Pretend Married (A Billionaire Love Story)

by Nikki Wild

  “Any interests you’d like to share with your potential matches?”

  “Well, I do love a good football match,” I said, smirking as I watched her eyes flicking toward me every now and then from her screen. “And I suppose a healthy enjoyment of literature is a bit of a must-have. After that, maybe an enjoyment of classical music.”

  “When have you ever liked literature?” she asked, her eyebrows raised incredulously.

  “Since always and forever, my dear stepsister,” I said, my grin widening as her substantial shock to such news. “It’s always been one of my secret loves.”

  In fact I’d gotten top marks in every literature course since primary school, a fact that my father never once gave one lick of attention to. He’d have much rather focus on my failings than congratulate me for my accomplishments.

  She blushed deeply and cleared her throat again, trying not to let her mind dwell too long on the fact that I was sitting here while she was almost drunk off of her ass. I wondered just how easily it would be to get her to take those clothes off. I knew I could if I tried, and I knew that I’d have enjoyed it… but there was another task at hand. As much as I wanted to claim Gwendolyn, I knew business had to come first, and sadly, a sense of propriety along with it.

  “Any preferred physical type?” she asked, swallowing thickly as I considered.

  “A redhead, preferably. A woman who’s about my height—maybe slightly shorter—curvy rather than skinny, I think,” I said, pondering just what I’d always fancied in the women I’d bedded countless times.

  “I see,” she said, her cheeks still flushed a nice rosy pink with embarrassment. “I think that’s about all that I have right now… If I need to narrow things down a little more, then I’ll contact you.”

  “Sounds like a plan, then,” I said, smirking as I stood slowly from my chair. “I hope I’ll hear from you soon then.”

  “I’ll try to get you a match by tomorrow evening and arrange a date for the two of you,” Gwendolyn said, rising as I did and offering her hand awkwardly. “After that, we’ll see where everything goes.”

  “I’ll be eagerly awaiting your call, my dearest Gwennie,” I said smirking as I watched her face redden with annoyance. “Yes, I know, ‘don’t call you Gwennie.’ ”

  “Goodnight, Tristan,” she said, summoning some resolve after my purposeful little jab.

  “Goodnight, Gwendolyn” I said as I turned and walked out of her office and into the night. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I walked a few blocks out alone in the early hours of the morning, enjoying the crisp night air as I gathered my thoughts.

  I thought about the days when Gwendolyn and I were younger, teens who would have liked nothing more than to have never known one another, yet secretly harbored an unforgivable lust for each other—though “secret” could have been a strong term. I used to catch her staring at me all the time, her pale cheeks made rosy by all the naughty thoughts I was sure were running through her brain.

  I happily recalled the night before I’d left for Afghanistan, the way she felt underneath my touch as I slipped her cami up her body. The way she’d writhed for me, her lashes fluttering, her fingernails dug in to the palms of her quaking hands. Was my Gwennie still a virgin? Part of me—a very southward part of me—was desperate to know, and had been ever since I left her dripping wet the night before my deployment.

  Oh, what a dolt I was back then. I’d made assumptions about her character, writing Gwendolyn off as a girl who was just the same as any other I’d seduced. But she was stronger than that, not at all the shade of her mother I’d imagined she’d turn out to be. As punishment for my pride, I’d spent years wondering what it would have been like to have had her, to have consummated our forbidden affair. I wondered if I’d ever get the chance to know.

  I also wondered if she even realized that the perfect match I’d described to her back there in her office fit her to a “T.”

  5

  I sat in silence behind my desk after my brother left, walking so casually back into the night as though he hadn’t just completely flipped my life upside down. He had a habit of that, though, turning everything on its head just for the sake of a good laugh. But is that was this was? Did he just want to play with me?

  It was certainly easy to think so after he’d practically named me as his perfect match to spend the rest of his life with. My heart was thumping like a war drum as I stared into the empty space that he’d occupied only moments before, looking so absolutely fabulous without even trying. All those memories of the two of us growing up together flooded back like a dam had burst in my head. It was almost too much to handle.

  Tristan had been an absolute terror when we were in our teens. He’d discovered girls long before the two of us had met, and was more than popular with the younger members of the serving staff. His father, of course, never approved of the way he conducted himself, but I admired his freedom more than I admitted. My mother had always had me under a tight leash, constantly dictating my behavior and my choices in friends—even controlling which pieces of my wardrobe would be worn on different days. It was like I had two mother rolled up into one—both of them overbearing and controlling.

  But my stepbrother could do as he liked, disapproval be damned. The fact that he was so bound and determined to gain back his father’s title after the announcement of my soon-to-be brother’s birth came almost as a shock, given Tristan’s utter aversion to authority, which was just what I had thought when he’d joined Her Majesty’s Royal Army. It was as though just as you thought Tristan would go one way, he decided to veer in a completely different direction simply for the thrill of throwing everyone else in the world off their kilter.

