by Jan Hinds
She drew in a deep breath. “About the wedding. Cooper and I don’t want do disappoint all of you, but—”
“I knew it,” Evie said, throwing down her napkin by her plate. “This has all been a sham hasn’t it? You two aren’t even a couple.” She sat back and crossed her arms in triumph. The smug look she gave Paige filled Cooper with fury.
Paige’s shoulders drooped. She put her hands on the table as if bracing herself. Cooper lifted her hand and kissed her ring finger.
“Let me tell them.” He looked at the expectant and hopeful look on his mother’s face. When his gaze traveled to Evie Vaughn’s smug expression, anger boiled in his chest. Suddenly it wasn’t about him or his parents. His only desire was to protect Paige. “You may have noticed Paige and I have been stressed today. What Paige is trying to tell you is we had our first disagreement.”
Cooper’s father was uncharacteristically quiet. In a gentle voice he said, “Son, you need to learn now that your greatest responsibility in life is to make the woman you love happy.”
Cooper interlaced his fingers with Paige’s. When she didn’t contradict him, he said, “We disagreed on how long an engagement we want to have. I want to get married right away, but Paige wants us to have a long engagement.”
Stuart Vaughn sat at the other end of the table, facing Cooper. "Just how long of an engagement are you two planning?”
Cooper and Paige looked at each other. He saw the uncertainty in her eyes and hoped the look in his eyes expressed the feeling in his heart. He had her back. “We want to wait until I’m finished with my surgeries and am no longer on pain meds before we get married.” He kissed her hand again.
Stuart frowned at Cooper. “And what will you do if my daughter gets pregnant before then?”
Cooper frowned at Paige and lifted an accusing eyebrow at her. “Since we’re waiting to have sex until our wedding night, she’ll have some serious explaining to do if she gets pregnant.”
Everyone at the table laughed, but Stuart persisted. His tone was gentle, yet filled with warning when he spoke. “That may be your intention, but living together might prove to be too much of a temptation.”
Cooper squeezed her hand and said, “If we get pregnant, we’ll be thrilled and will marry right away.”
Stuart’s face softened with relief. “I can’t say I’m happy with the living together before marriage arrangement, but having met you and your parents, I’m going to trust you. Heaven help you if you hurt my little girl. Evie, anything you want to say?”
Evie sat with her mouth open and looked around the table. “Since Cooper will be recovering from surgery at Christmas, why don’t all of you plan to come to our home in Ohio for Thanksgiving?”
Sylvia clapped her hands together. “And we can host Christmas, if the weather permits you to make it here.”
Relief swept through Cooper. He hated lying to his parents, but maybe by the time he and Paige broke off the fake engagement, they’d like her enough to be glad when they part as friends. Ending their fake engagement was what he wanted. He wanted to continue working with her. For the moment he immersed himself in the glow of a relationship with Paige. Their parents were happy for them and happiness seeped into his soul.
His happy thoughts took a nosedive when Paige dug her fingernails into the back of his hand.
♥♥♥
While Evie and Sylvia helped Paige clean the kitchen, Cooper showed off the offices and the bedroom Paige designed.
“She’s talented, isn’t she?” Stuart said with unmasked pride in his voice.
“She certainly is,” Cooper agreed. “I can’t imagine starting this business without her.”
Matt frowned and folded his arms. “You know, Stuart, I’d hoped Cooper would join my construction business. I thought his architectural skills would mesh well with Jennings Construction. My dream was for him to take over when I retire. He’s got his own plans, though. Seeing what he and Paige can do together, well, I think it’s time I hire another manager to groom for my replacement. I have a feeling he and Paige are going to soar together, personally and professionally.” He clamped his hand down on Cooper’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you, son. And I couldn’t be happier for you. Paige and you are going to find great joy in your life together.”
Paige and the mothers caught up with the house tour in time to hear Matt’s comments. While Sylvia and Evie gushed over Paige’s bedroom, Cooper put his arm around Paige’s shoulders. She’d been quiet ever since dinner and refused to even look at him. She stood stiffly by his side and crossed her arms over her chest, making polite conversation with everyone except Cooper.
At length her parents excused themselves as they had to return home and prep the store for a new sale starting the next day. Cooper’s parents left at the same time.
Once alone, Cooper didn’t know what to expect from Paige. She was clearly upset with him. He only wished he could figure out why.
His relief that she didn’t yell at him was short-lived. He wasn’t prepared for the wall of silence she constructed between them. Without looking at him; without saying a word; she gathered her laptop and books and retreated behind the locked door of her bedroom.
Cooper worked on the model in his office for an hour, listening for the sound of her moving about above him. The silence was killing him. He gave up and went upstairs to knock on her door. “Paige, please talk to me. Yell at me. I know you’re angry with me. Please come out. Tell me what I did and what I can do to fix it?”
Silence.
He went to the living room and turned on a football game, keeping the sound low so he could hear her if she came out.
She didn’t.
He returned to her door an hour later and knocked softly. “Paige, please talk to me. I couldn’t stand the way your mom was treating you. I didn’t want to disappoint your dad either. I thought we agreed to a long engagement. Please unlock the door.”
