It had been a week at my new job, and I really enjoyed it. The customers were polite—or at least ninety percent of them were, and even the ones who had been rude weren’t too bad—and I liked my coworkers. Red was my manager on my shift, a fun, easygoing guy who respected it when I told him I wasn’t really comfortable with being touched.
“Hey, your body, your boundaries,” he told me after he laid a hand on my arm and I jumped a mile—and then had the embarrassing job of telling him I wasn’t really good with touch.
“Thanks,” I told him, relieved that he wasn’t asking me why I didn’t like it. Women were okay, I only flinched a little, but if it was a man, something in me curled up in fear and I had to swallow down panic. And if I was touched in surprise, I’d jump.
I didn’t want it to be that way. At least I wasn’t screaming any more, like I had been when I’d first gotten away from Pete. It was a learning process, or so my research online told me. I probably needed a proper therapist to tell me these things but I sure as hell couldn’t afford one. So that just left the internet articles and online forums for abuse survivors. I was learning a lot from all that, though.
This is a learning process, one person on a forum had said. Your body and your mind are learning how to interact in a world that doesn’t have your abuser in it. You’re kind of like a child all over again.
It was annoying, but true. I’d read something else about neural pathways, and how you had to literally rewrite them after coming out of a situation like mine, and that sometimes, some of those pathways couldn’t really be rewritten. They were stuck that way. PTSD, and all that.
Ugh.
Red didn’t mind, though. He was accommodating, and would use a gentler, quieter voice with me than he would with the others. My coworkers noticed and followed his example. It made me more grateful than I could say. Of course, the downside of working with such friendly, considerate people was that they wanted to know about me, my life, my past, and I couldn’t tell them that. So I just tried to dodge any questions that went past high school. My childhood and all that I could talk about, but the closer we got to my time with Pete, the more careful I had to be.
“Are you comfortable working the register today?” Red asked when I came into work and set down my bag. It was just an old messenger bag that Edith had gifted me, but I loved it. It was one more thing that was mine that Pete hadn’t touched.
“Sure.” Sometimes the idea of facing people and dealing with them was too much, so I would make the coffee. But I was feeling good today, feeling energized. Edith had sort of taken me on as her special project and was making sure I got a hearty breakfast every morning. I didn’t mind. My parents had both died when I was young, Dad from an accident at the construction site where he worked when I was twelve, and Mom from cancer when I was nineteen. Edith might be babying me a little but dammit, I wanted to be babied. I wanted a parent again.
Red smiled at me. “Great. I’m real proud of you, Trudie, you pick this stuff up quickly.”
“Thanks, boss.” I’d had to think fast, to be good at picking things up quickly, to stay alive.
I took my place at the register and smiled at the first customer. The day went pretty quickly—we were busy as hell, since it was cold as balls out and everyone wanted a warm drink. I had never experienced winter like this, not like Chicago, and Red had been telling me that it was one of the worst winters in recent years.
“Polar vortex,” he said. “Thanks to climate change melting all the damn ice caps, it’s pushing all that ice and cold down here to us. Get used to it, it’s not going away anytime soon.”
Here in the coffee shop, though, it was warm and friendly, and the day passed by in a blur until it was late afternoon and we were almost closed.
“My feet are killing me,” I laughed to Red, putting away some coffee bags. I turned back to the register and jumped in surprise to see someone staring at me.
The person was… well, a man, yeah, but also the most handsome man I’d ever seen. He looked like he belonged on the cover of a magazine with striking blue eyes, a chiseled jaw, and ash blond hair that looked windswept from the cold. I felt my face heating up. I hadn’t really had a chance to look at anyone… in a sexual way, after Pete. I’d just wanted to be by myself, get to know who I was as just Trudie, rather than Trudie, Pete’s girlfriend.
But this guy was making me blush, and all he was doing was looking at me. I swallowed, trying to remain professional. This was just a customer, after all. No reason to get all excited.
“Can I help you?” I asked, smiling.
The guy blinked, like he was startled, and then said, “I sure hope you can, lass.”
I stared at him in surprise, noting his Irish accent. It was… okay, it was charming, and attractive, the way the words rolled off his tongue, rich and varied, with a lot more inflection than Americans had in their accents.
And then the guy kept speaking. “How’d you like to be my wife for a few weeks?”
What the fuck!?
1
Trudie
As I stood there gaping at him like an idiot, Red walked up. “Laird, what the hell are you doing scaring my best new barista like that? She’ll never come back to work again and I just got her trained.”
Laird laughed. “I’m sorry, I went about this all wrong. I’m Laird Hindes, I work upstairs.”
He held out his hand for me to shake, which I did. I didn’t want to be rude, and it was just a handshake. His touch was warm and firm, but not crushing my hand like he was trying to prove a point or anything. I liked it.
“Laird works up at the top floor,” Red said. He grinned at Laird. “How’s it treating you?”
“Oh, y’know, same old. Christmas rush is over so we’re back to the daily grind.” I could listen to his deep voice for hours, I decided. It was just so lovely and soothing. Laird glanced at me. “Mind if I steel your new girl away for just a minute?”
Red looked at me. “Are you comfortable with that?”
