But then my mind wandered to other things. What were the odds, I thought that I could get Nicole Perkins in my bed? She didn’t seem like the type who would get attached anyway? Maybe if she had a good roll in the hay she’d lose that sharp attitude…
I frowned at that. Nah. I kinda liked that sharp attitude. But she’d want a good roll in the hay anyway. And if not, I could at least make this PR stuff as helpful to her as it would be for me.
“Justin!” Joanie’s voice was shrill on the other end of the phone. I should have known she wouldn’t wait to answer me. “What do you mean you have a girl in mind? I’ve got the girl! I’ve got four girls! Choose one! I’ll send you pictures. We just have to negotiate compensation.”
That was the voicemail I heard once I was out of the shower and getting ready for bed. I sighed heavily. It was probably a better idea to use one of Joanie’s selections. Except that I had such a good feeling about Nicole Perkins. I felt as if we were meant to meet in that elevator. It was probably an absurd thought. I owned the company and she worked there. Eventually, we were going to meet. But after three years, to have met her just when Joanie was suggesting I pick a phony girlfriend… It just seemed significant somehow.
But I’d work things out tomorrow. Now I found myself exhausted by the dragon flight and the stress of the day and I collapsed onto my giant, plush bed in my giant, luxurious penthouse, right above my massive hoard of gold and treasure, and promptly fell asleep.
The email to Nicole Perkins the next day, I thought, engaging enough. I sent it early in the morning and by the afternoon, she had not written back.
Nicole,
I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to lay out an unconventional business proposal to speak to you about. I’d like to take you to lunch and discuss it. Please reply if you can make it this afternoon.
-Justin King
I didn’t think of myself as an entitled type of guy. Dragons can be plenty selfish, sure. But I’ve been through enough hard times in my life that I don’t expect to get what I want from everybody I meet. On the contrary, I expect to have to fight for everything I want and I have. Getting to the top of my industry at such a young age was no cake walk and not just anybody could have done it. I did it. I will say, it’s made me...let’s say, radically confident. But confidence isn’t just egoism when you’ve got the goods to back it up. Not in my book anyway.
So maybe I didn’t expect Nicole to fall right in my lap, but at the same time, when noon came and went and she still hadn’t replied to an email from the CEO and founder of the company she worked for...it made me even more curious.
I was tempted to give her a call but considering this proposal wasn’t exactly on the company books, I wanted to put a little room around the whole thing. Instead I called her supervisor and asked if she’d shown up to work that day. The supervisor was an early hire to Koinage who knew me pretty well. He sounded baffled when I asked him if some random coder was working that day but I didn’t tell him what I wanted her for.
At one in the afternoon, I finally caved and called her desk.
“Perkins,” she barked into the phone.” She sounded like a police sergeant or something and I raised an eyebrow.
“Nicole,” I said, smooth as ice. I may have used my bedroom voice, the one that melts panties right off of women every time. “This is Justin. King. I was wondering if we could meet?”
I heard a little breathy sound and I could swear Nicole sounded a little affected by the tone of my voice but she only cleared her throat and said, “Oh...I got your email. I didn’t know what to do about it.”
For some reason, that made me blurt a laugh and I chuckled into my phone as I sat there at my big, glassy desk, looking out on Central Park in the afternoon. “I mean it was an email from your CEO,” I said. “You usually want to open those?”
I thought that might break the ice. I wasn’t trying to give her a hard time. I was talking casually but Nicole just sighed and said, “So what is it then?”
You wouldn’t have known I was her boss. The highest level of boss she could have.
“I’d rather meet in person and explain it,” I said huskily. “It’s business but it’s also partly personal. It’s a great favor I’d be asking of you, but I’d compensate you well of course-”
“Are you propositioning me!” Her voice went way up and I felt an awful tension at the back of my neck at the very idea.
“No!” I blurted. “Jesus. I mean not like that. No, of course not. I…” I sighed heavily. This conversation was getting away from me. “Okay look. I’m just gonna lay it out for you so you don’t have the wrong idea. I need a phony girlfriend for a while. I need somebody to go out in public with me, go to events, somebody who makes me look respectable and most importantly, settled and…”
“Mature?” Nicole said wryly.
That made me a little indignant. Was she saying I was immature? “Okay, sure. Mature. And I want you for the job. It would be...let’s say maybe three months. I’d pay you well for it. I mean very...very well.”
Nicole didn’t answer. All I could hear was her breathing and I wondered if the whole thing sounded a lot crazier than I thought it did, and I already thought it sounded fairly crazy.
I blurted out, “It was my publi-”
“I have to go!” Nicole snapped, and abruptly hung up the phone.
The last time somebody hung up on me, it was the CEO of a small tech firm in Palo Alto and they’d hung up because I’d made them such a big offer to buy, they’d thought it was a prank. No woman had ever hung up on me for personal reasons. Even the ones who ended up wanting relationships always left smiling (that’s how good I was).
That afternoon, Joanie sent me headshots and profiles of the four women she had ready for me as fake girlfriends. But none of them were Nicole Perkins and I didn’t know for sure, but I assumed that none of them were dragons either. It had been so nice just to stand close to another dragon. I had my friends but I only saw them maybe once a month. Nicole worked in my building.
