by Susan Meier
Nanna said, “Of course! We will make the best breakfast ever cooked.”
Mitch shook his head. “No! This is Alonzo and Julia’s celebration. Not ours. We’ll be back in the fall and you can celebrate properly if you wish.”
His mom nodded. “Yes. You are correct. This is Alonzo and Julia’s time. Now that we have toasted your engagement, we can go back to celebrating the wedding.”
The family began to file out. Each stopped and took the chance to shake his hand and hug Lila, who hung in there like a trooper.
Finally Nanna stepped up. She hugged Lila, saying, “Welcome to the family.” Then hugged Mitch. He could feel the tension of the first meeting ebbing away as she pulled out of the embrace.
Then she looked him in the eye and said, “While Lila gets settled, why don’t you and I take a minute to catch up, Nene?”
His heart sank. To the casual observer, her request was the simple longing of a grandmother to spend time with her grandson. But she’d called him baby boy, the term she’d always used right before she scolded him.
“Of course.”
She turned and started to the door, but stopped suddenly and faced him, motioning with her fingers for him to follow her. She wanted him to leave with her. There’d be no reprieve. No couple of minutes to pull himself together. He had to go now.
He glanced at Lila. “I won’t be long.”
Her smoky gray eyes clouded with fear. “I’ll be fine.”
The look in her silvery orbs didn’t match her words. She sounded relieved. She looked totally shell-shocked.
“Oh, come on already,” Nanna said with a sigh. “I’m an old woman, getting older, and I need my sleep. Kiss her goodbye so we can get going.”
His heart chugged to a stop and he understood how Lila could sound relieved and look terrified. Nothing had gone as they’d planned. Once they’d landed and he remembered the time difference, he’d believed they’d sneak in under the cover of darkness, get a little sleep, then go to an ordinary breakfast in a few hours, be bombarded by well-wishers and sit down and eat eggs. Instead, they walked into a group of his family lying in wait. And now he had to kiss her.
Obviously, she didn’t want him to.
His male pride took a direct hit. It wasn’t like he was Frankenstein. Hell, most women considered him good-looking. Yet, this woman he’d seen almost every day for a year seemed appalled at the thought of kissing him.
Putting his hands on her shoulders, he brushed his lips across hers quickly, not even pausing when a little zap of something set his hormones humming and sent an unexpected urge to linger through him. She was Lila, for heaven’s sake.
He pulled away, a bit surprised by the stunned expression on her face. It matched the weird jumpy feeling he had in his stomach. His hands slid from her shoulders, down her arms to her hands, and for a few seconds he didn’t want to let go. He liked the feeling of her small, soft hands in his. He wanted to investigate the weird buzz of confusion.
But Nanna cleared her throat.
He followed her out of the apartment, closing the door behind him, still feeling a little shaky from the odd reaction to a kiss that was nothing more than a touch. When Nanna didn’t talk on the way to the main house, through the high-ceilinged foyer, up the stairs and into the living room of her quarters, he was glad. He wasn’t sure he could have spoken without his confusion coming through.
Nanna perched on a Queen Anne chair as if it was a throne and, out of habit, he walked behind the shiny mahogany bar and poured her a small glass of red.
After handing it to her, he sat down. Trepidation raced through him. In all the confusion of that kiss, he’d forgotten Nanna wanted to interrogate him.
Damn it! He shouldn’t have let Lila get away with evading his questions about her past because now he had virtually nothing to tell Nanna.
“So, your fiancée, she is pregnant?”
Mitch’s heart slammed to a halt, as his eyes bulged. “What? No!”
“The baby’s not yours, then?”
“What?”
“Why else does she not drink?”
“There are a million reasons a person doesn’t drink.” And right now he wished to hell he’d asked her. Damn it. How could a woman who doesn’t drink work for a winery—
He paused his thoughts. That was actually a very telling thing. If she could work for a winery that might mean her reasons for abstaining weren’t serious ones. Like, maybe, she didn’t like the taste of alcohol? Or maybe she didn’t want the extra calories—
“She’s so casual about not drinking that I never asked her. At first, I was only her boss. So I figured it was none of my business.” He shrugged. “Now? I just assume it has to do with watching her calories. She’s crazy about keeping her figure.”
There. His ass was totally covered. He’d as much as said he didn’t know, yet there were valid reasons for not knowing. He had been lucky this time, but there was no guarantee he’d be lucky the next. When he got back to his apartment they were going to have to have a long talk.
“So she’s not pregnant?”
“No.”
Nanna set her wineglass down and laid her hands on her lap demurely. “Hmm...”
“No ‘hmm,’ Nanna. She’s not pregnant.” And even if she was, they’d be gone in two weeks, the fake engagement over, and no one in this family needed to know. Except—
What if she was pregnant? What if that was why she needed a job that paid her more?
“It’s just that she has a certain glow. A happiness that women get when they are pregnant.”
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe she’s happy to be engaged to me.”
Nanna laughed slightly.
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
She rose. “You are too suspicious.”
