Engaging the Boss (Heirs of Damon) (2 page)

BOOK: Engaging the Boss (Heirs of Damon)
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“I’d
need to arrive at his place this Friday.”

She
swallowed hard. She hadn’t expected it to be so soon. She was thinking she’d
have weeks to prepare or for some kind of natural disaster to occur that would
prevent her from going through with it. “No problem. It would just mean putting
this project on hold.” She nodded toward the microscope they’d been working
with before his uncle had called.

He
sighed with a very faint twist of his lips. If she hadn’t known him so well,
she wouldn’t have recognized the expression as reluctance. “Yeah. But, if we
lose our funding, it won’t matter. Better to delay now.” He hesitated,
obviously trying to make the decision.

“I
really don’t mind. It might be fun. I’ve never been to England, you know.”

“I
don’t know how fun it will be. You don’t know my family. They’re a
little…high-maintenance. Are you sure you’d be comfortable with this? I don’t
want to put you in an awkward position.”

“Why
would it be awkward? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

She
wasn’t sure where she got the courage to be so daring, to say something so
presumptuous. She thought of him as a friend, but they’d never done friend-type
things. They’d traveled around Iceland together over the last couple of years,
but that was to collect genealogical and genetic information, so it was always
under the context of work.

Otherwise,
both of them spent all of their days and most of their evenings working in this
lab.

“Yeah,”
he agreed, making up his mind at last. “Thanks. I really appreciate this.”

She
shrugged again, pleased that her casual act was convincing. Maybe she was a
better actress than she thought. “Not a problem. I’d hate for you to lose your
funding and for me to lose my job. I actually kind of like it, you know.”

He
smiled at her—a real smile, the one she only saw rarely. For a moment, he was
so attractive she almost lost her breath. “Good. Me too.”

He
took another long gulp of coffee, and they went back to work. Neither mentioned
the fake engagement again, and Sarah was quite sure that it had completely
slipped out of Jonathan’s mind. When he was absorbed in work, he thought about
nothing else.

She’d
never met anyone who could focus so intently for so long as him.

They
worked late, since they were making good progress, and it was almost ten in the
evening when Sarah realized she was famished and so tired she couldn’t see
straight. Having a peppermint ball every half-hour wasn’t cutting it. She hated
to call it quits before Jonathan, but sometimes she just had to.

“I’m
sorry,” she said at last, rolling her chair back over to her desk to set down
her tablet. The wheel on her chair had been acting up, and it steered her off
course so she almost ran into the corner of a table. “What did you say?” He’d
been talking, but she hadn’t tracked with any of his words. Her head ached and
her stomach churned, and her damned chair wasn’t working right.

Jonathan
glanced at his watch, as if he just realized it was late. “You’re exhausted,”
he said. “Go on home. We’ll pick up again tomorrow.”

She
let out a relieved breath, but still felt a bit guilty. “I can hold out a
little longer if you—”

“No,
no. It’s late. Sorry I kept you so long.”

She
got up to leave, since he’d already gotten distracted again, jotting down notes
on his pad of paper as he studied the monitor. But she’d been thinking a lot
for the last several hours and, before she left, she had to clear up a few
things.

“This
wedding, it’s going to be really fancy, isn’t it?”

He
blinked, as if he’d just remembered they’d talked about that earlier today.
“Yeah.”

“I’ll
need to do some shopping. Is it all right if I have a day off sometime this
week to go into Reykjavik?”

“Why
do you need to go shopping?”

Her
lips parted slightly as she stared at him. “Are you serious? I don’t dress up around
here. I don’t have anything close to appropriate to wear.”

“Oh.”
He wrinkled his forehead, as if shopping were something foreign to his
experience. “I guess so. Sure, take whatever day you want. Or, better yet, we
can leave a day early and you can shop in London. I’ll be happy to pay—”

“No,”
she interrupted, stiffening her shoulders. “I have plenty of money for my
clothes. But London would be great. Thanks.”

He
peered at her like she was an odd specimen under the microscope. “I didn’t mean
to offend you. I just thought, since you’re doing this for me, it would be only
fair—”

“I
know,” she interrupted. “But it would be weird if you bought my clothes. I can
buy them myself. You pay me well, and I hardly spend anything here.”

It
was true. She worked all day, almost every day, so she spent almost nothing on
recreation or a social life. The lab provided food and housing for its staff,
since they were in such an isolated part of Iceland. Her generous salary had
been accumulating in her bank account for the last three years, and she’d
already paid off her student loans.

“I
hope you don’t mind that I’m not beautiful and glamorous,” she said, the words
tumbling out before she could stop them. She couldn’t help imagining herself
among the well-dressed, sophisticated guests at the wedding, and it wasn’t a
pretty picture.

Sarah
wasn’t particularly shy, and she was confident about her intellect and the
trajectory of her career. She knew she was better looking than she’d been as a
child, but she was realistic about herself, and beautiful and glamorous she
wasn’t.

Normally,
it didn’t matter. In the life she lived here, it didn’t matter if she wasn’t
attractive. It simply wasn’t a relevant factor of her existence, since Jonathan
was obviously never going to think about her as a woman. But it
would
be
relevant at a fancy house party at Damon Manor.

Jonathan
stared at her. “What?”

She
felt herself flushing again but pressed on. “I mean, I’m sure you would prefer to
have a beautiful and glamorous fake fiancée. So I hope you won’t mind that I’m
not.”

“Oh,”
he blinked, as if he’d finally processed what she’d said. “What do I care about
that? My uncle wouldn’t expect me to get engaged to someone like that. You’ll
be fine.”