I nodded. Being alone with a man was still something that made me nervous, but I knew that all men weren’t like Pete. And Red liked this guy, which said a lot in his favor.
“Great.” Laird gestured for me to follow him. “Let’s talk in my office. I’ll have her back in a few minutes, Red!”
There was an elevator that led up to the other levels on the office building. We got in and Laird immediately pressed the button for the top floor. That was the sports magazine, right? “Sorry to just spring that question on you like that. I probably could have introduced myself first, at least. I’m Laird, like Red said. Laird Hindes. I own the magazine The Trek.
“That’s a sports magazine, right?” I asked.
Laird grinned at me. “It sure is. And you are?”
“I’m Trudie. I’m a barista.”
Laird laughed. “I like someone with a sense of humor.”
Not everyone got my dry sense of humor, and I struggled to hide a pleased smile. “So, do you usually go around proposing to random baristas to be your spouse for a few weeks or am I special?”
Laird winked at me and my stomach melted. “You’re special.” Then he sobered up as the elevator opened and he led me out into the office area.
Wow. This place was high end, with large offices for everyone, sports equipment sitting around for people to use, the whole nine yards. It looked like those places I’d seen in magazines, those Silicon Valley, new wave, new age kind of places that tried to make your office open air and fun, not just a soulless cubicle-crammed Hell.
Laird’s office was the biggest, which didn’t surprise me seeing as he owned the company. “My parents are wonderful people, you have to understand that, Trudie.”
I loved how he said my name and hated myself for loving that. I wasn’t some dewy-eyed teenager who would fall for a handsome guy with a cool accent. I had learned my lesson with Pete and I was going to keep my distance.
“They’re wonderful, but they’re meddling.” Laird gestured fo
r me to sit and then walked over to a water dispenser machine, pouring us both a cup. “And they will not leave me alone about getting a girlfriend. Neither will the rest of my family. They all think that I’m lonely for some reason, that my friends aren’t enough and I need a romantic partner. Antiquated notion, I know, but there you have it. So my cousins are being the way they are, and my parents apparently just blurted out that I wasn’t the lonesome bachelor they all supposed but was, in fact, married.”
He spoke with this air of sophistication that made me feel like I really was some backwaters girl from a small town in the middle of nowhere. I was a barista, for crying out loud, and this guy owned a popular magazine. He spoke like he’d gone to an Ivy League school. What would he want me for, of all the people he could get to help him?
“Now, normally I could fake it from afar, and then pretend I got a divorce or something, but my favorite cousin is getting married next week and they’re all expecting me to bring my wife. It’s far too fast for me to fake a divorce, and besides, I don’t want to have to fake being devastated and sad when it’s supposed to be my cousin’s big day. This is about the couple getting married, I don’t want to steal the show. Which means I need to find someone to pretend to be my loving spouse for a few weeks.” He paused. “And that’s where you come in.”
This sounded like a lively and tight-knit family, completely the opposite of what I knew. Both my grandparents had been dead before I was born, and my parents had no siblings, so when they’d died, I’d been all alone in the world. I hadn’t grown up with big family reunions, or playing with cousins at the holidays, or being spoiled by grandparents. A part of me yearned for that kind of family, echoing like a scream in an empty cavern.
“What do you say?” Laird asked. “Would you mind a vacation to Ireland?”
I really shouldn’t do this. I had just gotten myself out of trouble, and there were so many ways this could go wrong. The right thing for me to do would be to keep my head down and avoid any insane nonsense like, you know, pretending to be someone’s wife.
But at the same time… Ireland was about as far away from New Mexico as you could get. And it would be a chance to see a part of the world that I hadn’t a hope of seeing otherwise. When else would I get the money to travel somewhere? And Laird did seem nice… but then, so had Pete at first…
I knew I shouldn’t do this. But I found myself opening my mouth and saying anyway, “What’s in it for me?”
2
Laird
The smart thing, of course, would’ve been to ask a friend of mine to pretend to be my wife, since that friend would know me and I’d be comfortable with her. And I had no shortage of female friends. Problem was that I was well aware—or my brother Liam had made me well aware—that most of my friends who were women were hoping I would come to see them as more than friends, and I didn’t want to hurt them by putting them in a position of false hope.
I could’ve hired an escort or someone of that sort, but I worried about someone in my nosey family doing a background check and finding out the truth about her profession and then it would all be a mess. My family would’ve lost their minds.
Still, I could’ve interviewed people and found someone. That was the sort of thing I had an assistant for. But I had seen this woman, Trudie, working the till the last week at Buzz when I’d come in to grab a coffee on my way to work and I just couldn’t help myself. She was gorgeous, with these warm hazel eyes and this soft smile that left me breathless.
I was a bit surprised, and yet not surprised at all, to hear her ask what was in it for her. I was asking for something pretty unusual, and I was a total stranger to her. At the same time, it felt a bit mercenary for my tastes. But that wasn’t the problem. I wasn’t trying to actually date the woman, I was trying to get someone to play a part for a few weeks. And I didn’t know what kind of financial straits she might be in.
“How about fifty thousand dollars?” I offered.