Silence.
He returned to her door every hour with similar pleas. Finally, when exhaustion was more than he could stand, he imitated Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory: knock, knock, knock, “Paige,” knock, knock, knock, “Paige,” knock, knock, knock—repeating, in spite of his sore knuckles, until she opened the door.
She stood with her hands on her hips, her blue eyes dark with anger. “What?”
He held out his open palm. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Yell at me. Hit me. Kick me in my bad leg. I don’t care as long as you stop ignoring me. If I could get down on my knees, I would to beg for your forgiveness. But first tell me what I did so I won’t ever do it again.”
Paige poked her finger in his chest. Her face was beet red and her words filled with fury. “I don’t know what to do with you. You can’t keep making unilateral decisions for my life. You can’t break up with my boyfriend, or declare us engaged, convince my parents you love me, set a tentative wedding date, or say we’ll get married if we get pregnant. I have the final say in my life decisions, and if you ever make a decision for me again, we will be done. Do you understand that?”
Cooper shut his mouth and nodded. He was afraid to say anything. He gently covered the hand poking his chest.
Paige looked at his knuckles and screwed up her face as she stomped her foot. “Look what you did. Your knuckles are all bruised and bleeding. Get in here and let me clean them for you. Honestly, what were you thinking?”
She led him into her bathroom and gently cleaned and bandaged his hand. “You’d better put some ice on your hand tonight.”
He watched her taking care of him and imagined her cleaning the scraped up knees of her children. He had an overwhelming desire that they be his children as well. He enveloped her hand in his. “Am I forgiven?”
“Yes, I suppose. You’re quite the actor. You almost had me convinced that you loved me. If you ever really fell in love with me, I’d be hard pressed to believe it wasn’t an act. And after that performance, my parents will find it hard to believe when we break up.” She finished wra
pping his hand with a bandage. “How engaged are we going to pretend to be?”
He realized she hadn’t agreed to be exclusive when they talked the day before. “As long as we’re even fake engaged, I don’t plan to date anyone except you.” He cleared his throat. “What about you?”
She looked at the ceiling. “Ted has been texting me, begging me to get back together with him. I’ll call him tonight and tell him I can’t date him anymore.”
Cooper tried not to smile and failed. “Are you sure?”
She nodded her head once. “And you’d better get me a fake engagement ring, because my mother will never accept this engagement as real unless jewelry is involved.”
Chapter Eight
Paige sat at her office desk reading the same paragraph for half an hour. Not one sentence seeped into her mind as a coherent thought. With a smile, she kept replaying the previous evening.
Just three weeks after they moved in together, she and Cooper settled into a comfortable companionship. Even the most mundane tasks of work, school, and study became—fun. The banter and teasing with him added excitement and laughter to her life. She loved living with him. If tasks took her away from him, she counted the minutes until she could be back with him again.
Friday date night quickly became her favorite night of the week. They each picked a movie to watch together, Paige selected romantic chick flicks while Cooper chose bloody, creepy thrillers.
“This is horrible,” she’d complained as she snuggled under his arm and buried her face in his chest. “Why do you keep picking these scary movies when you know how they affect me?”
Cooper tightened his arms around her and shook with laughter. “Why do you think?”
Paige sat up. “Do you even like these movies?”
He chuckled. “No, but if this is what it takes to get you to let me hold you in my arms, I’ll suffer through it.”
She grabbed the controller away from him and turned off the movie. “If you want to snuggle, just say so. You don’t have to get me so scared I’ll have nightmares.”
His arms settled around her. “I want to snuggle.”
She searched for reruns of The Office and tossed the controller onto the ottoman in front of the sofa. “We can snuggle while we purge those disturbing images with laughter.”
Cooper tenderly caressed her arms and back with a feather-light touch. He held her hand and nuzzled her ears and neck, administering delicious sensations until she felt driven to nirvana. And he did it all without kissing her.
When he walked her to her bedroom door, he embraced her. As she melted into him, he whispered, “Have I convinced you of my affection for your yet?”
“Ung—huh,” she uttered with a gulp.
He traced her lips with his fingertip and smiled. “Goodnight, Paige. Sleep well.”
She’d hardly slept a wink, and spent the entire night analyzing, every word, every touch, wondering whether he’d proved his attraction for her, or magnified her attraction for him. Either way, the dynamics between them shifted.
She dreaded the thought of moving out when he recovered from his surgery. When he was healthy and free to go back to dating the girls he normally was attracted to… When that happened, her heart was in serious danger of breaking. She loved being Cooper’s fake fiancée. She loved living with him and being around him. The thought of ending the charade tugged at her heart and she felt a twinge of guilt that hope for a prolonged recovery crossed her mind more frequently than she cared to admit.
High pitched laughter filtered through the bookcase and banished her thoughts of longing. Paige gripped her pencil so hard it snapped in two.
Whitley Barrow was in Cooper’s office with him. Ugh. With her unnaturally bright red hair, and mysterious, muddy-green eyes, she stalked Cooper like a starving lioness to an injured antelope. Only instead of feasting after a quick kill, Whitley nibbled with soft touches, combined with a shrill laugh at almost everything Cooper said.