  And how he was trying to get married—married to a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, the exact same as myself in personality and temperament. Just the thought of that had my mouth running dry. I felt my chest tighten as I bit down on my lip nervously. How could he do such a thing? How, after all of this time could I be the perfect match for him and he had never once said a word? If anything I had always felt as though Tristan hated me when we were younger, his constant chiding that I was a stuffy, stuck-up mother’s-girl still ringing in my ears like church bells.

  “No matter,” I said to myself in the darkness of my office as I pressed the pulsating power button on my computer to bring it to life. “This is for the best, after all.”

  Even I had a hard time believing that.

  With trembling hands I brought up the database of my female clients, all of their personality traits indexed and coded so that I could simply type in my stepbrother’s preferences into the required fields and before I could even blink there was a list of gorgeous women almost a hundred strong. Surely, one of them would be an appropriate match for Tristan. One of them might just be my future sister-in-law if this crazy plan of his actually worked.

  Despite my forced professionalism, I couldn’t shake the feeling of my stomach having dropped somewhere close to my feet. The thought of Tristan with someone else, some woman that he barely knew brought a sickening taste to my mouth. Deep down a part of me wanted to close down the database and simply tell him that there had been no matches, that no woman I had in my considerable list was what he wanted. I think I wanted more than anything for him to realize that it was me that had always wanted him—me that was his perfect idea of a woman. Did he even know that the kind of woman that he wanted had been sitting in front of him all this time?

  He’s your stepbrother, I thought, chiding myself on my incestuous desires. To even think of the things that I wanted to do to Tristan would have been enough to cause a scandal the likes of which the aristocracy hadn’t seen in a decade. Sure the two of us were not technically related, but the bonds of marriage mean a lot to the rest of the world, and scandal is something that I know that my mother would not at all appreciate.

  That doesn’t make me want him any less, I answered my own chiding. I knew that if I set Tristan up—got him married
to some member of the aristocracy—then he’d be lost to me forever, and I’d lose any chance that I had at making him mine like I’d always wanted. But he was my stepbrother, fruit of the forbidden tree, and I knew that just one taste would be enough to have me smote low and ejected from the garden of my family’s favor.

  I knew that my feelings for Tristan would never come to fruition, never give me the satisfaction of having him in my arms, inside of me the way I’d dreamed about since I’d become an adult. But maybe that was for the best.

  If I could get Tristan tied off to someone that spent most of their time away from London, and away from me, then I could protect myself against the thoughts that I knew would betray me sooner or later. In a way having Tristan matched was my only hope of protecting myself from the effect that he head on me.

  I began to work my way through the list, clicking through the collected entries Tina and I had spent our professional lives cultivating. Blondes, brunettes, and even a few exotic redheads crossed over my screen, though I felt utterly unsatisfied with all of them. None of them felt right for Tristan. I’d met countless times with each of them, and no matter how well they seemed to match on paper I felt as though Tristan would never have them for his wife. Something didn’t seem right.

  It’s because you want him for yourself, I thought, my stomach tying itself into knots. I hated myself for thinking it, for telling me the harsh and unwanted truth and I could only have wished for a comforting lie. I wished I was only protective of him, wished that I was simply playing the role of the dutiful sister in charge of her brother’s romantic interest—that I merely wanted him to have a more suitable chance at love. All of this was true, but with the condition that I was the one that he fell for.

  I rested my head in my hands in frustration. I couldn’t just disregard all the women who matched my stepbrother’s parameters for his ideal match. He was counting on me to find him a woman that would make him a suitable wife and these women were all also hoping that I would find them a romantic match, as well. I had two people whose wishes I needed to make come true, regardless of what I wanted—needed—to have.

  Romance, for me, had been touch and go all of these years. Holding down a boyfriend was difficult, harder still when marriage is expected to happen fairly quickly, especially where my mother is involved. She’d been trying to get me married off since before I was even old enough to walk, scheduling playdates with the boys she’d see as the up-and-coming members of high society that she hoped I’d fall all over as I grew into a young woman. It never worked out well. High society can make men into monsters, their heads filled with entitlement and expectations of what a woman is meant to do for them. I had little time for useless men like those.

  Tristan had always been different, though. While he was an arrogant pig at times, he still maintained a kind of charm that always made my heart start to hammer like I’d just run a mile. He could be kind and cunning, that grin of his always belying the inner workings of that gloriously brilliant brain of his. That quick wit was never in short supply, never failing to bring a smile to my face whenever we’d been stuck at one of our family’s dinners while the two of us were in our teens. Just the fact that he was back in town had brought me back to the feeling of being a teen once again, awkward and shy, just hoping that my dashing stepbrother would notice me and take me into his arms like I’d dreamed of since the day we met.

  None of these women are right for him, I thought, shaking my head as I poured over the list again and again. But I knew that I had to pick one for him no matter what I felt. I needed to end this fascination with him, this sinful desire that I knew would never be brought to fruition. I needed to be free from my own wants, from the very thing that could ruin my life and my reputation.

  “You have to do this, Gwendolyn,” I said aloud in an attempt to steel my resolve, to bring myself to let go of the man that I had desired for almost a decade. It was like torture, but it had to be done. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Duty. That was what it meant to be British, wasn’t it?

