. “No, it doesn’t. I was saying that the oldest male has to be married and produce an heir, or the evidence of one at least, or the entire line of Andersons—all the Anderson children in the family—forfeit their inheritance, trusts, businesses, assets, and so on. All of it will be given to charity.”

I’m shocked. Obviously. “That’s so…”

“Astoundingly strange, I know.”

I was going for overly cliched and unoriginal.“Did your grandma happen to like…uh, books, by any chance?”

“She loved them. Romances, mostly, but she was a sucker for a good thriller or mystery as well.”

Oh. Oh, yes. It shows. My god, it really shows. It’s like she wrote a romance, arranged marriage, baby trope into her will to thwart her family because she thought it was funny. Or perhaps overly romantic. She couldn’t have actually thought it would work out, could she?

“She thought it would work out. That we’d find our perfect matches and be blissfully happy like she was until my grandpa passed.”

“Oh, I see. I…”Thought things like this stay in books. Too many books. Like, half of the romance books.

Don’t get me wrong. Romances are awesome. They make me feel like things are possible. That life can get better. That one’s father didn’t abscond and leave one drowning in a horde of bills, one’s sister doesn’t have to be sick, there doesn’t have to be stacks and stacks of bills that are past due, one doesn’t have to work two jobs, one’s mother doesn’t have to work two to three jobs, one doesn’t live in a crumbling little house, and that things can and will get better. I mean, dang it, even the dark romances that are all twisted have happy endings.

But this? This is real life. And this granny seriously left my dreamy boss in the lurch.Holy shit. He’s looking at me. Like pointedly looking at me. Is he suggesting? He can’t be suggesting…

“Charity isn’t so bad,” I squeak, a mouse in the room with a lion. I know there are stories about that, too, but in this one, the mouse gets eaten.

Charity might be the best thing for certain members of Bradford’s family. His brother, who’s a few years younger than him, is not so much rumored as proven to be reckless. Then there’s the sister who prefers to stay out of society’s eye and the youngest brother who is so foul that all the kisses he keeps amassing won’t turn him into a prince, no matter what. Too bad he’s not the oldest. Then again, he doesn’t seem to be in any rush to get married. Also, then again, he’s only eighteen. I’ve heard Bradford on the phone with him many times, giving him some tough love—smarten up and don’t embarrass the family instructions disguised as older brother care.

“Yes, well, obviously, my grandmother thought it was hilarious to have the last laugh. Payback for all the times we were brats as kids, no doubt. We gave her hell when we were young, and now she’s giving it back.” He clenches his hands together. Hands that I’ve looked at and daydreamed about. Hands that guide his handsome white horse as he swoops in to save me from my dismal life in his sparkling armor. “It’s more of a wife problem at the moment, actually,” he clarifies. “If there isn’t a wife, then everyone will lose everything.”

“That’s…that’s so unfair.” It is. He’s done marvels with this company. It matters. He matters. He matters to a lot of people, and this whole city is so proud of him. Philadelphia would lose one of its heroes.

He nods. “It is, which is why I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime. Six months, one million , and a whirlwind romancethat no one saw coming. You’ll be swept away, given everything you could ever desire. And, at the end of it, a doctor will declare that you’re not capable of having children, and that will be that. An annulment and everything will be saved. You’ll be that much richer, and everyone’s problems will be solved.”

Well, shit on two sticks.

I was wrong. Bradford’s not a lion. He’s a wolf, and he’s looking at me like he knows I have a shit ton of very real problems and very real debts. A sister who is sick for real and a mother who is going to work herself into a literal grave. He can’t know that, can he? There are a thousand women who would do this for him.Anyone. He would just have to ask.

“Why me?” Somehow, that comes out past one heck of a dry throat problem. But I have to be sure. I can’t just say no. Not when I’m in the position I’m in, even if it makes me the damsel in distress to his cliched grandmother and her horrible token will.

“Because you’re a good person, Everleigh. We’re not strangers. I know how generous and good you are, and I know you’re a hard worker. That you’re brilliant. I can’t just choose someone off the street or someone I know. I know you’ll say you’re no one and that you’re not in my league or on my radar, but that’s the reason I chose you. It has to look real. In the end, if it doesn’t work out, well, that’s very unfortunate. No one can accuse us of frauding the will if a secret romance has taken place here in the office. No one will fault me for wanting to keep it under wraps, and yes, we had to push things up because of the will and all that…”

Wow.Here, I thought he barely knew my name, but now that he said it, it’s like red velvet cake on his tongue. All sweet and sensual and exotic. Yes, that’s about the extent of my fun and life experiences because I really do think red velvet takes it up a notch, and I know it’s so five years ago or whatever because that ship has gone and sailed, but I can’t help it. I really, really like it,even if it’s just basically a really good chocolate cake with a fancy name.

Shit, wait. He just asked me to be his fake wife, and I’m swooning over how he said my name? What’s wrong with me?“Whoa, come again with that. No one will believe it. And I am no one. I’m your secretary. How embarrassing.” I feel like I’m suffocating. The walls in here are closing in. Bradford is closing in. Life is closing in. My numb ass is closing in.

He shrugs, and my god, he totally has this all planned out. How long did it take him to come up with this? “Everyone loves a good old-fashioned love story. It will all play out the way it’s supposed to play out.”

“Back up about fraud and the will. I think it would be rather obvious.”

He shrugs again like it’s no big deal and as though people don’t go to jail for things like this. “A real doctor, real opinion, real facts. Hard to contest that.”

My god, I’ve just been handed the very thing I spent so much time dreaming about. The man. And a way to fix all my family’s problems. His granny might have been unbelievable, but this is very real. If I don’t take this chance, what else am I going to do? Let my sister suffer? Let my mom work herself into a literal early grave? Keep working two jobs myself? Stay exhausted all the damn time? We’re one disaster away from everything folding in on us. As it is, we’re barely keeping our heads above the black, ominous ocean of poverty.

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