That evening as I went over reports on trials of our new app, all I could think about was Nicole Perkins and how I would get her to say yes.
Chapter Four: Nicole
The morning after Koinage CEO and apparent dragon shifter, Justin King, came at me with the weirdest proposition in probably CEO history, I found myself scrambling to get Tyler ready for school. The problem was dinosaurs. He was obsessed with them. Except that he knew he was a little baby dragon and he also knew he couldn’t tell anyone but he was only four so it all had become a bit mixed up in his head and he kept insisting to the adults at his day-care, as well as the other kids, that he was a dinosaur. I think he thought it would be harmless because humans didn’t know dragons were real but they knew dinosaurs were real, so it shouldn’t matter if people thought he was a dinosaur and that was close to a dragon after all… I’m sure it had made sense to him. But now it was eight in the morning and I was trying to rush him out the door while trying to explain why he couldn’t keep telling people he was a dinosaur.
When I dropped him off at day-care, a small brick building next door to a funky bookstore just outside Chinatown, his very tattooed and very cheerful caretaker, Mags, only smiled.
“How’s our little T-Rex!” She said, tousling his hair.
“See, mom! It’s fine!” Tyler grinned up at me.
“Kids this age are so fanciful and full of magic,” Mags said fondly.
“Right.” I took a deep breath. Maybe this wasn’t an emergency after all.
On the upside, I’d managed to put together a decently chic outfit and a dash of makeup for the day even in my rush. I was wearing a slim-fit white button-down tunic and black jeggings. I almost wore a little gold bracelet and then thought better of it.
The thing about dragons is, we love gold. I don’t mean we like it, I mean we love it. Even shifters hoard it like crazy. But it’s more than that. Wearing gold, it...well, it really turns us on. It turns us on especially
when we wear it in front of another dragon we’re attracted to.
I’d, perhaps, entertained some fantasies the night before about a certain dragon shifter seeing me in gold. Justin King was a jerk. Of that, I was certain. He was a big cretinous egomaniac though because I toiled away in his little kingdom he could just buy my company like...well, like the gold he probably had tucked away in his tower
On the other had, he was incredibly hot. I hadn’t been with anyone in more than a year. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had great sex. Maybe since Tyler’s dad and that hadn’t even been great. So yes, Justin King was a jerk, but I’d definitely brought myself off the night before while thinking of him getting all turned on seeing me in gold.
But to wear a gold bracelet, especially if I did happen to see him in person… That was too much. For a dragon, that would be like throwing my panties at him. It was already hard enough to get used to regular humans wearing gold. The effect isn’t quite the same when it’s not a dragon shifter. But it’s still a huge turn-on.
On the subway, I listened to my true crime podcast but my mind was wandering again. I was way too stubborn to be anybody’s fake girlfriend but I couldn’t help but wonder who he would get to do the job. Some perfect model he could take home to hoard probably.
I was absolutely convinced that Justin had only asked me in the first place because I was so rude to him. He wanted what he couldn’t have. Once I said yes, he would completely lose interest. Not that his interest was real in the first place. I could just imagine his eyes going dull as soon as I was friendly to him. He was the kind of guy who liked the chase.
Well, I didn’t like the chase. I had a kid and I was barely getting by. I had absolutely no time for “the chase.”
When I got to my desk that morning, there was a giant display of yellow roses waiting for me.
“Oh no,” I said under my breath.
Everyone was looking at me over the walls of their cubicles. I’d never gotten flowers before and when I say this display was huge, I mean I couldn’t sit at my desk and work with the roses there. They took up all the space on my desk.
“Who they from!” The girl on the other side of my cubicle had popped up like a damn meerkat and she looked at me expectantly.
There could only be one sender and when I dug the card out from it’s little perch deep in the bouquet, sure enough the initials J.K. were written in bold black script on a thick white card.
“Nobody important!” I said, lying through my teeth. My co-worker didn’t look like she believed me but she mercifully didn’t ask any more questions and sat back down, looking disappointed.
When I logged onto my computer, there was an email from Justin. I was sipping my coffee when I read it. That turned out to be a mistake.
Did I mention that I’ll pay you $500k to be my fake girlfriend for three months?
I sat there, trying to make sense of the message. I thought for sure the letter “k” must have been a typo. Had he meant to say he’d pay me five hundred dollars? But that didn’t make sense either. That would have insulted him more than me even as an offer. But half a million dollars? I couldn’t begin to understand who would be worth so much just as a phony date. Perhaps it was because I was a shifter? Except that nobody knew that except us. This was all just for the good PR? Right?
I stared at the email for probably a half hour and then finally got to my feet and went to the break room in a daze. I opted for regular coffee this time instead of an energy drink and stared out the window, thinking of Justin’s offer. There had to be a catch. There had to be something. I didn’t even think it was about sex. If Justin King wanted to buy sex, he wouldn’t buy it from me even if he did want a dragon. Surely, a man of his means could find other female dragon shifters who were more...his type.
When I returned to my desk, there was another email. This one asked again to have lunch with me. At this point, I was racked with curiosity. So I emailed back.
