“It’s not a big deal,” Megan said again.
“Who are you trying to convince?”
“Gage said it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Because he didn’t want you to get all freaked out about it,” Ashley guessed.
“Or maybe because it’s really not a big deal.”
“Are you that oblivious?” Paige asked her.
Megan frowned. “Oblivious to what?”
Ashley shook her head. “How long have you been dating now?”
“We’re not dating.”
Paige sprinkled grated cheese on top of the sauce. “You’ve been going out together after work at least two or three times a week. What would you call it?”
“Going out with a coworker after work,” Megan insisted stubbornly.
“But when that coworker is a sexy, single guy whose kisses pack enough heat to melt the polar ice caps, it’s called dating.”
“I might have to agree with you if I’d been getting any of those kisses.”
Now it was Ashley’s turn to frown. “You haven’t?”
Megan shook her head.
“All of those nights you’ve spent together?” Paige pressed.
“Nada.”
“What is wrong with that man?”
“Nothing’s wrong with him—he just doesn’t see me as anything more than a friend. Which is why I’m certain this dinner at his parents’ isn’t a big deal.”
“He hasn’t kissed you once?” Paige asked incredulously, not able to get past that fact.
“Not since Ashley and Trevor’s engagement party.”
“That does put a different spin on things,” her cousin mused.
“Maybe he’s just taking it slow,” Ashley suggested.
“Or maybe he just wants to be friends,” Megan said again, still unwilling to let herself hope they could be anything more.
It was a Friday night and instead of being out on a date or watching a game with some friends, Gage was surrounded by females. While he generally appreciated women of all shapes and sizes, he felt decidedly out of his element and outnumbered with his four nieces.
It was only supposed to be for a few hours, while Craig was at a late dinner meeting because Tess was away on a two-day business trip. After the first hour, Gage was at his wits’ end because Gracie hadn’t wanted to stop chatting online to come to the table for dinner, Eryn and Allie were grumbling because he wouldn’t take them to the movie theater to catch a show with their friends, and Lucy had fallen off of the bathroom counter after climbing up to try and catch a particularly nasty-looking spider.
So when the pizza box was empty and the plates and cups loaded into the dishwasher, he decided to entertain them the only way he knew how: he taught them to play Texas Hold ’em.
He emptied the change out of the cup holder in his car and divvied it up so they had coins to wager with and he spent the next hour and a half teaching them the intricacies of this particular variation of seven-card stud. Lucy had just raked in the jackpot when her father finally walked in the door.
“Daddy, Daddy. I won!”
Craig’s eyes glinted with amusement as he glanced around the table, noting the drinks and snacks and his four daughters in their pajamas.
“How much?” he asked Lucy.
She beamed as she finished counting. “A dollar thirty-two.”
“Big stakes.” He looked at his brother. “I hope you didn’t hide the beer and cigars on my account.”
Gage shook his head. “Turns out your girls prefer gin, and Gracie took one puff of a Cuban and turned green.”
“I did not,” Gracie said, then frowned. “A Cuban what?”
Craig chuckled. “Never mind. Go brush your teeth and get into bed.”
Gage gladly tidied up the cards and snacks while his brother handled the bedtime routine.
When Craig came back downstairs, he disappeared into the kitchen for a moment then came out with two bottles of beer.
Gage took the one offered to him and studied the Millhouse Brew Co. label for a moment before he twisted off the cap. Millhouse was the company his friend, Brian, had been trying to convince Gage to invest in with him. But he’d declined, because he was a Richmond, and Richmonds made pharmaceuticals, not beer.
He lifted the bottle and took a long swallow, and had to admit that it was really good beer.
Craig propped his feet up on the coffee table. “Well, you survived,” he said to his brother.
“Barely.” Gage tipped the bottle to his lips again. “Don’t they drive you insane?”
“Every day.” His brother grinned. “And I couldn’t imagine my life without them.”
Gage knew it was true, but still, he wondered. “Did you ever worry—when Tess got pregnant, I mean—did you ever worry that you might not be able to stick it out?”
“Every day,” Craig said again. “I guess that’s not surprising, considering what we went through with Charlene.”
Gage nodded, acknowledging the complete lack of maternal instincts possessed by the woman who had given birth to them.
“And then, the very first time I held Gracie in my arms, I stopped worrying. Because I knew that nothing could ever matter more to me than my family, and nothing could ever make me leave them.”
“Like Dad,” Gage said. “He stuck with us even when she made his life hell.”
“Do you remember that? You were hardly more than a baby.”
“I don’t remember a lot,” he admitted. “But I’ve heard enough stories through the years to put the rest of the pieces together.”
“Why are we talking about this now?”
“I guess I was just wondering if it’s some kind of genetic defect that made Charlene incapable of really loving someone.”
“And wondering if you inherited that genetic defect,” his brother guessed.
“I’m thirty-two years old and I’ve never been in love,” Gage admitted.