Paige had an honest appreciation of Cooper’s sense of humor, but he wasn’t that funny.
Whitley was a local interior designer who recommended Cooper as the architect to design a home for Phil Stanova, the CEO of Vici Systems, a Silicon Valley transplant, poised to help reclaim the old GE campus near downtown Fort Wayne.
Phil hired Whitley as the interior designer of his home and, if he was pleased with the house, renovation of the factory might bring more business to Jennings Design Services.
Paige tried to ignore the jealousy boiling in her, but every time she heard Whitley’s hyena laugh, her fingernails itched to claw out the woman’s vocal cords. It killed her that she had no reason to be in the office with them as they discussed the details of the house.
Cooper had finished the model the day before and Whitley came to his office armed with her interior design plans so he could finish the model to present to Mr. Stanova.
Paige didn’t know why she was letting Whitley’s attentions get under her skin. She and Cooper were both honoring the terms of their fake engagement and neither had gone out with anyone else. As far as she could tell, Cooper hadn’t made any flirtatious advances to Whitley, but it irked her that he hadn’t discouraged the woman’s advances either.
“Whitley stop!” Cooper’s voice was loud and frantic. “Paige, help!”
Paige rushed to the bookcase and flung open the hidden door so hard the books flew from it and scattered on the floor.
Cooper looked at Paige in panic, his eyes pleading for her to help him. His new ergonomic stool wedged his injured leg against the wall as he fended off Whitley while his face contorted with pain.
“Get away from him!”
Whitley waved a dismissive hand at her. “Oh, go away. We’re just having a little fun for old times’ sake.”
“You’re hurting his leg.” Paige wedged Whitley out of the way and helped Cooper to the chair behind his desk.
“Sorry,” Whitley said with an indifferent shrug. “I’ll be more careful next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” Paige said, standing between Cooper and Whitley with her arms crossed. She purposely exposed her ring finger and the cubic zirconia ring Cooper had given her to wear.
“Oh, yes there will. This is between me and Cooper, besides, you’re just his secretary.”
“I’m not talking about the job. I’m telling you there will be no fun and games between you and Cooper.”
Whitley laughed. “I think that’s up to me and Cooper, little girl.”
Cooper stood up next to Paige and pulled her into a one arm hug. “Paige is not just my personal assistant.” He looked down at her with adoration and caressed the side of her face. “She’s my fiancée and the future mother of my children.”
Whitley grimaced. “You can’t be serious. She’s isn’t enough of a woman for you.”
Cooper pointed a finger at Whitley. “I’m warning you. Do not insult the woman I love.”
Whitley grabbed her coat and portfolio. She sniffed and lifted her nose in the air. “Humph.” The clip of her heels faded down the hall as she left the house.
Paige wandered out into the foyer to lock the front door behind Whitley, ignoring her scathing, backward glance, and hurried back to Cooper. “Did she hurt you?”
He rubbed his leg. “I don’t think so. I may have some bruising. She took me by surprise. One minute we were discussing the model and the next she was all over me. It was like I was wrestling with an octopus.”
Paige’s mind flashed to her near catastrophic first date, which she’d described the same way, but there was a marked difference between her experience with unwanted advances and the familiarity Cooper permitted from Whitley. Paige let her date know in no uncertain terms from the get go that his advances wouldn’t be tolerated.
Paige folded her arms and set her mouth in a grim line. “Perhaps if you’d stopped her from pawing all over you in the first place, she wouldn’t have taken so many liberties.”
He sat down and looked at her in
shock. “Are you angry with me?”
“Daffodils, yes, I’m angry with you. She made it perfectly clear from the moment she walked in what she wanted, and you’ve been around the block enough times to know what she was doing. Why didn’t you set some boundaries and try to stop her? Do you want to seduce her, or let her seduce you? I thought we had an understanding.” She knew she was being unfair. Had he been a woman in that situation, she’d never make such an accusation.
“No. I don’t want her. I want you. And why are you floral cussing? You never cuss.”
“I do when the man I love has been making googly eyes with another woman.”
Cooper stood up and limped to her side. She didn’t move to make it easy for him. “Say that again.”
“You’ve been making googly eyes at another woman when we’re sort of engaged.”
“I have not. Say the first part again.”
She gave him a puzzled look until she realized what she’d said, she swallowed the lump of fear lodged in her throat. “I said I only cuss when my fake fiancé is making—”
He cradled her face in his hands. “That is not what you said.”
Paige sagged in defeat. “It must have been the heat of the moment.”
“Was it true?”
“You told Whitley I was the woman you love. That was just the heat of the moment for you, wasn’t it?”
He trailed his fingertips along her jaw. “The truth comes out in the heat of the moment.”
“It does?”
“Yes.” His husky voice whispered next to her ear.
Paige’s heart drummed so loud she heard the echo. “You’re still grounded.”
He trailed his fingertips down her back, sending a shiver along her spine. He rubbed the bridge of his nose along the back of her jaw and whispered, “When will my grounding be done?”
She backed way out of his reach. “Dahlias! The way you confuse me? I’m thinking not until I walk down the aisle.”