“Oh, yeah? I’m not the one who jumped to the conclusion that my girlfriend was pregnant.”
“Fiancée.”
He scrubbed his hand across the back of his neck. Another mistake. He should be smarter than this. On his toes. Especially with the woman he needed to fool. “She’s been my girlfriend so long that I sometimes lapse.”
“Really? Because according to records she’s only been your assistant for a year.”
“Right.”
“Then you started dating right after she went to work for you?”
“Sort of, but—” He thought of Lila’s suggestion that he’d ravaged her in his office one night but they hadn’t told Riccardo and smiled. “Actually, Nanna, Riccardo doesn’t know everything about our relationship. And it might not be appropriate for you to know either.”
She laughed. “Oh, Nene. You are truly the bad boy of the family. But this woman, Lila. She is sweet. It will hurt me if you hurt her.”
“We’re engaged, Nanna. I’m not going to hurt her.” The lie stuck in his throat like stale peanut butter. Not just because he didn’t like lying but because it never once occurred to him that he could hurt Lila. This was a business deal. She knew that. He knew that. Why was he thinking about stupid things?
Nanna squeezed his hand. “Good night.”
He said, “Good night,” watching her leave the living room and head back the hall to her bedroom. When she was gone, he looked skyward and rolled his eyes. He’d certainly accomplished his purpose of taking everybody’s mind off his reaction to Julia and Alonzo getting married, but he should have thought twice about where he’d chosen to put their attention.
He headed for his apartment, knocked twice, lightly, because he was an idiot, involved in a scheme with a woman he didn’t know, who he was going to have to learn completely before breakfast the next morning, then he opened the door and walked into the empty living room.
“Crap.” He hoped to heaven she wasn’t in the shower and wondered if
he should go looking for her. Because that was another thing he’d forgotten about this charade. She could be stark naked behind either of the bedroom doors.
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO MINUTES AFTER Mitch left with his nanna, the driver brought their bags to the apartment, immediately turning left and stacking them in the larger of the two bedrooms.
He made three trips and all three times, Lila had smiled and thanked him. But when he left for the final time, she darted into the room with the luggage, grabbed her bags and set herself up in the second bedroom. Mitch was gone so long she’d taken a quick rinse in the shower, put on her pajama pants and a T-shirt and crawled into bed. Just before she would have fallen asleep out of sheer exhaustion, the apartment door opened and quietly closed.
He was back.
Her breath stalled as she waited in silence, wondering if he would realize she was already in bed and simply head for the room where the driver had left his bags. He’d gone to that bedroom without any instruction from her and she’d decided that had to mean it was the room Mitch typically used. She certainly didn’t think he expected her to be in his bed.
So, if she was lucky, he’d figure out she was in the other room and let her sleep.
“Lila!”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Nope. Not lucky.
“Lila! We need to talk.”
Oh, she didn’t think so. Her plan was to play a role so she could keep enough emotional distance between them that she didn’t fall any more in love with him than she already was. So talking was absolutely out. Especially since she had the sneaking feeling his nanna might be a little harder to fool than Mitch believed, and that’s why his voice sounded so edgy. Sweet little Nanna had wanted to talk to him in private. Of course she had reservations. And Lila didn’t want to discuss any of them.
“I refuse to go to breakfast tomorrow with my family unable to give even simple facts about you. Not to mention the big questions dredged up by your announcement that you don’t drink.”
This time she winced. It had never even occurred to her that she was a nondrinker working for a winery. For her, work was a way to make a living—and her job had also been about being with him, hoping he would notice her. Ironic that she intended to avoid him as much as she could in their last two weeks together.
A long space of silence ensued. She waited, not breathing, praying he didn’t open the door and find her lying in bed with covers up to her chin, hiding her worn pajama pants and New York Giants T-shirt. If he came in now, he’d be talking to the real Lila. Not the fancy girl in the pink dress and tall sandals. That girl could handle him. Real Lila would stutter.
“All right. If you’re sleeping, fine.”
She pressed her fingers to her lips to stop a laugh. It was just like Mitch to keep talking to someone he thought was sleeping. He never let a thought go unfinished.
Her smile faded. That meant first thing in the morning they’d be having the talk she was avoiding now.
She’d better dress pretty damned dazzling to have enough confidence to keep him at bay the way she had in the airplane.
In spite of her worry, she fell asleep almost immediately. Having set her phone alarm for six o’clock, Spain time, she got up when it sounded and headed for her closet, ready to jump into this problem and solve it. The pink dress had worked to keep him slightly off his game the day before. So she’d have to find something like that. She flicked a few hangers to the left, then realized she shouldn’t get too dressed up for a breakfast. She pulled a white lace top out of the closet and matched it with a pair of skinny jeans and flat sandals. Fixing her hair the sleek way she had it the day before, she decided she had the best of both worlds. A sleek, sophisticated hairdo and contact lenses that made her look like a different person, paired with an ordinary outfit that said she was a comfortable, easygoing person, who oozed confidence.
