Page 52 of One Golden Ring
Nothing is.
16
DARCY
Iduck into my room, realizing as I shut the door that maybe it’s rude to cut Derek out of this conversation.
The thing is, Mandy already knows too much. And I can’t have him overhearing her if she starts yelling at me.
“What’s going on?” she asks me.
Her voice is gentler now than it was earlier today. I guess she’s had a chance to think about all of this.
She’ll be mad all over again as soon as I explain.
“It’s not real,” I tell her right away. “I was in front of his grandfather earlier, so I couldn’t say anything.”
“It’s not… it’s—what?” she asks.
“You know all those Hallmark movies where people bring pretend boyfriends and girlfriends home to meet their families for the holidays?” I ask her.
“Yeah,” she says. “I love those movies.”
“Well,” I tell her. “This is that.”
There’s a pause.
“Darcy,” she says. “You don’t do that in real life.”
“His grandfather is his whole world,” I tell her softly. “And he’s not well. Derek just wants him to stop worrying about him being alone.”
“Derek?”she echoes.
“You know who I mean,” I say.
“You’ve worked for the man for three years and I haven’t heard you use his first name once,” she says.
“Well, we can’t make anyone think we’re really engaged if I’m going around calling him Mr. Lockwood,” I tell her.
“You’re not trying to fool me right now,” she points out.
She’s not wrong.
But even though I struggled with it at first, calling Derek by his name gets easier every time.
“I know you have feelings for him,” she says after a moment. “Aren’t you worried about getting hurt here?”
I sigh and lower myself into the chair by the vanity, trying not to meet my own eyes in the mirror.
“It’s… complicated,” I tell her.
I could have said that I don’t have feelings for him, and until these last few days it would have been skating the border between a lie and the truth. I could have passed it off as a silly crush.
But now, seeing him here, seeing the man he is with his family in Angel Mountain?
Yes, I definitely have feelings.
“It’s not complicated at all, Darcy,” Mandy tells me. “He’s your boss—the guy who hired you even though you didn’t go back to school, the guy who pays you fairly andtreats you like a human being. If anything goes wrong here…”
