by Elena Armas
Copyright © 2021 by Elena Armas
All rights reserved.
Visit my website at www.authorelenaarmas.com
Cover Design: Ella Maise and Elena Armas
Editor: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgments
To those chasing dreams,
never give up on them.
We are not quitters, you hear me?
Chapter One
“I’ll be your date to the wedding.”
Words I had never—not even in my wildest dreams, and trust me, I had a vivid imagination—conceived of hearing from that deep and rich tone reached my ears.
Looking down at my coffee, I squinted my eyes, trying to search for any signs of noxious substances floating around. That would at least explain what was happening. But nope.
Nothing. Just what was left of my Americano.
“I’ll do it if you need someone that badly,” the deep voice came again.
Eyes growing wide, I lifted my head. I opened my mouth and then snapped it closed again.
“Rosie …” I trailed off, the word leaving me in a whisper. “Is he really there? Can you see him? Or did someone spike my coffee without me noticing?”
Rosie—my best friend and colleague in InTech, the New York City–based engineering consulting company, where we had met and worked—slowly nodded her head. I watched her dark curls bounce with the motion, an expression of disbelief marring her otherwise soft features. She lowered her voice. “Nope. He’s right there.” Her head peeked around me very quickly. “Hi. Good morning!” she said brightly before her attention returned to my face. “Right behind you.”
Lips parted, I stared at my friend for a long moment. We were standing at the far end of the hallway of the eleventh floor of the InTech headquarters. Both our offices were relatively close together, so the moment I had entered the building located in the heart of Manhattan, in the vicinity of Central Park, I had gone straight to her office.
My plan had been to grab Rosie and plop down on the upholstered wooden armchairs that served as a waiting sitting area for visiting clients, which were usually unoccupied this early in the morning. But we never made it. I somehow dropped the bomb before we ever sat down. That was how much my predicament needed Rosie’s immediate attention. And then … then he had materialized out of nowhere.
“Should I repeat that a third time?” His question sent a new wave of disbelief rushing down my body, freezing the blood in my veins.
He wouldn’t. Not because he couldn’t, but because what he was saying did not make any freaking sense. Not in our world. One where we—
“All right, fine,” he sighed. “You can take me.” He paused, sending more of that ice-cold wariness through me. “To your sister’s wedding.”
My spine locked up.
My shoulders stiffened.
I even felt the satin blouse I had tucked into my camel slacks stretch with the sudden motion.
I can take him.
To my sister’s wedding.
As my … date?
I blinked, his words echoing inside my head.
Then, something unhitched inside of me. The absurdity of whatever this was—whatever perverse joke this man I knew not to trust was trying to pull off—made a snort bubble its way up my throat and reach my lips, leaving me quickly and loudly. As if it had been in a rush to get out.
A grunt came from behind me. “What’s so funny?” His voice dropped, turning colder. “I’m completely serious.”
I bit back another burst of laughter. I didn’t believe that. Not for a second. “The chances of him,” I told Rosie, “being actually serious are the same chances I have of having Chris Evans pop out of nowhere and confess his undying love for me.” I made a show of looking right and left. “Nonexistent. So, Rosie, you were saying something about … Mr. Frenkel, right?”
There was no Mr. Frenkel.
“Lina,” Rosie said with that fake, toothy smile I knew she wore when she didn’t want to be rude. “He looks like he’s serious,” she spoke through her freaky smile. Her gaze inspected the man standing behind me. “Yep. I think he might be serious.”
“Nope. He can’t be.” I shook my head, still refusing to turn around and acknowledge that there was a possibility my friend was right.
There couldn’t be. There was no way Aaron Blackford, colleague and well-established affliction of mine, would even attempt to offer something like that. No. Way.
An impatient sigh came from behind me. “This is getting repetitive, Catalina.” A long pause. Then, another noisy exhale left his lips, this one much longer. But I did not turn around. I held my ground. “Ignoring me won’t make me disappear. You know that.”
I did. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying,” I muttered under my breath.
Rosie leveled me with a look. Then, she peeked around me again, keeping that toothy grin in place. “Sorry about that, Aaron. We are not ignoring you.” Her grin strained. “We are … debating something.”
“We are ignoring him though. You don’t need to spare his feelings. He doesn’t have any.”
“Thanks, Rosie,” Aaron told my friend, some of the usual coldness leaving his voice. Not that he’d be nice to anybody. Nice wasn’t something Aaron did. I didn’t even think he was able to pull off friendly. But he had always been less … grim when it came to Rosie. A treatment that had never been for me. “Do you think you can tell Catalina to turn around? I’d appreciate talking to her face and not to the back of her head.” His tone dropped back to minus zero degrees. “That is, of course, if this is not one of her jokes that I never seem to understand, much less find funny.”