Ok. I can have lunch at 1pm.
That was my entire email. It wasn’t exactly poetic, but I was still completely baffled by this entire thing. Besides all that, I was a coder, not a writer. Justin wrote back to say he’d meet me in the lobby. Now I had a few hours during which I was ostensibly supposed to work. For a while, I couldn’t concentrate at all. I tried to think about every article and interview I’d ever read about Justin. He’d always come across as such a douche. The way he talked about tech like he was the Second Coming. He was always so unapologetically confident. He acted like he was God’s gift. I went over all of this in my head as I fell into my work and sipped my coffee and worked myself into a good head of steam.
The whole thing was probably a huge prank, I told myself. He was probably still pissed that I hadn’t been deferential enough to him in the elevator. He was probably used to people falling all over him, especially women. It was like I’d been thinking all along; he just wanted what he couldn’t have.
And he couldn’t have me, I told myself.
“Right,” I said aloud to myself. “You tell em’.”
It was 12:55pm, so I logged off and started making my way out. I felt so weird about this entire thing. I wished I wasn’t at work at all. I wished I was at home with Tyler and discussing dragons vs. dinosaurs. I wished we could go to the park. Tyler is only just starting to really appreciate the park. I sulked, thinking about how I’d rather be playing with my kid. I was so caught up, I didn’t even notice Justin standing right beside me...again.
I was standing in the middle of the giant lobby with the big statue of Athena in the middle of it, tapping my foot on the marble floor, always feeling a little out of place in my jeggings, with the five-dollar purse I’d bought of a vendor’s table by the park. Justin nudged me and smiled and I tried not to react. He really did have a pretty smile; those wide, plush lips splitting into a genuine seeming grin, his brown eyes sparkling.
“Hello there, Ms. Perkins,” Justin said, winking. “I hope you’re hungry. I’m taking you somewhere special.”
“Well, I only have a half an hour,” I said quickly.
He laughed at that and gently took my arm like some old-fashioned gentleman, ushering me out to the sidewalk.
He had a car waiting. I stopped short on the sidewalk. An actual driver was opening the door to help me into the backseat.
The thing is, I grew up with money. A lot of it. I’d been here before and been happy to leave it all behind. To me, that kinda money had only been a cage. As hard as it had been to raise Tyler on my own, to me it was still better than the alternative. And that was really saying something.
But still, it was nice to be helped into the backseat of a nice car. I could smell Justin’s gorgeous scent again when I sat down next to him in the back. I felt myself flushing, but I tried not to show it, ducking my head and turning away.
“You meant five hundred dollars, right?” I looked over at Justin finally. It wasn’t the most polite way to begin a conversation, but then I really hadn’t been too polite so far anyway. “Because-”
Justin looked at me like I might be out of my mind. “Five hundred thousand,” Justin said slowly. The two of us were sitting in the back of a black town car, inching through traffic. I was mildly distracted just because Justin was sitting so close and also because the seats were so comfortable, the leather so cool and plush, that I wanted to fall asleep.
I blinked at him and he shook his head. “What do you mean five hundred thousand?” I muttered.
Justin laughed and I pursed my lips trying not to think about how his voice went up high when he laughed like he was giggling, like he just couldn’t help himself. “I mean that if you pretend to be my girlfriend for three months, I’ll give you half a million dollars.”
The thing is, Justin was an incredibly sharp businessman. I had no doubt that extended to this proposal. I could definitely get him to go higher if I wanted to. Unless he just decided to go with a different girl. But I had a feeling he was set on me for some reason.
&n
bsp; I chuckled to myself and Justin sat back, watching my reaction. He wasn’t wearing a suit. He often didn’t wear suits. Today he was wearing dark jeans almost as skinny as mine and a black t-shirt and a military style jacket. He looked very fashionable and hot as hell, a dark shadow of stubble over his chin. When he sat back and looked over at me, I bit down on my tongue, trying not to give myself away.
“I’m not going to have sex with you!” I said, feeling as if I were trying to convince myself.
“Jesus,” Justin said, his eyebrows shooting up. “This isn’t for that. If I wanted that, I would get an escort or something. Sex isn’t on the table. This is just for appearances. That’s it.”
“I…” I shook my head as the city went by outside. I stared out the window, as if some clue to the cars and buildings going by would help me to understand this. “Why do you want me so badly? That’s what I don’t get.”
“Ah…” He stroked his chin in that way guys do, and squinted his eyes. “I don’t come across other dragons often. Especially women. I’m not even sure the last time I met a female dragon shifter. It’s nice. And...I don’t know. You look good on paper. You have a kid. That will make me look settled. You seem witty, smart, reliable, you work hard…”
“I’m an employee of yours,” I said warily. “Won’t that look bad?”
“We declare the relationship to HR,” Justin said, shrugging. “And you’re in coding. I don’t exactly work closely with you. I don’t think that will be a problem. In fact, people love a good workplace romance.” He grinned at me now, with teeth and everything. Even his teeth were kind of cute; little white pearls all in a line. “So what do you say?”
Dragon's Fake Mate Page 3