“What about Beth?”
He scowled at the reference to his ex or maybe he was scowling at his own naïveté in ever believing that he’d been in love with her. “Beth was a leech masquerading as a human being.”
“That’s a pretty harsh assessment.”
“But not untrue.”
“No,” his brother agreed. “But you loved her, anyway, didn’t you?”
“I think I was more in love with the idea of being in love,” Gage admitted. “You and Tess had recently married, and I thought—for a while anyway—that I wanted what you had with her.”
What he’d got, instead, was a girlfriend who expected unrestricted access to his bank to bail out the sister who kept falling into debt to her drug dealer.
He’d let himself be suckered in three times before he’d put Beth’s sister in rehab and walked away from the whole mess, but not before the experience confirmed the lesson Charlene had taught him—that love of money was stronger than the affection anyone claimed to have for him.
“So why are you thinking about this now?” Craig asked him.
Gage frowned at the question, shrugged.
“Because I don’t think you’re really concerned that you’ve never been in love,” his brother said. “I think you’re concerned that you might now be falling.”
“What? Are you kidding? No.” He shook his head firmly. “No way.”
His brother chuckled. “What was it Shakespeare said about protesting too much?”
“I was never a big fan of Shakespeare.”
“Which is hardly the point.”
“You were making a point?”
Craig shrugged. “You’re the one who’s bringing Megan to meet the family tomorrow night.”
“Only because Mom badgered me into it.”
“A piece of advice,” Craig said. “Don’t tell that to your girlfriend.”
Gage suspected that Megan wouldn’t accept that label so easily, but that was something he would worry about later.
As for worrying that he could fall in love—he wasn’t, b
ecause he knew it would never happen. He wouldn’t let it. Not again. And certainly not with Megan Roarke.
Chapter Eight
Megan had seemed so pleased the first time Gage took her flowers that he couldn’t resist stopping at the florist again. This time it was a pot of sunny daffodils that snagged his attention—and earned him her sunny smile.
“I love daffodils,” she admitted.
“That’s what you said about the tulips.”
She smiled. “They’re both spring flowers, and that’s always been my favorite season. A time of reawakening and renewal, when everything is fresh and anything seems possible.”
“I like summer—backyard barbecues and baseball games. Cold beer and…” he trailed off, cleared his throat.
“Hot women in skimpy bikinis?” she guessed.
He grinned, acknowledging that he’d been caught. “I think I’d like to see you in a skimpy bikini.”
“I doubt that,” she said. “But thank you.”
“For picturing you in a skimpy bikini?”
She blushed. “For the flowers.”
“I have something else for you,” he said, and handed her a letter-size envelope.
“What’s this?”
“A standard form ‘Notice of Disclosure of Personal Relationship with Trial Candidate,’” he explained. “After you’ve filled it out, your sister can come in to the clinic for the preliminary bloodwork so we can get her on the standby list.”
“But she’s not even twenty-nine. She doesn’t fit the criteria for the study.”
“We do sometimes extend the criteria,” he reminded her. “So why didn’t you ask if we could extend it for Ashley?”
“I thought about it,” she admitted. “And I might have, if we’d had a shortage of candidates.
“The fact that we didn’t further convinced me that the drug is desperately needed, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the test results prove successful so it can be made available to all of the women who didn’t fit within the original group.”
“We’ve had a couple of dropouts already,” he noted.
The first woman had reluctantly withdrawn from the study because her husband’s job was forcing them to move halfway across the country, making it impossible for her to come in for the required follow-up testing. The second woman had happily dropped out of the group when she realized she’d conceived within a few days of starting the protocol. He knew the woman’s pregnancy was more likely a coincidence than a result of the drug, but it was a happy result nonetheless.
“How did you know about Ashley?” she finally asked him.
“There were clues. Your dedication to the research, your focus on the trial, your sister’s illness that you explained away as ‘a female thing.’ Are you really surprised that I was able to connect the dots?”
She shook her head. “Not surprised that you could, but that you would bother to do so. And grateful. Very grateful.”
“We all have our own reasons for doing what we do,” he told her. “You started the Fedentropin project for your sister, she should have the chance to benefit from it.”
“Thank you,” she said again, and rose on her toes to kiss his cheek.
It was a quick touch of her lips to his skin, nothing more than a fleeting brush, really. But when her gaze met his, the air was suddenly charged with an awareness that seemed to crackle between them like static electricity.
Megan took an instinctive step back.
Gage stepped closer, breaching the distance she’d deliberately put between them, so that she had to tip her chin up to maintain eye contact. But she didn’t retreat any farther.
Her eyes widened as he lowered his head toward hers. This time she could have no doubt about his intention, and he watched as the violet depths of those fabulous eyes darkened as awareness took over…deepened as awareness gave way to desire.
He touched his mouth to hers gently at first, testing. But when her lips softened, parted, the response was like a jolt of electricity through his system, setting every nerve ending in his body on fire.
