Читать книгу His Pretend Fiancee - Victoria Pade - Страница 9

“Shh! Don’t bark, Pip! You’re going to have us living in a cardboard box!” Josie Tate said to her dog as they neared the old, gray stone building where they currently shared an apartment with three friends. An apartment she and Pip were supposed to have vacated.

But did the warning have any effect on the 120-pound, tawny-coated, black-faced bull mastiff who had forced her to take him onto the streets of New York’s East Village at midnight? No, it didn’t. After one bark and Josie’s warning, Pip barked again. And this time they were even closer to the tiny basement apartment directly beneath that of the landlord.

“I mean it, Pip! Be quiet,” she begged the animal she’d adopted four months ago when she’d come across the skeletal pet scrounging for food in the trash cans on her way to work.

But again the big dog barked. Three times this round.

“Shh! I mean it!”

There was a no-pets clause in the lease and Josie had already passed the deadline the landlord had given her to get rid of the dog or move out. Waking Mr. Bartholomew now couldn’t lead to anything good. Especially not when she hadn’t yet found a place she could afford that allowed animals.

Pip seemed to have taken heed because he kept quiet as he crossed what remained of the distance with his nose to the sidewalk, as if he’d picked up the scent of something interesting.

Until he hit the top of the stairs that led down to the apartment.

Then he started to bark with a vengeance. And not the friendly bark. The warning bark he reserved for strangers.

On the other end of the leash, Josie reached the top of the steps behind her dog and finally realized that Pip hadn’t merely been barking to hear his own voice. Down below, in the shadows of the unlit stairwell, there was a man standing at her door.

She stopped short just as a light went on in the landlord’s apartment and pinch-faced Mr. Bartholomew lunged through the curtains. Then up flew the window so he could shout, “That’s it! I want you and that damn dog out of here!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bartholomew, but there’s a man—”

“I don’t care! I need sleep!”

Pip ignored the landlord and continued to bark as Josie thought that if the man in the stairwell was dangerous she wasn’t likely to get much help from her irate landlord. But still she said, “But, Mr. Bartholomew, there’s some guy—”

“No buts. Either the two of you are gone by tomorrow or I’ll get the police to kick the whole lot of you out!”

“It’s just me, Josie,” her late-night visitor interjected as if he’d been trying to find the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

She recognized the voice even before she looked from her landlord down the stairs again, and it was enough for her pulse to race and her mind to go blank. But not out of fear.

Pip continued to bark. Mr. Bartholomew went on ranting. But Josie merely stood there at the top of the steps, dumbfounded.

“It’s okay, boy, I’m harmless,” her midnight visitor said to Pip in a warm, friendly tone as he started up the steps.

Pip must have believed him because the bull mastiff stopped barking, tilted his big square head to one side, and quirked up an ear to stare curiously at him.

The landlord used the sudden silence to shout louder himself. “Do you hear me? I want you out!”

“Yes, Mr. Bartholomew. I heard you,” Josie finally managed to say.

“Tomorrow! Or the other three go, too!”

Josie’s visitor was halfway up the stairs and he held out a hand for the dog to sniff. A big hand with long, thick fingers. A big, adept hand. A talented hand that she’d felt all over her body…

Pip allowed their visitor to join them on the landing, sniffing him raptly as the man aimed his gaze up at the landlord and said, “This is my fault. The dog was barking at me. Don’t punish them for that.”

“They’re out,” the landlord insisted stubbornly. “She was supposed to be gone a week ago and I’ll make sure she goes now. One way or another.”

Down went the window with a slam and the landlord disappeared behind the curtains.

“Nice. Real nice,” the midnight visitor called after him.

Josie knew she’d have to try persuading the landlord not to enforce his edicts in the morning but since there was nothing she could do about that now, her attention was all on the man who stood only a few inches away, petting her dog.

“Michael Dunnigan,” she said as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“That’s me,” he responded. “I’m sorry for this—I didn’t come here to cause you trouble.”

“And yet here you are,” Josie said in a questioning tone she hoped might inspire an explanation.

“And yet here I am,” he countered instead.

