Emily paused to give the couple a chance to answer. Charlotte and Ethan exchanged a look. Emily didn’t know what they said to each other, but she felt an inexplicable pang of jealousy. She wanted to be the one sharing secret messages with Ethan.
Charlotte and Ethan both began to speak at the same time and Ethan stopped and indicated Charlotte should go ahead. He was definitely deferring to Charlotte on several things today. Emily found that puzzling, as he didn’t seem the type to step back so often. With Charlotte, though, he really seemed to distance himself. Curious.
Charlotte took the floor. “Emily, we have some time here today to spend with you, but probably not as much as you need. So, to streamline all this, Mama, I suggest you go with Mari now and talk out some of the more set details. You know, like the date and the church and all your people who have to be on the guest list. Meanwhile, Ethan, Emily and I talk about some of the particulars that you just don’t have to worry about. What do you think, Emily, will that work?”
Emily began to nod her agreement, but Mari, who had been largely silent the entire meeting stepped in. She seemed to want to assert her authority, even though her input had been unnecessary so far.
“Charlotte dear,” Mari chimed in, “I want you to have all the best people and resources available to you during this whole process. I really do think it’s best if I stay while you all discuss these details with Emily. After all, the devil is in the details, and you don’t want anything overlooked because you didn’t have a more experienced professional on hand.”
What a bitch, Emily thought to herself. Behind Mari’s back, Ethan raised his eyebrows at Emily, and she secretly thrilled inside that he was sharing a private moment with her. Emily wished that Mari would leave, just so she could relax a little, but it seemed as though Mari was sticking to this one. There would be no shaking her.
Emily had underestimated Charlotte. “Oh, Mari, that’s exactly why I was hoping you’d go with Mama now. She has just so many people and things that need to happen at this wedding, you know, with her own…” here Charlotte dropped her voice to a hushed pitch, “fiancé. These are the critical pieces that I just know you can manage better than anyone else can. All this,” Charlotte swept her hand at the wedding book, “is just the icing. The real work is in managing the ‘people’ involved.”
While she was talking, Charlotte deftly maneuvered her mother and Mari together and towards the door, so that by the time she was done, the two older women were nearly out of the room already. Mari might have realized how she’d been managed, but there was no graceful way to get out of it now. With a barely concealed glare of menace directed towards Emily, Mari turned on her heel and led Vivienne out.
The threesome in the room watched the women walk away, and when they had safely settled into Mari’s office and the door shut on them, Charlotte shut the door to the intake room and sagged against it. “Whew, that woman is scary. How do you manage to face her every day? She’d have me quakin’ in my Jimmy Choo’s! That look she gave you when you first walked in, even though we were the ones who showed up unannounced and over an hour early…I always thought ‘If looks could kill’ was just an expression, but man, I think that glare of hers could take down a rhino. You have some backbone not to wither under that.”
Emily barked out a laugh of surprise. “Charlotte, I can honestly say I have never seen anyone handle Mari the way you did just now. That was epic. I want to hire you to be my personal bodyguard, just so you can protect me from Mari and her wrath.”
“Well anyway,” Charlotte went on, “we’re finally alone, so now we can get all this awkwardness out of the way. I know you kissed Ethan.”
Emily gasped. Even though she had suspected Charlotte knew something was up, she still wasn’t prepared for it to come out quite this quickly. However, she was learning that Charlotte wasn’t one to pussy-foot around the issue. It was one of the characteristics that Emily appreciated most about her.
Emily cast a quick glance at Ethan, who was lounging back in the sofa watching the two women with an amused expression on his face. He must be anticipating a catfight, Emily thought. Well, no man was worth fighting over, so Emily was prepared to disappoint him if he was expecting a hair-pulling, girl-scratching fracas.
“What you don’t know,” Charlotte said next, “is that Ethan is not my fiancé.”
Chapter Eight
That was one statement Emily never expected.
Emily gave them both a startled glance. Ethan still had his amused look on his face and gave her a “what can you do?” kind of look when Emily stared at him. Despite his outwardly casual appearance, Emily could see the tension he held in his shoulders, and sensed he was nervous about the discussion they were all about to have.
Strange, she thought, that I can already see the subtle emotions he tries to keep hidden. She also caught a glimpse of a predatory heat in his gaze when her eyes met his. She felt a matching pulse tingle down her spine as she recalled the spark that had erupted between them when they had kissed. Feeling a little weak in the knees, and not at all sure she could handle the information that was about to come and maintain her ability to stand, Emily sank heavily into one of the plush armchairs.
Ethan threw her a smirk, raised his eyebrows a touch, and glanced at the vacated space next to him. Emily scowled at him in return. She needed some serious explanations before she was willing to be anywhere near him.
Charlotte broke the tension in the room, in perfect Charlotte style, saying it like it was. “I feel like I should throw a bucket of water on y’all before you erupt into flames, what with all those sparks flyin’ between you two. It’s a good thing we aren’t really engaged, or we’d all be in some serious trouble.”
Confused and frustrated, Emily had had enough, and struggled to regain her composure and control of the situation. “If you’re not engaged, then why, exactly, am I planning your wedding? A very high profile and expensive one, I might add.”