“Oh.
Good.” She went to her desk to get her purse and tried to convince herself she
didn’t feel disappointed that he’d agreed she wasn’t beautiful or glamorous.

It
would have been crazy if he’d thought she was.

***

Three hours later, Jonathan
realized he’d made a huge mistake.

He’d
fixed the bad wheel on Sarah’s chair and then gone to run on the treadmill with
his normal reading material—an alternating stack of scientific journals and
comic books. Instead of taking mental notes and shaking his head over how half
the work his colleagues produced was utter crap, his mind kept drifting over to
the upcoming wedding and how it would work for Sarah to pose as his fiancée.

He
switched to a comic book, hoping it would better hold his attention.

He’d
never really been comfortable around women. Sex was good—since it didn’t
require much talking and didn’t take much time away from work—but relationships
had always stumped him. Women either bored him to tears or spent way too much
time trying to get him to open up and share his feelings. He was happy to work
with women as much as men—he worked better with Sarah than he ever had anyone
else—as long as they didn’t try to transform the work into something more
personal.

He
sped up on the treadmill, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his
hand, his feet pounding on the track as his mind drifted further from his
reading.

He’d
learned early in life that work was the thing that could bring him fulfillment.
His parents were always traveling, so they’d put him in an exclusive boarding
school in Switzerland. Whenever he achieved in school, they’d been pleased, so
he focused all his effort on academic achievements. They’d died in a plane
crash when he was almost eleven, and he’d briefly hoped his uncle could be a
father-figure for him. His uncle had kept him in the school, however, per his
parents’ wishes, he said.

Jonathan
had suspected his uncle simply didn’t want him.

He
spent most of his time in high school studying, and the same was true in
college and grad school. When he proposed the purpose and direction of his lab,
Cyrus Damon had been impressed and had decided to fund it, but evidently
Jonathan hadn’t lived up to his uncle’s expectations in the rest of his life.

Which
wasn’t really surprising. He’d never been able to do anything good enough to be
a real Damon.

But
maybe the fake fiancée plan would be enough to get him back into his uncle’s
good graces and protect the lab. Without his uncle’s money, Jonathan would have
to try to find another source of funding, and that would mean giving over
control to someone else—who would likely to take the research in a direction
influenced by money, market, or politics, which was exactly what Jonathan had
been able to avoid thus far.

He
knew what he needed to work toward now. Restore his uncle’s good opinion.
Sustain funding in the lab. Do the work that really mattered.

He
and Sarah had always worked well together. If they could treat this house party
like a job, like a task to be done, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

He
was just about to resign the topic to his satisfaction and focus on the
adventures of a dark, conflicted superhero when he realized a problem he hadn’t
even considered before.

He
stopped the treadmill, wiped the sweat off his face with a towel, and went down
the hall of the staff housing building to Sarah’s apartment.

Knocking
on the door, he wondered how he could have been so stupid.

It
was a minute before she opened the door, and when she did, Jonathan stared at
her in astonishment.

Her
thick red hair was tumbled messily around her shoulders instead of pulled back
in the ponytail she normally wore. And, instead of jeans and a sweater, she
wore a white tank top and loose, cotton pajama pants. She was barefoot, and her
blue eyes were groggy and disoriented. She’d clearly just gotten out of bed.

“What’s
wrong?” she asked, obviously anxious. Her cheeks were flushed, and she crossed
her arms in front of her chest. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah,”
he said, stunned by how pretty she looked. Pretty and curvy. She always dressed
in heavy sweaters and a lab coat, so he’d had no idea she had a body that
curved so deliciously. “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”

She
glanced at her wrist, although she wasn’t wearing a watch. Then she looked
behind her shoulder at a clock that showed it was after one in the morning.
Instead of complaining about his rudeness, she said, “It’s no problem. What’s
going on?”

“I
wasn’t thinking before,” he explained, pulling himself together so she wouldn’t
think he was a complete spaz. “I can’t let you pose as my fiancée.”

“Why
not?”

“It
wouldn’t be fair to Matt. I’m sure he won’t like this. I’m not sure why I
didn’t think of it before.”

“Matt?”
she asked, pushing up one strap of her top that kept slipping down her
shoulder.

“Matt,”
he repeated, trying not to look at the generous amount of cleavage revealed by
the slipping of her tank top. Where the hell had
that
come from? “Your
boyfriend? It wouldn’t be right for us to do this. I can think of something
else.”

She
stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “I’m not dating Matt anymore.”

“What?”

“We
broke up almost two years ago. How could you not know that?”

Jonathan
froze, trying to wrack his brain. Had he heard about the breakup and forgot
about it? Surely not. He would have noticed if Sarah had moved from the “Taken”
compartment in his mind.

He’d
always been comfortable with her, since she was smart, accommodating, and had
the same priorities he did. She worked for him and was thus off-limits for deep
friendship or dating, so he didn’t have to worry about dealing with anything
personal. For the first few months, she’d tried to thank him all the time and
made a big deal about trivial things, which he hadn’t liked at all. But, since
then, she’d always been perfectly safe and comfortable.

Until
now, for some reason.

“Did
you tell me?” he asked.

She
shrugged, glancing down almost shyly, which struck him as uncharacteristic. And
kind of pretty. “I don’t know. Maybe not. But I figured you’d know.
Everyone
knew.”

It
was true that no one had any privacy in the lab. In such a closed community,
keeping a secret was almost impossible, but he usually just ignored the gossip,
since it wasn’t of any interest to him.

“So
you don’t have a boyfriend?”

“No,”
she said, adjusting the wayward strap again and, in the process, hiding some of
the cleavage. “It’s totally fine. It’s no big deal. Really.”

BOOK: Engaging the Boss (Heirs of Damon)
9.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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