“Not the answer I was looking for.”

“The answer to what?” he asked.

She thought he was only playing innocent and opted not to let him get away with it by bluntly demanding, “What are you doing here?”

Michael Dunnigan shrugged mile-wide shoulders negligently and smiled a small smile. “I had sort of a crazy thought tonight and acted on impulse.”

“Ah.” Josie didn’t know what else to say to that and so merely waited for more information.

But rather than getting it, Michael Dunnigan pointed a thumb at the window the landlord had abandoned. “But I don’t think we should talk out here.”

Josie glanced up at Mr. Bartholomew’s window again, as if she expected to find him glaring at them still.

“That is your place downstairs, isn’t it?” Michael Dunnigan said then. “I knocked but no one answered.”

“It’s Saturday night. All of my roommates are gone,” Josie responded before she realized she’d just negated her best excuse not to ask him in.

He proved the point by saying, “Then can we go inside?”

She was a little worried that this was nothing but a booty call. After all, she’d done something she’d never done in her life when she’d met him—two weeks ago she’d spent the entire Labor Day weekend with him. In bed.

She still couldn’t believe she’d done it. And she’d regretted it ever since. Certainly she had no intention of repeating it. If that’s why he was here.

But since she was fresh out of reasons not to let him into the apartment, she had to agree.

“I guess we can go in,” she said with a complete lack of enthusiasm. “To talk,” she added pointedly.

Apparently he got the message because he held up both hands, palms outward as if in surrender, and said, “Absolutely. Just to talk.”

Josie led the way down the stairs, with Pip right beside her and Michael Dunnigan bringing up the rear.

“We have to get that bulb changed,” she muttered to herself as she unlocked the door, referring to the light just above the doorway that offered no illumination because the bulb had burned out and not been replaced.

Then she opened the door.

But the moment she stepped inside she was even more sorry she was bringing company with her because she’d forgotten that she’d already unfolded the futon in the living room and made it up for herself for the night.

But what could she do? She couldn’t turn around and tell the man she’d just conceded to invite in that she’d changed her mind. She was just going to have to tough this through. And it would be tough because having Michael Dunnigan in the same vicinity as a bed was not an easy thing for her even now.

“I was about to call it a night,” she said both in explanation and as a hint that she didn’t want him to stay long.

Michael Dunnigan closed the door as Josie took off Pip’s collar, wishing as she did that she had on something better than her sweat suit over her nightshirt, that she hadn’t washed off all her makeup and that she’d at least run a brush through her short bobbed hair before she’d taken Pip on his walk.

But there was nothing to be done about it now. Except to smooth her hair behind her ears once she’d stashed the leash.

“Wow, this place really is small,” Michael Dunnigan said as he glanced around.

“There are two bedrooms—two of my roommates share one of them but the other one is really just an oversize closet so only Liz uses it. I lost the toss and ended up sleeping in the living room.” She didn’t know why she was giving him so many details but the words just seemed to tumble out.

“That’s right, I remember you telling me that there are four of you living here. Plus the dog?” Michael Dunnigan asked.

“Four of us and the dog,” Josie confirmed. It was one of the very few pieces of information they’d exchanged about themselves during the three-day lovemaking marathon that hadn’t left much time—or energy—for conversation.

Josie waited for him to say something else, preferably about why he’d shown up on her doorstep since he still hadn’t given her a clue.

But he wasn’t forthcoming. Instead he moved to the wall that separated the living room from the hallway-size kitchen.

Josie and her roommates used the wall as a gallery for a mélange of pictures of friends and family and events. As Michael Dunnigan looked at each photograph in turn he was in profile to her and Josie couldn’t help taking her own concentrated look at him.

He was still drop-dead gorgeous. More gorgeous than she’d even remembered. He had coal-black hair that he wore short all over. His nose was straight and not too long, and his chin was just pronounced enough. He had high cheekbones and a sharp-cut jawline that was faintly shadowed with the hint of dark stubble.

It was a face that had demanded Josie’s attention even through the crowd of the smoky bar where she’d been doing a poetry reading and he’d been sitting in the audience. A face that had riveted her right from the start and kept her enraptured during the three days that had followed. As enraptured as the body that went with it.

