by Karen Booth
“And looking to add to it, from what I understand.”
That one hit a little too close to home. Noah had to end this, now. “We went to a wedding. Charlotte used to work on weddings with Lyle’s wife. Stop reading so much into it.”
“You and your brother can be as coy as you like. I just want you to know that I’m watching.”
Noah sat up in his chair and plopped his elbow down onto the desk. “Is there something else you wanted? I have some work I need to get to.”
“No. Merely calling to make sure everything is okay. I worry about you and your siblings.”
No, you don’t. “Everything’s great.”
“Okay, then. I’d like to meet my future daughter-in-law at some point if that’s possible. That’s a courtesy your brother wasn’t willing to extend to me. I had to meet Kendall on my own.”
Another lie. Dad had met Kendall weeks before she and Sawyer were engaged, and only because he’d tried to buy off Kendall to spy on Sawyer or at the very least sabotage the reopening of the Grand Legacy. “We’ll see. I’ll let you know.”
“Have a good day, son.”
A low grumble fought to leave Noah’s lips. “You, too.” As soon as he hung up, he tossed his phone aside onto a stack of paperwork. He didn’t want to look at it again anytime soon.
Just then, Lily marched into Noah’s office and tossed a copy of one of the most infamous New York tabloids on his desk. “Page five.” She jabbed her finger into the headline then dropped down into the chair and crossed her legs. Even when she was obviously mad, she was ridiculously hot. Last night had been torture. He’d been so close to taking her home.
“I’ve already seen it. I told you we should’ve kissed each other goodbye.”
Lily dropped her chin and shot him a pointed glance. “Don’t make this my fault. We wouldn’t have had that argument in the first place if it hadn’t been for your former lady friend stopping by for a visit.”
Noah took one more look at the paper. He and Lily were both attractive people, but it was amazing the unflattering angles the paparazzi were able to capture. He hated the tabloids. That much was official. It didn’t even matter anymore that they were what had brought Lily closer to him. Now they were driving her further away.
“I hate this, Noah.” Lily sat back in her chair, staring out the window, her head wagging slowly back and forth. “It’s too much. This is way more than we ever talked about.”
“What do you want me to say? It’s not like I can control this.”
“My neighbor saw this. The little old lady who lives down the hall from me. She was so upset and I had to convince her that we were still together, when the reality is that it’s all fake.”
Don’t remind me. This was getting to Noah, too. Being around Lily while she tried so hard to keep him at arm’s length was much worse than the misery he’d been experiencing before.
Sawyer poked his head into Noah’s office. “Did you guys see the story in the paper? Kendall showed it to me. Not good.” He stepped inside and leaned against the doorframe.
Noah didn’t get headaches often, but today was already an exception. “It gets worse. Dad saw it. And he knows we went to the wedding. He suspects something is going on with Hannafort. It’s only a matter of time until he finds out. My worry is that it’s going to happen before everything is signed and he finds some way to interfere. For all we know, Dad was behind the tabloid video in the first place.”
Sawyer sucked in a deep breath, adopting his trademark look of concern. “It could happen, especially considering everything he did to mess with the Grand Legacy.”
“I also think Dad suspects there’s something off about my engagement to Lily. He could out us, easily.”
Lily’s gaze flew back and forth between Noah and Sawyer. “Do you think he could put the deal in true jeopardy? I haven’t done all of this extra work for that to all go south.”
Noah couldn’t for the life of him figure out what Lily wanted from him anymore, but he was starting to get a better idea. Between sticking up for the woman in the bar and now treating their fake engagement as nothing but work, it was clear that everything that had happened between them in Florida had meant very little to her. Noah was getting a taste of his own medicine and he didn’t like it at all.
“We have to do something,” Sawyer said. “Any suggestions?”
“I have one,” Noah said. “How about we not give the tabloids any more free material?”
Lily shot him a look so fast it could’ve sliced his head off. “That’s not fair. We can’t exactly control that.”
“Or can we? I mean, at least circle the wagons and keep you two away from negative publicity.” Sawyer nodded, clearly calculating. “I think we need to double-down on the engagement. Lily, I think you need to move in with Noah.”
Lily’s eyes grew as big as saucers. “Move in with him. As in pack up all of my stuff and move into his condo in the Grand Legacy. You do realize this is far more than I was originally asked to do. Way more.” Her voice was reaching a pitch that would soon only be audible to dogs. “Don’t forget, I have to go meet Marcy Hannafort in a few days and plan a fake wedding.”
There was no mistaking what Lily was saying. She wanted more money. Noah knew it. “Fine. Then we up your percentage.” If ever there was a message that everything was back to being business, that was it. Part of Noah hated that it had come to this, but it was unavoidable. It was a tangled mess and Lily was not wrong. They were asking her to go well beyond the call of duty.
“Three percent?” Sawyer asked. “That seems fair to me.”
Lily took in a deep breath through her nose and nodded. “Yes. That sounds fair.”
“Great. Done.” Noah shuffled some papers on his desk, wondering what in the hell he’d just proposed and agreed to. He and his brother were buying off the woman Noah couldn’t get out of his head, all so she could move in with him. This was all kinds of wrong.
