Page 5 of Boss's Baby: A Fake Fiance Romance

I was still wearing the ring.

Katie’s hand shot out so fast to grab mine that she nearly made me drop my drink. She inspected the ring on my finger, one eye squinted as if she were a jeweler making sure it was the real deal.

“Is this…is this Grandma’s engagement ring?”

“Um, yeah.” I slipped my hand out from under hers.

Sure enough, on my finger was the ring that had belonged to Grandma Mary, the vintage piece that Grandpa Alan had given her years and years ago.

“Can I ask why you’re wearing it? I mean, it’s gorgeous, we both know it, but why do you have it on?”

“Because I put it on earlier and I kind of…forgot about it.”

“Not sure how you forget about it,” she said. “But why’d you put it on to begin with?”

It was such a dumb reason, part of me wanted to lie about it. But there was no sense in that—Katie would no doubt see right through it. I’d never been much of a liar.

“I was going through Mom’s jewelry, and I saw it tucked away in back. And I couldn’t help myself—I put it on because I wanted to…”

Katie’s eyes went wide again. “You wanted to see what it was like!”

She had me dead to rights.

“It’s so dumb,” I said, a surge of embarrassment running through me. “But yeah. I wanted to see what it was like to wear something like this. I mean, I’ve tried it on before but that was back when I was a kid.”

She smiled warmly, as if she’d caught me red-handed. Or ring-handed, in this case.

“Cass, that’s so freaking cute. You wanted to pretend that you’d been proposed to?”

“No!” I shot out. “Not ‘pretending.’ That sounds weird. I wanted to, um, see what it was like, like I said.”

“See what it was like to be proposed to and wear a pretty ring,” she quickly added smirking.

I clumsily tried to cover up the ring with my drink-holding hand, the whole process far more awkward than I’d hoped it would be. Then, as I started twisting the ring off, Katie reached out and stopped me.

“No! Leave it on! It’s fun.”

“I feel so stupid,” I said as Katie took her hand away. “Seriously, I slipped it on, and then you told me it was time to go, and I forgot about it.”

“Sounds like some selective forgetting.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe you wanted everyone here to think you’d gotten engaged or something.”

“No way!” I quickly replied. “You really think I care what these people think about my dating life?”

This made me think of my dating life in New York. More specifically, how I didn’t have one.

“It’s fine!” said Katie. “Have some fun with it. Let people think you’ve been taken by some gorgeous New York CEO or something—billionaire CEO, of course.”

“’Billionaire CEO?’ Pretty sure those only exist in movies.”

She flashed me a coy look. “You mean those cheesy Hallmark movies you watch all the time?”

Another flush of embarrassment. “Not ‘all the time.’ Every now and then, at most.”

“Now and then” meaning whenever I happened to be home before eight. Or on days off. Or on holidays.

Ahem.

“Well, I say leave it on. Besides, taking it off and sticking it in your pocket or something’s an easy way to lose it. And trust me, you don’t want to lose that.”

I twisted the ring back down my finger. “Mom would kill me.”

Katie nodded. “Right. So that’s why you need to—” She stopped midsentence, like someone had poked her in the back.

“What’s up?”

Without saying a word, she reached into her pocket and took out her phone. “Oh…shit.”

“What?”

“You remember Mark Walsh?”

“’Mark Walsh’ as in ‘debate team captain’ Mark Walsh? ‘So nerdy it’s painful’ Mark Walsh?”

“That’s the one. I sort of happened upon him on Tinder and…”

She held up her phone, showing me a muscular, handsome man with a head of slicked-back red hair, one that vaguely resembled the braces-wearing string bean I’d known in high school.

“No way. That’s him?”

“That’s him. And he wanted to meet for drinks tonight over at this new wine bar.”

I realized what that meant, my stomach dropping at the idea of being left alone.

“You’re leaving me alone here?”

“Is that bad? We’ve kind of been talking all day and I, you know, think there might be something there.”

Katie, like in nearly every other facet of her personality, was my total opposite when it came to dating. Whereas I’d pretty much forgotten what it was like to go on a date—not that it bothered me—she seemed to always be with some new guy. And they always managed to have some kind of interesting job, like “shark photography” or “hot yoga instructor.” For me, every date I’d been on in the last year seemed to be with the same interchangeable, boring white-collar dude.

“He founded his own chai bubble tea delivery service in San Francisco, and it’s sort of a huge deal. And he’s totally, you know, grown out of his teenage awkwardness.”

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