  After another few minutes of agonizing over who I would give Tristan to I settled at last on a pretty little blonde woman that had enlisted my services almost a week previously. She had exactly the kind of traits that my stepbrother was looking for, exactly the right personality that he was looking for in his ideal match. She was even prettier that I was.

  But she’s not you, I thought, grimacing as I began to draft the email to inquire whether the young woman would be interested in my stepbrother’s company. She had notes detailing her eagerness for a match, for someone who could excite her and make her laugh—and fulfill her sexually.

  I felt my heart grow cold as I wrote to the young lady, Patricia Attmore. It felt like I was signing my own death warrant, and once I sent that email Tristan might as well have been gone forever. I swallowed nervously, trying to calm my nerves, strengthen my resolve as I moved my cursor over the “send” button in the upper right corner of the screen. Tristan would be mad not to take a woman like Patricia and beg for engagement, and the logical part of me hoped that he would to save both of us from a scandal, but it wasn’t the logical part of my brain that was screaming the loudest in my mind.

  I closed my eyes, tensing for some kind of harsh immediate repercussion as I let the email out into the world of the internet to find its destination in the blink of an eye. I was almost disappointed that the world hadn’t crumbled down around me, perhaps then I would have felt that the utter devastation in my stomach would have been justified. I almost felt like a fool; a foolish schoolgirl with a foolish little crush that would have never gone anywhere much less amounted to anything.

  Buck up, Gwendolyn, I thought, taking a slow, calming breath through my nose before letting it out through my quivering lips. It’s better this way. And even if you can’t have him, then at least you can give him the life that he deserves with a woman that he loves. That’s your job, after all.

  “But I want him,” I whispered to the chilly silence of my office, reclining back in my chair as I wiped a spot of errant moisture from my eyes.

  But you can’t have him, I told myself. You can’t let your feelings get in the way of your job. This is what you do.

  I was already tipsy, and it was bad enough that I was practically talking to myself. I felt enough like a loon already, and pining over my stepbrother was hardly going to help matters. No matter what I desired, Tristan deserved my best work, and I was determined to give it to him.

  6

  The very next afternoon Gwendolyn had called me to tell me that she’d found me a match among all of her hundreds of female clients. Needless to say, I was impressed to have been matched up so quickly, but when your firm has a reputation like hers, I would have expected nothing less than exceptional.

  My date was, apparently, a woman named Patricia—her last name hardly mattered, since the success of my time with her would result in a rather permanent change of it. She looked pretty enough, especially from the pictures Gwen showed me from her Facebook, some of which were very much to my liking—risqué and just barely within the bounds of propriety. Despite how eager I was to take a stab at this marriage business, the more I sat there, the less I actually wanted to go through with any of this. It wasn’t like me to succumb to nerves but something about this made me feel on edge.

  I’d been there for almost half an hour before I began to even wonder if this woman would show up, the entire time Gwendolyn’s eyes hardly left me. She hovered like a hawk, making sure I had something to occupy myself with. I watched as she waited, it seemed often more nervously than even I was, for Patricia to walk through the door while Gwen’s assistant tried to get her to calm down.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said, trying to convince myself just as much as I was trying to convince her. “I’m a charming man. She’ll never be able to resist my charm.”

  Honestly, it wasn’t bedding her that I was concerned about—I knew better than anyone I could get a woman naked and we
t in the time it took most people to say “hello”—but that didn’t seem to be the reason why I was so… off.

  “Yes, I know very well how charming you can be, Tristan,” she said, “but the question is whether that makes you husband material or not.”

  “I thought we were looking for women that were wife material, not the other way around,” I said.

  “It’s whether they actually do you the favor of even considering you for marriage that should be your concern,” Gwen said, frowning at me, her arms crossed over her chest. “You’re not exactly what most women are looking for in a husband.”

  Something was off about her, and I definitely got the feeling that she wasn’t normally this neurotic when it came to matching up her clients. Just before I could ask her what she meant by that, the door to the office opened and the unmistakable bombshell that was Patricia stepped inside, her heels clicking softly on the hardwood floors.

  She was certainly a beautiful woman who had no fear of flaunting the parts of her that she was proudest of—namely, her chest. Her blonde hair stretched down all the way passed her backside where it hung in a wavy sheet.

  “Hello!” she called as she entered, looking me right in the eyes as she took a seat across from me in the waiting area. She crossed her legs, as she smiled at me, laying her purse on the seat beside her own. “This must be my arm candy for the evening.”

  The way Patricia looked at me, you might assume that I was some kind of candy. In fact, the entire time we sat there I was quite certain she was going to take a bite out of me. She was certainly young enough, though I could tell that if she was left in the dating game long enough, Patricia would have become a ravenous cougar with all the shameless lust that came along with it.

  “Tristan, this is Patricia Atmore. Ms. Atmore is the daughter of a software magnate, and she shares your love of the classics.”

  “A pleasure,” I said, smiling at her stiffly, even I wouldn’t have bought its genuineness. It was forced, and I had little interest in hiding it. Maybe it was nerves, some irrational fear or misgiving about my whole elaborate plot. Either way, something felt off the moment that woman sat down, and I wasn’t entirely sure it was her.