The body that was six feet of broad-shouldered, hard-packed muscle that left no doubt that the firefighter was capable of carrying even a full-grown man from a burning building. Six feet of broad-shouldered, hard-packed muscle encased in a pair of tan dress slacks, a hunter green polo shirt, and a sport coat that made Josie suddenly wonder if, when he’d begun this evening, he’d dressed for a date.

“So where are you coming from?” she asked as her curiosity got the better of her.

“A date with my mother’s podiatrist,” he said without hesitation, a heavy dose of disgust in his tone.

“Another setup?” she asked. One of the few things she knew about him was that his mother was desperate for him to get married and was in relentless pursuit of finding him a wife.

“The fifth setup since I saw you last,” he confirmed.

“She’s arranged five blind dates for you in two weeks?” Josie said in amazement.

He’d finally finished with the photographs and turned to face her. The full bore of striking green eyes as vibrant as the leaves of summer was almost enough to take her breath away.

But he didn’t seem to notice as he answered her question with a complete list. “There was dinner with Mom’s hairdresser, lunch with the receptionist from her dentist’s office, brunch with the woman who delivered a package to her, coffee with the niece of a friend of her bridge partner, and dinner tonight with the podiatrist.”

Josie couldn’t help smiling. “You can say one thing—you’re eating well.”

“Actually, tonight it was tofu cuisine and I hardly ate anything.”

And if his tone was any indication, there was more than the food that he hadn’t had a taste for.

“So something about tofu cuisine gave you a crazy thought that brought you here,” she said, using the segue to maybe finally find out why he’d come when they’d both agreed at the end of that Labor Day weekend that they didn’t want any big involvement and to go their separate ways.

Michael Dunnigan smiled at her a bit sheepishly. “It wasn’t the tofu, it was the fact that I was sitting across the table from this woman whose company I was not enjoying in the least, thinking that if I had to do one more blind date I would scream, and wondering how the hell I was going to get my mother to stop.”

“And that gave you a crazy idea.”

“A really crazy idea.”

But still he didn’t tell her what that crazy idea was.

He took another look around the apartment, shook his head and said, “I can’t believe four people and a dog are crammed in here.”

Josie clenched her teeth and shrieked to let her frustration be known. “What was the crazy idea?” she said, slowly enunciating each word.

Michael Dunnigan smiled again, obviously enjoying this. “It occurred to me that my mother is never going to cease and desist until she actually believes I’ve found someone.”

And that made him think of me?

A hopeful little flutter in the pit of her stomach gave Josie pause.

Yes, she had liked Michael Dunnigan. A lot. Yes, she’d been attracted to him. A lot. But she hadn’t been kidding Labor Day weekend—she was strictly against getting involved with anyone, so she’d nixed any idea of a relationship developing between them. Which, for his own reasons, he’d been in favor of. So why was she feeling flattered and hopeful that he’d connected finding someone with her?

She tamped down the very notion.

“Okay,” she said to prompt him. “Your mother is never going to cease and desist until she believes you’ve found someone. That seems logical.”

“It does, doesn’t it? I don’t know why it took me so long to realize it. Anyway,” he went on, “that was when I started to think about the bind you said you were in to find another place to live and I thought that if you hadn’t already done that, what if we solved each other’s problems?”

“You’ve lost me,” she confessed.

“Well…” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “Remember, I warned you that it was crazy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I thought, what if I sort of hire you to move in with me and pretend to be my fiancée?”

That just made Josie laugh.

“Okay, so it’s a crazy and funny idea,” he said. But he wasn’t laughing along with her. He was just waiting for her to stop.

So she did. And that was when she said, “You want me to move in with you?” as if it just had to be a joke.

“On a purely platonic basis,” he was quick to add. “Of course my mother wouldn’t know it, but you’d have your own room—rent free—plus use of the rest of the place. Which includes a small yard the dog could go out into. You’d have to play the part of my fiancée when my mother came around or if I needed your attendance at something, but the reality would be that we’d just be roommates. And the beauty of it is that if my mother believes I’m engaged to you, I could get her off my back.”