“In the meantime, we need to double our efforts into figuring out where Dad is getting his information. I read an article about a security company specializing in corporate espionage. I don’t like that word when we’re talking about our own dad, but it’s pretty much come to this.” Sawyer rapped on the door casing two times and walked away.
Painful silence hung in the air with Sawyer’s departure. Lily sat in the chair, arms crossed, her foot bobbing. Noah vacillated between staring at papers he couldn’t care less about and trying not to look at Lily’s legs. He really needed to get his act together.
“So. When do you want me to move in?” Her tone said she was resigned to this new reality. That extra 2 percent apparently made the idea tolerable.
“Whenever. Tomorrow?”
“Okay. Sounds good. I’m going to get back to work. I have a ton of emails to answer.” She rose from her chair and headed for the door.
Noah wanted to let the events of the last half hour go, but he couldn’t. “Extra work, Lily? Is that what this has been to you?”
“Excuse me?”
“I realize we’ve had some uncomfortable moments, but it’s not like you weren’t taken care of. We went to an amazing destination wedding together. And I guess more than anything, I thought we had fun in Florida.”
“We did have fun, Noah. We talked about that last night. But that still doesn’t mean that I wanted all of this other stuff to happen.”
He didn’t believe for a minute that she was so naive. “What do you want from me? You had to know what you were getting yourself into when you agreed to this in the first place.”
“Like I had a choice, sitting there in Sawyer’s office while everyone basically laid the entire future of Locke and Locke on my shoulders. Plus, I agreed to a weekend. That was it. Now we’re moving in together. This was the last thing I planned on.”
“Yeah. You and me both.”
*
* *
In case the tabloids were watching, Lily moved into Noah’s brand new condo on the seventeenth floor of the Grand Legacy in broad daylight, around noon the next day. They made a show of the movers hauling her things into the building, but more than half of the boxes were empty. This was a temporary measure and Lily was, quite honestly, tired of the act.
“Is that the final load?” Noah came out of his home office as the movers marched by with more boxes.
“I think so.” Lily was doing her best to remain upbeat, but this was yet another life event she hated faking. She’d never moved in with Peter, which ultimately ended up being a blessing, but that made this a first for her, unlike getting engaged. And it put her in whisper-thin proximity to Noah, when every warning sign imaginable was going off in her head.
One of the movers had Noah sign some paperwork while the rest of them filed out of the apartment. Once he was gone, Lily was alone with the man she couldn’t resist, who held her professional future in his hands.
“I guess I should get myself set up in the guest room.”
“Sounds like a plan. I have some more work to do.” Noah went down the hall to his home office and Lily decided that distance was the best. Things were still chilly between them after the argument yesterday.
Lily unpacked her clothes. She hung dresses, skirts and blouses in the closet and put everything else away into the bureau. Noah’s apartment was straight out of Bachelor Pad Monthly, lots of expensive modern furniture and not a single soft touch anywhere. Her bed was a platform style in dark wood with built-in floating bedside tables. The bedding was dark gray. She would’ve called it austere if it wasn’t such a high thread count. Lily had no idea how long she’d be living here, but if it ended up being more than a few weeks, she might need to go shopping for cute throw pillows or a scented candle. A few weeks? Her nerves would be rubbed raw by then. It was that difficult to be around Noah and pretend like everything was fine and that nothing had happened.
Still, he had not only agreed to the 3 percent, he’d suggested the increase. And there was an argument to be made that their predicament was exactly that—theirs. They were in the same boat, for better or worse, and perhaps Lily needed to stop being so hard on Noah.
She headed down the hall to his office. “I was thinking that I’d make dinner. If you’re up for that.”
Noah looked up and his green eyes worked their way into her soul. The part of her that had been mad at him was a distant memory now. “You don’t have to do that. I order in most nights.”
“May I?” She gestured for the brown leather chair opposite his desk. Noah’s office was by far the most comfortable room in the house. Beautiful antique desk, soft lighting and an array of cool art on the wall—black-and-white photographs and some old playbills from jazz shows at the Village Vanguard.
“Yes. Please.” He got up from his seat and walked over to a turntable in the corner and flipped the record. When he moved the stylus over to the spinning vinyl, some familiar jazz began to play.
“Oh, wow. I haven’t heard this since I was a kid. Art Tatum?”
Noah nodded. “The one and only.”
Lily looked behind her. There was an entire wall of records at the far side of the room. She got up to peruse the spines. “My grandfather used to play this all the time.”
“Are you calling me an old man?”
“No, but you are the man with a record player. I don’t think I know anyone else who has one.”
“Vinyl’s making a big resurgence. It sounds so much better than anything else, especially if you’re into music recorded in the ’50s and ’60s. That music was engineered for this medium. It’s not really meant to be listened to any other way.”
He might not be wrong about that. The record sounded amazing. “I also don’t know anyone who has this many records. You must’ve been collecting forever.”