She made a long assessment of herself in the full-length mirror. If she had to say so herself, she’d chosen well. The outfit made her appear casually sexy, as if sexy was her natural state. She looked so unlike herself that she felt like she was seeing a stranger. But that was good. The only way she would manage to keep her distance with Mitch would be to remember this was all playacting, and there was no better way to get yourself into character than with a costume.
Satisfied, she walked out of her bedroom and found Mitch in the sitting area, on the sofa, reading a newspaper, probably a Wall Street Journal that he’d brought with him. When she closed the door behind her, the paper rustled as it lowered.
For a few seconds, Mitch said nothing but the expression on his face spoke volumes. His eyebrows rose. His lips twitched, going from a smile to a frown and back up into a smile again.
“Do I pass?”
“Ridiculously. That’s one of the reasons I think we need to talk. I can’t quite reconcile you with the Lila who works for me.”
“You’re not supposed to connect me to who I am for real. I’m a fake fiancée, remember?” She motioned around herself. “All this is smoke and mirrors. Something you need to take the focus off you and put it on your brother and his bride.”
He sucked in a breath. “All right. I get that, but last night Nanna—”
The phone rang. Mitch’s face became like a thundercloud at the interruption. He grabbed the receiver. “Yes! What!”
There was a pause, then he jumped from the sofa and squeezed his eyes shut. “Sorry, Nanna!”
Wearing cargo shorts and a golf shirt, the kind he usually wore when they worked Saturdays in the summer, he was 100 percent Mitcham Ochoa. Except that his nanna really seemed to be able to push all his buttons.
“Right. I know we eat promptly at seven, but Lila and I—” He stopped. His face twisted with horror. “There was no hanky-panky, Nanna! We just slept in. We are on our way downstairs now.”
He hung up the phone and Lila sucked in a breath. “She’s a tough one.”
“Which is exactly why we need to talk.”
“No,” Lila said, racing to the door. “We’re late. We need to get down to breakfast and keep the conversation on your brother and Julia.”
Mitch followed her. As he closed the apartment door, she ran down the steps, knowing that once they got outside he wouldn’t ask questions because they’d be within hearing distance of anybody milling about on the grounds. But success right now only provided a short reprieve. After breakfast, she’d have to give him a darned good reason for not drinking. And it couldn’t be foolish. It had to work.
It just couldn’t be the real one.
She wanted a clean break when they got home. So he couldn’t empathize or sympathize with her. She didn’t want any emotion at all between them. Not even friendship. When she walked out of his life in two weeks, she didn’t want either one of them looking back.
He caught up to her as she started across the empty parking lot to the sidewalk that led to the house. He took her hand and she gave him a brief smile, though her heart began to chug and all of a sudden heat infused her. Real Lila couldn’t handle things like holding hands, and she realized that though she’d gotten into costume, she kept falling out of character.
She took a second to remind herself she was playing the part of a rich guy’s fiancée, and she was in Spain. Gorgeous Spain! Where the sun glistened on the dew coating the leaves in the rows and rows of grapevines. Rolling hills stretched to black mountains. And the sky was such a perfect blue it almost took her breath away.
“It’s beautiful here.”
“It’s summer. Everywhere is beautiful in the summer.”
“Yes. I guess.” She glanced around at the grounds. Healthy green grass and trees gave way to a plethora of grapevines that seemed to go on forever. “Your family must make a lot of wine.”
He laughed. “How else do you think we support three generations of Ochoas?”
“By making a lot of wine.”
He shook his head. “By selling a lot of wine.”
He opened the door for her and she stepped into the lobby of the main house turned business premises. On the right were shelves filled with bottles displaying the Ochoa label, as well as touristy trinkets, T-shirts and corks with the vineyard’s logo. On the left was a silent corridor. Mitch had told her the family’s business offices were on this level, and she assumed that hall led to those offices.
Remembering the restaurant in the basement, she said, “Do we go downstairs?”
“Upstairs. To the residences.”
“Okay.”
Once again they climbed a flight of stairs, a circular stairway wide enough for them to walk side by side. A huge sitting room greeted them at the top of the steps with corridors jutting left and right.
“My parents’ quarters are that way,” Mitch said, pointing to the left. “And Nanna lives down here.” He directed her to walk to the right.
At the end of the hall they entered a door that opened onto another sitting room, then Mitch led her to a dining room where it seemed the entire Ochoa family had gathered at a long cherrywood table.
The men rose. Mitch walked Lila to the two empty places at the table, pulled out her chair and helped her sit before he sat beside her.
As the men returned to their seats, Julia said, “Jeans at the breakfast table! Lila, what a bold woman you are!”
A quick glance around showed all the women were dressed up. Though the men were a lot more casual, like Mitch.
“I thought you were coming with us this morning while I pick up my gown for tonight’s opening gala?”
Lila smiled at Mitch, then Julia. “Actually, I didn’t know that. But I’d love to come.” She wasn’t sure if Julia was being catty, but she could handle a million Julias. It was a morning alone with Mitch she needed to get out of. “Give me ten minutes after breakfast and I can be ready.”
Julia smiled. “So you’re a quick-change artist.”