At this, Charlotte seemed to deflate a bit. Her whole being shrank, and her body shuddered in a deep sigh. She opened her mouth as if to explain, but then froze, and cast a desperate look to Ethan. He scowled in return, before his expression softened and he stood and folded Charlotte into a hug. Despite the declaration that Charlotte and Ethan were not engaged, and the surge of hope that Emily had tried to ignore at hearing the news, seeing the genuine affection between the two sent a green shard of jealousy stabbing through her body.
After what seemed like an eternity of watching the two embrace, they finally separated. Ethan settled Charlotte into a chair, and then sank back onto the loveseat. He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it mussed, and Emily longed to smooth it back into place. An unwelcome image on him and his roughed up hair lounging in her bed pushed its way into her head, and she thrust it back out. Then he spoke.
“Charlotte and I are not, nor have we ever been, engaged. That, and everything that I am about to share with you is confidential and protected information, and I have to ask that you not speak about this with anyone. I really shouldn’t be telling you at all, but…” his voice trailed off.
“Okay, you totally sound like you’re in the FBI or something,” Emily responded. She expected them to laugh, but when Charlotte and Ethan shared a quick glance, it was Emily who sputtered with a crazed and disbelieving burst of laughter. “Seriously, FBI? You realize this sounds crazy, right?”
Ethan stood and paced the small room. “I’m not actually an FBI agent, but I am working for them as a consultant. I have certain…expertise…that they needed for a case they’re working on, and despite my better judgment, my playing the part of Charlotte’s fiancé is part of the act. The FBI has been trying to build a case against Reverend Ron Gaines. We have intel that suggests he has been conning women into gifting him large sums of money, amounts in the millions, and hiding it in secret accounts. We are aware of three women so far whom he has stolen from, and we are convinced that he is trying to do the same thing to Vivienne. We want to stop
him before he steals from her, and recover the money he has taken from the other women. He’s very smart, and has been clever in hiding his money and not leaving any trail of it, but we have a plan to expose him.
“To do that, though, we need to find out where he has hidden his money, and that means we need to be watching when he accesses those accounts. So far, he’s not tapped into them. When he and Vivienne became involved with one another, we realized that we might have finally found a way in…her daughter. Charlotte agreed to work with us, and she was assigned an agent, Jonas Crawford, who would act as her boyfriend. This would give him access to their house, and it would not be unusual for him to be around. The plan was for him to retrieve the information we needed to arrest Ron. But we ran into complications.
“Ron became suspicious of Jonas, and began looking into his background. The FBI had given him cover, but Ron’s contacts made it possible that he would discover Jonas’ real identity. He was pulled from the case, but the authorities didn’t want to give up on the idea entirely. Of course, Charlotte still wanted the case to continue to help her mother. That’s where I came in. My involvement with the FBI has always been ancillary,” he waved a hand vaguely. “I’ve done some computer work for them,” he said casually, though Emily had to believe it was more than “some work.” She was no expert, but she would guess that the FBI didn’t make a habit of hiring civilians for IT support.
“But my family is in the same social circles as Charlotte’s. Jonas came from a different background, and that was one of the reasons Ron was questioning the match.”
Here Charlotte broke in. “The asshole thought Jonas wasn’t good enough to be his son-in-law. But we knew Ethan would please Ron. And since he was already vetted by the FBI, we worked on a way to fit him into the scheme.”
“Huh,” said Emily, still wondering how this was all fitting together.
Ethan continued. “When Ron began to question Jonas and Charlotte’s relationship, we had them stage a break-up. The reason for the break-up was me—an old family friend who had reappeared in Charlotte’s life and professed his undying love to her. She realized that Jonas was just a fling, and tossed him aside for me. After a few months of appropriate dating, we became engaged. And that is why you’re planning our wedding.”
Emily cut in. “Okay, so this is crazy, but sort of makes sense, but how is a fake wedding going to help you expose this guy?”
“We’re creating some data breaches and identity-theft related issues for Vivienne that will temporarily freeze her accounts. Since Ron is trying to access her fortune, we expect he will offer to finance her daughter’s wedding until the money is released. And that brings us to why we are here. Rivera Productions is the priciest wedding planning business in the area, and if the costs escalate beyond Gaines’s visible bank account, he will be forced to access money from his hidden accounts. Once we know where the money is, we can track it back to its source and catch him.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Emily interrupted. “This sounds more than a little farfetched. First, why would he agree to pay for the wedding? Why wouldn’t he just tell them to wait until the money is released and let Vivienne pay for it herself? I have a hard time believing he’d just offer to pay out of the goodness of his heart.”
“You’re right,” Charlotte stated. “But he wants this wedding to happen as soon as possible. You see, I told him I’m pregnant, and that goes against all his teachings in the church. Hooking up with a famous movie star was bad for his image, but he managed to use her to show how people can change, can discard their immoral Hollywood ways and come to Christ. We’re betting that he won’t want to risk the scandal of his fiancée’s daughter raising a bastard child. So he’ll agree to whatever if it means I’m getting married to a respectable man. And Ethan’s respectable.”