Heat rushed up my body, reaching my face.
“Sure,” Rosie complied. “I think … I think I can do that.” My friend’s gaze bounced from that point behind me to my face, her eyebrows raised. “Lina, so, erm, Aaron would like you to turn around if this is not one of those jokes that—”
“Thanks, Rosie. I got that,” I gritted out between my teeth. Feeling my cheeks burn, I refused to face him. That would mean letting him win whatever game he was playing. Plus, he had just called me unfunny. Him. “If you could, tell Aaron that I don’t think one can laugh at, or much less understand, jokes when one lacks a sense of humor, please. That would be great. Thanks.”
Rosie scratched the side of her head, looking pleadingly at me
. Don’t make me do this, she seemed to ask me with her eyes.
I widened mine at her, ignoring her plea and begging her to go along.
She released a breath and then looked around me one more time. “Aaron,” she said, her fake grin getting bigger, “Lina thinks that—”
“I heard her, Rosie. Thank you.”
I was so attuned to him—to this—that I noticed the slight change in his tone that signaled the switch to the voice he only used with me. The one that was just as dry and cold but that would now come with an extra layer of disdain and distance. The one that would soon lead to a scowl. I didn’t even need to turn and take a look at him to know that. It was somehow always there when it came to me and to this … thing between us.
“I’m pretty sure my words are reaching Catalina down there just fine, but if you could tell her that I have work to do and I cannot entertain this much longer, I would appreciate it.”
Down there?
Stupidly large man.
My size was average. Average for a Spaniard, sure. But average nonetheless. I was five foot three—almost four, thank you very much.
Rosie’s green eyes were back on me. “So, Aaron has work, and he would appreciate—”
“If—” I stopped myself when I heard the word sounding high-pitched and squeaky. I cleared my throat and tried again. “If he is so busy, then please tell him to feel free to spare me. He can go back to his office and resume whatever workaholic activities he had shockingly paused to stick his nose in something that does not concern him.”
I watched my friend’s mouth open, but the man behind me spoke before a sound could come out of her lips, “So, you heard what I said. My offer. Good.” A pause. In which I cursed under my breath. “Then, what’s your answer?”
Rosie’s face filled with shock one more time. My gaze remained on her, and I could picture how the dark brown in my eyes was turning to red with my growing exasperation.
My answer? What the hell was he even trying to accomplish? Was this a new, inventive way of playing with my head? My sanity?
“I have no idea what he’s talking about. I heard nothing,” I lied. “You can tell him that too.”
Rosie tucked a curl behind her ear, her eyes jumping very briefly to Aaron and then returning to me. “I think he’s referring to the moment he offered to be your date to your sister’s wedding,” she explained with a soft voice. “You know, right after you told me that things had changed and that you now needed to find someone—or anyone, I think you said—to go to Spain with you and attend that wedding because, otherwise, you’d die a slow, painful death and—”
“I think I got it,” I rushed out, feeling my face burn again from the realization that Aaron had heard all of that. “Thanks, Rosie. You can stop with the recap.” Or I’d be dying that slow, painful death right about now.
“I think you used the word desperate,” Aaron chipped in.
My ears burned, probably flashing about five shades of radioactive red. “I did not,” I breathed out. “I did not use that word.”
“You … sort of did, sweetie,” my best friend—no, former best friend as of right now—confirmed.
Eyes narrowed, I mouthed, What the hell, traitor?
But both of them were right.
“Fine. So, I said that. Doesn’t mean I’m that desperate.”
“That’s what truly helpless people would say. But whatever makes you sleep better at night, Catalina.”
Cursing under my breath for the umpteenth time that morning, I closed my eyes briefly. “This is none of your business, Blackford, but I’m not helpless, okay? And I sleep at night just fine. No, actually, I’ve never slept better.”
What was one more lie to the pile I was hoisting around, huh?
Contrary to what I had just denied, I was truly, helplessly desperate to find someone to be my date to that wedding. But that didn’t mean I’d—
“Sure.”
Ironically, out of all the damn words Aaron Blackford had said to the back of my head that morning, that one word was what made me break my stance to pretend I remained unaffected.
That sure, sounding all condescending and bored and dismissive and just so Aaron.
Sure.
My blood bubbled.
It was so impulsive, such a knee-jerk reaction to that four-letter word—which, uttered by anybody else, would have meant nothing—that I didn’t even realize my body was turning until it was too late.