Trudie’s eyes got a little wide, and I had a feeling that I had made too high of an offer, far more than she had been expecting. She looked to be in her mid-twenties so I had assumed she had bad student loan debt, like everyone else, but either she didn’t have a debt that large, or she hadn’t been expecting me to offer such a high sum. Either way, though, I’d said it, and I couldn’t take it back now. Besides, I could handle fifty thousand, no problem.
“I, um, well, that’s very… generous, um, thank you.” She seemed to retreat into herself, the smiling, lovely woman I had gotten used to over the last week shrinking almost, becoming a completely different person.
“Not a problem,” I replied. Honestly, I’d pay her twice that much if it meant I got my family off my back. I still wasn’t speaking to my parents, or Liam, after this whole mess. How hard was it to just be honest and not lie about your son’s marital status? I was genuinely still confused as to how the bloody hell they’d made this mess for me.
And Liam—Liam was being no help at all. Of course he wasn’t. When had he ever been a help? And he was still in the honeymoon phase with that darling new wife of his, the sports reporter.
I was only 36, for Christ’s sake, I wasn’t dying. I could take my time finding the right person to spend the rest of my life with. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was some trick on the part of my parents to get me to propose to whatever girl I might be seeing, or at least start seeing someone and take dating seriously.
Trudie chewed on her lip, apparently a nervous habit. She was clutching her water cup in her hand but not drinking from it. “May I take some time to think about it?” she asked. “I just moved here and got settled, so leaving for a few weeks might be a lot.”
“Understandable.” I grabbed my business card from the neat little rack on my desk and quickly wrote my personal mobile number on the back. I didn’t normally give out that kind of thing willy-nilly but I doubted this woman would take advantage of it. She didn’t even seem to know who I was. “You can text or call me anytime, I always have my mobile on me.”
“Oh, thank you.” Trudie took the card and put it in her pocket. “I’ll let you know—I won’t make you wait too long for an answer. I know you’ve got to find someone. This is just… a lot.”
“No worries.” I held the door open for her as she left. As she walked past me to get through the door, I got a whiff of her shampoo, something light and fruity. My stomach clenched with heat.
Down, boy. If I was going to be pretending to be in a relationship with this woman then I couldn’t go around having inappropriate thoughts about her. Even if she was absolutely stunning. The kind of sweet, curvy woman I’d normally totally hit up.
As Trudie walked away, Jack, my CFO and right-hand man, walked over to me. He raised his eyebrows in a knowing way and I rolled my eyes. “Don’t even start.”
“She’s exactly your type.”
“Of course she is, I had to pick someone my type so my cousins would believe me.”
“So you’re really going for it?” Jack shook his head in disbelief. “You’re really, seriously going to bring a fake wife to your cousin’s wedding.”
“What else am I supposed to do? Tell everyone that my parents lied? Nobody will believe me that my parents were the ones who lied to them, they’ll think I’m lying and hiding my wife from them for some reason and it’ll be this big dramatic thing. Easier to just—bring her, then avoid mentioning her for a few months, and then say we got a divorce. Ta-da.”
“Right. Any reason why she looked like she’d been backed over by a truck?”
“I… might have blown it when I asked her… I just walked up to her and asked her to be my wife.” I grimaced, an embarrassed shudder running through me. Could I have been any more bloody ridiculous?
Jack barked out a laugh. “Oh my God, that’s hilarious. And she just went with it?”
“I think she thinks I’m a looney,” I replied. “But she said she’d think about it. And I offered her payment. I think she’s hard up.” Trudie lo
oked like she hadn’t eaten properly in months.
“All right.” Jack was grinning like a maniac. “It’s your funeral though.”
I glared at him. “I can handle this.”
“You can’t even chat up a woman in a bar, Laird, how you’re going to pretend to be married to someone for weeks, I don’t know.”
The fucking annoying thing was, he had a point. The bastard. I always got tongue tied around pretty women. It had been that way my whole life. I had money, I was successful, I owned my own business, and I wasn’t too bad-looking if I could say so myself. You’d think this would give me some kind of bloody confidence but oh no, every time I walked up to a woman, I completely lost my nerve. What was I even supposed to say to be suave? I hadn’t the faintest clue.
Jack, on the other hand, always knew what to say to women to get them falling at his feet. It was absolute insanity. Which was why I was skeptical when Liam assured me that I had women with crushes on me and to ‘tread carefully’ when it came to my friends who were women. How the fuck could a woman have a crush on me when all I did was trip over my own sentences around them?
“You could try just talking business with her,” Jack chuckled, finding this whole fucking thing hilarious because of course he did. “You’re pretty good at that.”
“Why am I friends with you again?” I asked him.
“Because I’m entertaining and I keep you humble,” Jack replied immediately. He put his arm around my shoulders and walked me towards the elevator. “C’mon, it’s late, you should be out relaxing. She’ll call you and take the deal.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Trust me on this. She’ll take it.”
I wasn’t so sure, though. I was a complete stranger to her. I could be whisking her off to the backwoods to murder her for all that she knew. Had I just blown my chance?
Forbidden First Times: A Contemporary Romance Collection Page 20