“That really is a crazy idea,” Josie said.

He smiled sheepishly again and she wished he would stop it. Smiling put lines at the corners of each of his eyes and deep grooves bracketing his supple mouth, and only made him more attractive.

“We could tell my mother that since we really just met we’re going to have an extended engagement,” he continued as if this were actually a possibility. “And who knows how long we could draw it out? No matter how long it is, it’ll give me a break.”

He sounded like he needed one.

Certainly she needed a place to move to…

Josie could hardly believe that last thought had gone through her head.

Was she honestly considering this?

“It’s crazy,” she repeated. Only now what seemed even crazier than his idea was the fact that she might be thinking about doing it.

“I thought being a little crazy was right up your alley,” he commented then, as if he liked that about her.

She’d never considered herself crazy. Spontaneous. Free-spirited. Adventurous. Those were all things she remembered of her parents. Things she liked to keep alive in herself. And even if some people—like Mr. Bartholomew—considered what she did on the spur of the moment or on a whim crazy, what was important to her was that she found her actions reasonable. Or enjoyable. Or beneficial to someone.

Moving in with Michael Dunnigan, pretending to be engaged to him, would be beneficial to him, a little voice in the back of her mind pointed out. It would also be beneficial to her….

“Have you been drinking?” she asked suddenly, wanting to make sure this wasn’t some inebriated lark that he would regret when he sobered up.

“Drinking with Miss Tofu? Are you kidding? She ordered me a shot of some thick green stuff—wheat grass juice of something—but there was definitely no liquor in it. It might have tasted better if there had been.”

She purposely hadn’t invited him to sit down. Or sat herself for that matter. But now he perched a casual hip on the arm of an easy chair as if he were right at home anyway.

Then he said, “It wouldn’t be all that complicated. An occasional meal with my family. Holidays. A wedding or a reunion or a birthday here and there. And you wouldn’t always have to go to everything with me. Sometimes I could just say you had to work or you didn’t feel well or something else came up. The rest of the time we’d go our separate ways. Date. Do our own thing the same as any roommates. Plus my shifts run twenty-four on, twenty-four off, so every other day—and night—you’d have the place to yourself. And think how happy you’d make Mom,” he finished with another of those smiles that weakened Josie’s knees.

And that was the biggest problem with this idea, she thought when it happened. Sparks had already flown between them. She already knew there was an attraction between them. A combustible attraction. An uncontrollable attraction. The kind of attraction that had landed her in bed with him for the most passionate, the most mind-boggling sex she’d ever experienced. How could she now move in with him, be in close proximity to him, play at being in a romantic relationship with him, and keep it platonic?

“I don’t think it would be very wise,” she said in response to her own misgivings.

Which he seemed to read like an open book. “Because of Labor Day weekend. I know, I’ve thought about that. It was pretty fantastic and it would be hard…difficult to avoid the temptation to repeat it. But we’ve already agreed that that isn’t what we want and so far we’ve stuck to it. We haven’t seen each other again. And believe me, I’ve thought about calling you. So I think that if we make a pact just to be roommates, friends—”

“Coconspirators.”

“Okay, coconspirators and partners in crime, and we really put our minds to it, we can keep Labor Day weekend in the past and stay this new course for the future.”

Josie didn’t have time for a rebuttal because there was a loud pounding on her door just then.

She crossed back to it and opened it, too lost in her own thoughts to ask who it was first. But even so she was surprised to find Mr. Bartholomew standing outside in the stairwell. Still looking furious.

“Here,” he said, shoving a sheet of paper at her. “I called my lawyer—”

“At midnight on a Saturday night?”

“If I can’t sleep, neither can anyone else!” the paunchy man in the undershirt snarled. “My lawyer says to put in writing that you’ve broken the lease and either you get out or I can evict you, your dog, and the rest of the occupants of this apartment. So there it is. You’re gone tomorrow or else. Legally.”

Josie had no idea if he was bluffing or not but the landlord turned tail and stormed up the stairs, leaving her with a handwritten paper saying just what he’d told her it said.