Because of his unearthly height, I was welcomed by a broad chest covered in a pressed white button-down that made me itch to fist the fabric and wrinkle it with my hands because who pranced through life so sleek and spotless all the damn time? Aaron Blackford—that was who.
My gaze trailed up rounded shoulders and a strong neck, reaching the straight line of his jaw. His lips pressed flatly, just like I had known they would. My eyes traveled further up then, reaching his blue ones—blue that reminded me of the depths of the ocean, where everything was cold and deadly—and finding them on me.
One of his brows rose.
“Sure?” I hissed.
“Yes.” That head, topped with raven hair, gave one single nod, his gaze not leaving mine. “I don’t want to waste more time arguing about something you are too stubborn to admit, so yes. Sure.”
This infuriating blue-eyed man who probably spent more time ironing his clothes than interacting with other human beings was not going to make me lose my temper this early in the morning.
Fighting to keep my body under control, I inhaled a long, deep breath. I tucked a lock of chestnut hair behind my ear. “If this is such a waste of time, I genuinely don’t know what you are still doing here. Please don’t stay on my or Rosie’s account.”
A noncommittal noise left Miss Traitor’s mouth.
“I would have,” Aaron admitted in a level tone. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”
“That wasn’t a question,” I said, the words tasting sour in my tongue. “Whatever you said was not a question. But that’s not important because I don’t need you, thank you very much.”
“Sure,” he repeated, turning my exasperation one notch up. “Although I think you do.”
“You think wrong.”
That brow rose higher. “And yet it sounded like you really do need me.”
“Then, you must be experiencing serious hearing issues because, yet again, you heard wrong. I don’t need you, Aaron Blackford.” I swallowed, willing some of the dryness away. “I could write it down for you if you want. Send you an email, too, if that’d help at all.”
He seemed to think about it for a second, looking uninterested. But I knew better than to believe he’d let it go so easily. Which he proved as soon as he opened his mouth again. “Didn’t you say the wedding is in a month and you don’t have a date?”
My lips pressed in a tight line. “Maybe. I can’t recall exactly.”
I had said that. Word for word.
“Didn’t Rosie suggest that if you perhaps sat in the back and tried not to draw any attention to yourself, nobody would notice you were attending on your own?”
My friend’s head popped into my field of vision. “I did. I also suggested to wear a dull color and not the stunning red dress that—”
“Rosie,” I interrupted her. “Not really helping here.”
Aaron’s eyes didn’t waver when he resumed his walk down memory lane. “Didn’t you follow that by reminding Rosie that you were the motherfreaking—your word—maid of honor and therefore everybody and their mother—your words again—would notice you anyway?”
“She did,” I heard Miss Traitor confirm. My head whirled in her direction. “What?” She shrugged, signing her death sentence. “You did, honey.”
I needed new friends. ASAP.
“She did,” Aaron corroborated, drawing my gaze and attention back to him. “And did you not say that your ex-boyfriend is the best man and thinking of standing in the vicinity of him, alone and lame and pathetically single�
�those were your words again—made you want to tear off your own skin?”
I had. I had said that. But I hadn’t thought Aaron was listening; otherwise, I would have never admitted it out loud.
But he had been right there, apparently. He knew now. He had heard me openly admit that and had just thrown it at my face. And as much as I told myself I didn’t care—that I shouldn’t care—the pang of hurt was there all the same. It made me feel all the more alone, lame, and pathetic.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I averted my eyes, letting them rest somewhere close to his Adam’s apple. I didn’t want to see whatever was in his face. Mockery. Pity. I didn’t care. I could spare the knowledge of one more person thinking of me that way.
His throat was the one that worked then. I knew because it was the only part of him I allowed myself to look at.
“You are desperate.”
I exhaled, the air leaving my lips forcefully. One nod—that was all I gave him. And I didn’t even understand why I had done it. This wasn’t me. I usually fought back until I was the one who drew blood first. Because that was what we did. We didn’t spare each other’s feelings. This wasn’t new.
“Then, take me. I will be your date to the wedding, Catalina.”
My gaze drew up very slowly, a strange mix of wariness and embarrassment washing over me. Him witnessing all this was bad enough, but him somehow trying to use it to his advantage? To get the better of me?
Unless he wasn’t. Unless perhaps there was an explanation, a reason, as to why he was doing this. Offering himself to be my date.
Studying his face, I pondered all these options and possible motivations, not coming to any kind of reasonable conclusion. Not finding any possible answer that would help me understand why or what he was trying to accomplish.