“Not forever, but I did go through a big audiophile stage when I was a teenager. I took my dad’s record collection since he never listened to it and I built on that. I would take the train into the city on the weekends and spend hours in record stores.”
“Interesting. Were you just bored?”
“I don’t know. Aren’t all teenagers bored? I know that for me, Sawyer had moved out and Charlotte was off doing her own thing. Partying, mostly. I was a nerd. I was not out partying.”
Lily could hardly believe the words out of Noah’s mouth, but he had hinted at this the day they went out to lunch after he bought her the engagement ring. “I really have a hard time believing that.”
He held his hands up in surrender. “True story. I didn’t have my first girlfriend until I was a senior in high school. I went through a very unfortunate pudgy stage.”
“Okay. Now I really know you’re lying. You’re so trim.” Remarking on Noah’s physique was bringing back the memories of their tryst at the Hannafort wedding. Noah wasn’t just slim, he was all lean muscle. Yes, a bit lanky, but she had a big weakness for that.
He held up a finger. “Hold on one minute. Allow me to dig up some very embarrassing photographic evidence.” He crouched down and slid open a panel in a midcentury oak credenza. He rummaged around and eventually pulled out a photo album. He flipped through several pages, finally showing it to her. “There.”
Lily sat on the Persian rug, hardly believing what she was seeing. Sure enough, there was Noah’s hair, and definitely his straight nose, and what appeared to be his beautiful green eyes, but they were in a decidedly rounder and much shorter package. “You were still cute.” Her voice broke a bit and she wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe because she so often saw Noah as superhuman. The golden boy with the world at his feet. This made him seem more real, which was a ridiculous concept. She worked with him every day. She’d seen him get angry and upset. She knew that he was human. But still, this was not something she’d ever expected to see.
“I really wasn’t cute, but thank you for saying that.”
“How old are you in this picture?”
“Fifteen. I grew about a foot and a half the next year.”
“And Sawyer was out of the house at that point?”
“Yeah. He left as soon as he could. Went into the military, which really pissed off my dad. He’d wanted him to go to business school and work for him, but it didn’t happen that way. Plus, I think my dad felt like Sawyer was always making him look bad. Dad went to a military school as a boy, but didn’t have the nerve to do what Sawyer did.”
Lily lifted the page to look at more. “May I?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
She flipped to the next set of photographs, some more formal-looking portraits around a Christmas tree. “Who’s in this one?”
Noah went straight down the line. “That’s my dad, my dad’s second wife, Charlotte, me, Sawyer and then my stepsiblings, Todd and Beth.”
“Did you like them?”
“I did. A lot. We were actually quite close. But then my dad divorced their mom, they moved out and I had another set of siblings to get used to.”
“Not exactly your normal upbringing.”
“No. Not really.” Noah took the photo album from her hands. “What about you?”
“Hey. I wanted to look some more.” She let her voice express her true disappointment. She loved looking at old photos, especially of Noah.
“I promise it’s more of the same.”
“No baby pictures?”
He laughed. “Hold on one second.” He put the photo album back and pulled out a small leather box. Inside it was a tidy stack of old photos. “Here you go. No laughing. This was the origin of chubby Noah.”
Lily couldn’t help but smile as she looked at the photograph. There was a very happy baby in the arms of a beautiful woman. “All babies are chubby. And you were adorable with your big bald head and thigh rolls.”
“Exactly what every
guy wants to hear.”
“Is that your mom? She’s beautiful.”
“Yep. She really was beautiful. I miss her a lot. You know how they say some people are the glue that holds a family together? Well, my mom was the glue. Things were never the same after she died.”
“I’m so sorry, Noah. I’m sure that was hard for you.” Lily noticed that there was a blue Tiffany box inside the leather box. “Made more than one trip to Tiffany?”
He shook his head. “Actually, no. This is my mom’s ring. Remember I told you about it the day we went to get yours?”
“Right. Of course.” Lily didn’t ask to see it. It was just a reminder of their arrangement.
“You didn’t answer my question. What about you and your family? For as much as we’ve worked together, I don’t know much.”
“I’m boring. My parents are happily married. I have one brother. He’s two years younger than me. Grew up outside Philadelphia. My mom and dad managed a small hotel. That’s how I ended up in hospitality.”
“That doesn’t sound boring at all. That sounds really nice.”
“It definitely wasn’t bad.”
“And then what brought you to New York?”
“Honestly, I just needed to get out of Philadelphia. I figured all of the best hotels were in the city, so I moved here to get a job. I switched around a few times, trying to get a position as a general manager, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. But then I read in a hospitality magazine that you and Sawyer were going to renovate the Grand Legacy and I wanted to be a part of it.” She picked at a spot on her jeans. At the root of that story was Peter and the failed engagement.
“Hold on. Back up. Why did you feel like you needed to get out of Philadelphia?”
Lily could’ve easily talked her way out of this, but Noah had shown her some pretty embarrassing things about himself. Maybe it was time to let him know at least a little bit about her past. “Yeah, that. A bad ex.”
He turned to her, his eyes saying he was eager for more. “One of the guys who yanked you around?”