Page 21 of The Fake Dating Plan

He shook his head. “Ax said nothing. Only that you too were no longer a thing. Makes sense now.”

“What does?”

“Him back then. Him now. You here.”

“Thanks for giving me a cryptogram with zero clues. Now tell me what I do not know about?”

He opened his mouth like he was about to say something, but then Ax came over and said, “Pay up,” to Santiago, “I won.” His eyes were on his brother, clearly avoiding mine.

“Check your account,” Santiago said to Ax. However, his gaze turned on me as he said, “But it’s nothing to what I’ve learned.”

Two days later and back in New York, I was still thinking about what Santiago said. The thought would not leave me even as I updated my colleagues on how the Singapore launch went.

“The Instagram pics you took with the race car drivers gained a lot of traction,” Andy, the social media manager, said. “And we saw an uptick in sales following the posts.”

I silently thanked Santiago for taking me to the pits. His brother, on the other hand, could rot.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we could get a bigger influencer to push our products? Someone with international reach?” This wasn’t the first time Andy had suggested we grow our social media budget. She had been making the pleas since she first came. “I mean, we have the money now, don’t we?”

I looked around. Everyone at the meeting seemed to agree. But we weren’t there yet. “We do have the money, but we need to focus more on the wholesale front now that our business is expanding. We were barely able to meet the demand KMVH made for this last launch.”

“But getting some brand recognition would be good though,” Laura said. “Imagine how many bracelets we would sell, if Kylie Jenner wears one.”

“Her posts cost a million dollars.”

Everyone went silent. Someone whistled.

“What about Gia?” Matthew, the warehouse manager who rarely contributed during this part of the meeting, said. People seemed to like the idea, as a few of them nodded. I was about to say the meeting wasn’t about who we could afford but where we should spend our money, but I could tell I had lost that battle. “She has a fun and flirty vibe, plus she has a big pull with the international audience,” Andy said. “There are a lot of nationalities in her tweets.”

“And she once wore our products.” Another person shouted, “she would be a perfect fit.” The room burst into murmurs. Yep, this has gotten away from me.

“Wasn’t she Axel Reid’s last girlfriend,” Laura said, “She might not want to be associated with her ex’s stuff.”

“It must have been a big breakup,” Andy said. “Both of them haven’t been dating anyone since.

So that’s who he was with before the famous stint. I tried not to think about how different it was when we broke up, how he immediately jumped into the dating pool. Or dwell on the odd feeling of hating this Gia person, whoever she was. Was that jealousy? Nope. Why would I be when I hadn’t cared about him for nine years and don’t care about him now?

“Fine. Andy, give me a list of models you think could be viable and are within our budget, including Gia. Let’s see if she’s willing to work with us.”

I would not be jealous of someone who clearly didn’t care about me.

When I got back to my empty apartment, something I had to rectify soon, I was so tired I dropped onto my bed and slept for a whole nine hours. Dwelling in Singapore was something I didn’t want to do, but I found myself the next morning thinking about exactly that. Why the fuck did I kiss her?Because you wanted to.I couldn’t lie to myself about that. When I saw her wearing that dress, all the anger and jealousy I was feeling withered away, and the immediate need to taste her lips, feel her skin, replaced it.

Then there was her response. Hell, I was getting hard just by thinking about the way her pillowy lips had felt on mine. Their softness and the way her tongue caressed mine, something only she knew how. Then she slapped my face.

I shook my head to get her out. I shouldn’t have gone to the race, but Tiago asked Emilia, and knowing his flirty nature, I knew I had to go as well. It made no sense for someone, like me, who was clearly over her.I’m over her,I repeated to myself.Damn it, I was still thinking about her.

I got out of bed, took a shower, and went to work. Work was the only thing that would get my mind off the woman with a body of sin and a heart to match. I arrived in record time. Taking a chopper doesn’t hurt, and when I entered my office—

“What are you doing here?”

“Not a hello to your own mother? I raised you poorly,” Mom said. She was standing by the desk, looking elegant in a flashy teal pantsuit intended for high society lunches and not for working. Her petite frame and round face didn’t look like that of someone who had three grown-up children. Sometimes I wondered if every child saw their mother as eternally the same age as I did mine.

“Surprised to see you here, that's all.”

She lifted my gold and black plaque that said, Axel Reid: C.O.O, on it. “A little crass don’t you think.”

“Leave that. I like it.”

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