So much for trying to cajole him into letting her stay a little longer.

She closed the door but remained facing it for a while, staring at it and considering her options.

She could get rid of Pip.

But she loved the big bull mastiff and she wasn’t going to do that.

She could gamble that Mr. Bartholomew couldn’t really evict her the next day and that maybe she could find a place for them before he actually could throw them out.

But if she was wrong he could very well kick out her three roommates, too, and that wasn’t fair. Besides the fact that she honestly could end up on the street because if the landlord did evict her suddenly she doubted a hotel or the YWCA could let her in with a dog.

Or she could take Michael Dunnigan up on his offer.

She could move into his brownstone, live rent free, and pretend to be his fiancée.

Actually, it didn’t seem as if she did have any options.

“Do you absolutely, positively guarantee that this will be a purely platonic arrangement?” she heard herself say before she’d even turned around to face Michael Dunnigan again.

“I absolutely, positively guarantee it. You’ll never even see me without a shirt on.”

Josie closed her eyes as if that might keep her from seeing the image that came into her head at just the mention of him bare-chested. The image of him in the kitchen between lovemaking sessions over Labor Day, eating out of a carton, nothing on but a pair of boxer shorts, his V-shaped torso a work of art…

“I don’t even want to see you without shoes and socks,” she said almost as if she were in pain.

“Okay. Not even without shoes and socks,” he agreed.

Josie opened her eyes and took a deep breath, sighing it out resolutely. “All right,” she said softly. “I guess we can give it a try since I don’t have anywhere else to go. But just for the record, I’m not happy about lying to your mother.”

“I’m not happy about it, either. But she won’t listen to me when I explain why I can’t get married and have kids right now.”

Funny, but after their Labor Day weekend together, Josie had had the impression that he simply hadn’t wanted to be tied down. But something in what he’d just said made her think there was more to it than that.

Of course she’d said basically the same thing to him and she had reasons that ran deeper, too.

But it was too late to get into all of that now so she let it lay and finally turned away from the door.

“I guess we have a deal then,” she said, looking at that oh-so-handsome face and hoping they really could abide by their pact.

He smiled again, a thousand-watt grin that made her doubt her own willpower already. “So, will you marry me?” he said, joking.

Josie rolled her eyes. “Well, I’ll make it look like I will, anyway.”

“Good enough.”

“I guess I’ll have to move in tomorrow,” she said with a nod back at the door where Mr. Bartholomew had just appeared and disappeared. “How are you going to explain to your mother that you went out with her podiatrist on Saturday night and have a live-in fiancée on Sunday?”

“I’ll make up something. She’ll be so thrilled she won’t pay attention to too many details.”

“So when do you want me?” Poor choice of words. “I mean, what time do you want me to move in?”

“Anytime. Do you need a truck or something for furniture?”

“I only own what I can fit into my car.”

“That works. I’m fully furnished.”

Somehow that sounded like a double entendre but since he’d let her slip of the tongue slide, she didn’t comment on his.

“So, I guess that’s it,” he added. “I’ll see you when you get there tomorrow.”

“I’ll have to pack my stuff and load the car so it probably won’t be until the evening.”

“Whatever. I’ll be there,” he assured.

He got up from the arm of the chair and headed for the door himself.

But before he reached it, he paused near enough to Josie for her to smell the scent of his aftershave. Near enough to bend and, with a warm brush of his breath against her ear, say, “Want to seal our engagement with a kiss?”

Josie gave him a withering look that made him laugh this time.

“Just kidding,” he assured as he straightened and went the rest of the way to the door.

But with one hand on the knob he smiled at her yet again and said, “Thanks for this. You don’t know what a relief it is to think that I’ll be free of my mother’s matchmaking.”

“It’s a relief to me to have somewhere to go with Pip,” she admitted.

Although that wasn’t completely true.

Because while it was a relief to know she finally had a place to live peacefully with her dog, she was still worried about who she’d be living with in that place.

And as Michael Dunnigan finally left she had to wonder if she hadn’t just exchanged one set of problems for another.