“Isn’t he going to figure out pretty quickly that you’re not pregnant?” Emily asked, even though she remembered her suspicions about Charlotte the other day.
“He won’t figure that out, because I am actually having a baby. Just not with Ethan.”
“Then who?…oh…” Realization dawned on Emily. “Jonas.”
Charlotte nodded. “While we were pretending to date, we started to believe it was real. Then it was real. It still is. But I have to save my mama from this jerk, and that means we can’t be together right now. So the sooner I can get this weddin’ going and start racking up the bills, the sooner we get to his money and save my mama.”
Emily nodded slowly. She thought she was getting it, though there were still so many questions.
“So are you and Jonas still together? And what does he think of this ‘engagement’?”
Charlotte smiled sadly. “We are still together. We’re in love and we will end up with our happily ever after. It’s just not going quite as smoothly as we thought.”
Ethan interrupted. “Jonas thinks this sham engagement is as bad an idea as I do. Somehow, Charlotte convinced us to go along with it. You may have noticed that she can be pretty convincing when she wants to be. In any case, whatever our feelings were about this idea to start with, we’re in it now…and we’re committed to seeing it through. So with the exception of Charlotte, me, Jonas, a few people at the FBI, and now you…no one knows that we’re not engaged.”
“So why are you telling me, then?” Emily asked. “And how does your mother not know?”
Charlotte shot a telling glance at Ethan. They both hesitated, waiting for the other to speak. Charlotte wasn’t very good at waiting, and jumped in before Ethan. “My mother is…a different person than she used to be. She used to be so full of life and happiness, and now she’s withdrawn and quiet. Secretive. She doesn’t seem that invested, most of the time, with what’s going on with me. If she was her real self, I’d never be able to pull this off, and I feel terrible that I’m lying to her at all. But I love her so much, and I need to save her from this monster. As to why we’re telling you…well, I’ll let Ethan explain that one. In fact, I’ll just leave you two alone for a minute while I freshen up in the ladies’.”
Charlotte waggled her eyebrows at Emily and Ethan before sauntering out the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, you two. I’ll be sure to knock before I come back in.” With that, she sashayed out and shut the door behind her with a resounding click.
Chapter Nine
Emily and Ethan stared at each other in silence. A million thoughts swirled in Emily’s mind, and she struggled to find something to say. He wasn’t engaged. He was with the FBI, sort of. He’d kissed her. Why had he kissed her? And please god, let him do it again. And why did she have to want him so bad? The seconds ticked by, and still neither spoke. Part of Emily expected a “Who’s on Candid Camera” crew to bust through the door announcing that this was all a joke and what a great sport she was for playing along.
Finally, just as the silence was poised to switch from thought processing to awkward, Ethan stood and came to Emily. He positioned himself about six inches from her, inhabiting her personal space again. Stealing her air. Her heart began to speed, and she could feel the pulse jumping in her neck.
“Well, Cinderella, it seems we’re in quite an interesting situation. Here you are planning my wedding, and all I can think about is you naked, under me.”
Emily gasped. She’d fantasized that something like that would come out of his mouth, but she hadn’t really expected it to. What was she supposed to do with this? Now that it was out there, she longed to press her mouth to his, see if he tasted as good as she remembered. But she’d made the first move last time, and though she wasn’t shy about doing it again, she sensed this time it needed to be his. So she waited, summoning as much patience as she could.
She imagined he could see the longing in her eyes, because that smile of his, simultaneously charming and annoying as hell, turned up the corner of his mouth. Emily forced her body to remain still, nearly trembling with the effort it took to keep her body from leaning into his. Just do it already! She ordered him in her mi
nd. It worked, or something did, because suddenly his mouth was covering hers, his tongue thrusting into her mouth, hard and demanding. In some part of her mind she thought, yes, there would be no flowers or candles with this guy. But she’d never been a candles and flowers kind of girl.
Even as her mouth opened to let him in, her tongue reached out and took from him, just as he was taking from her. It was almost as if they were battling to see who would come out on top, who would be in control. The struggle was half the fun, and the feeling of being taken was more arousing to Emily, and ultimately more satisfying than sensitivity and gentleness. As she crushed her mouth to his, she wound her fingers through his hair, and, just to experiment, pulled on it. Not too hard, but enough to make him notice.
As soon as she did, he pulled back and eyed her carefully. She stared back at him boldly. She wanted him to know where she was coming from.
He quirked an eyebrow at her in surprise. “So, it’s like that, is it?” With lightning fast speed, he reached one hand behind her head and wrapped her long hair in his fist. He used pressure on her skull to pull her back towards him, then yanked her hair to tilt her face to look up at him. He wasn’t gentle. With the other hand, he reached out and pinched one of her nipples, hard, eliciting a gasp of surprise mixed with both desire and a twinge of pain.
Emily’s clit pulsed in response, and she finally let her body curve into his. His thumb rubbed her nipple through her blouse and bra, and then pinched it again, a little harder this time. Experimenting with how far he could go.
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