He forgot to be gentle, careful, and simply devoured her.
He dragged her against him, held her tight. She didn’t resist but lifted her arms to link them behind his neck, her hands sliding through his hair, the touch of her fingertips against his scalp incredibly erotic.
The first time he’d kissed her, he’d been swept away by the intensity of her passionate response. This time, he’d thought he was prepared, but there was something about her transformation from shy, unassuming scientist to sexy, wanton woman that went straight to his blood.
Her lips parted, their sighs mingled, their tongues tangled. She pressed herself closer, her breasts crushing against his chest, her hips aligned with his, and he knew there was no way she could mistake the erection pushing against his zipper for anything other than what it was. Just as he knew that if she kept wriggling against him, they were never going to get out of her kitchen.
With extreme reluctance, he eased his lips from hers.
“I’ve tried not to do that,” he admitted, when he’d finally caught his breath again.
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want the attraction between us to become a distraction.”
“A distraction?” She seemed baffled by the thought.
And if his parents weren’t expecting them, he might be tempted to take her back to his place and show her how completely she distracted him. But as much as he enjoyed spending time with Megan, taking their involvement to the next level would invariably ruin all of his plans.
He wanted a fake fiancée, not a real relationship, and so long as he remembered that, everything would work out just fine.
Despite all of Ashley’s and Paige’s warnings to the contrary, dinner with Gage’s family wasn’t in the scope of capital letters and flashing lights.
His parents were gracious and welcoming, which she attributed partly to the fact that they were genuinely nice people and partly to the fact that they’d undoubtedly met a lot of Gage’s female “friends” over the years. And though her friendship with their younger son was truly of the platonic variety—two sizzling kisses notwithstanding—they seemed genuinely pleased that she’d accepted the invitation to dinner.
Gage’s brother, she already knew, of course. And she’d met his wife a couple of times at company functions, but it was Craig and Tess’s four daughters who truly captivated her attention through the meal.
She’d grown up with a sister and, later on, with Paige, too, but she didn’t ever remember family meals being such a cacophony of conversations. Everyone seemed to be talking at once and about different things, and though Megan didn’t quite know what to say to anyone, she enjoyed trying to follow the various discussions around her.
“I told you it was chaos,” Gage said, leaning close to whisper in her ear as his mother served up the trifle she’d made for dessert.
“It is that. But in a good way,” she said. And she meant it.
His family had been truly wonderful, accepting her presence at the table without question. At least until she got up to help Tess clear the dishes away.
“How long have you and Gage been dating now?” his sister-in-law asked as she loaded plates into the dishwasher.
Gage, having followed them into the kitchen, didn’t seem nearly as surprised by the inquiry as Megan was.
“It’s been a couple of months now, hasn’t it, sweetheart?” he responded to the question, sliding an arm across her shoulders.
Sweetheart?
Megan didn’t know what was going on or why he wanted his family to believe they were together, but she decided to play along. For now.
“Has it been that long already?” she asked, the gentle tone in contrast to the icy glare she shot in his direction.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he drew her closer to his side, tried not to wince at the sharp elbow she discreetly jabbed into his ribs.
Tess’s gaze slid from one to
the other, but if she had any suspicions that things weren’t quite as they appeared, she kept them to herself.
Megan turned on Gage as soon as he got in the car to drive her home at the end of the evening. “What was that about?”
To his credit, he didn’t pretend not to know what she was talking about. “My dad made certain assumptions, based on the fact that we’ve been spending a lot of time together recently, and he seemed so pleased by the idea we were dating that I chose not to correct his assumption.”
“And you didn’t think to warn me?” she asked incredulously.
“I knew if I did, you’d refuse to come to dinner.”
“You set me up.”
He didn’t deny it.
She shook her head, torn between anger and frustration and confusion. “But why would you want them to think that we’re together?”
“Because I’ve been thinking about how to convince my dad that I’m not the irresponsible playboy everyone believes me to be, and it seemed obvious that you would make the perfect fiancée.”
Fiancée? She felt a jolt of surprised pleasure at the idea of wearing Gage’s ring, of being with him forever. And then she remembered that he was only looking for a temporary fiancée, and reminded herself that he wasn’t really interested in her except as a player in his game.
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. No way.”
“Definitely you,” he said. “You’re the perfect choice.”
“And why is that?” she challenged, already sure she knew the answer.
“Because you’re the complete opposite of every other woman I’ve ever dated.”
Yeah, it was just as she’d thought, but his confirmation still made her heart sink. “‘Opposite’ as in not glamorous, not sexy, not gorgeous, you mean?”
He winced. “No, that’s not what I meant.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, but it was a lie.
Though she was used to being overlooked—growing up with a sister as beautiful as Ashley, it was something she’d grown accustomed to early on—she’d thought he was different. She’d thought he saw who she was beneath the surface, and this acknowledgment that she was lacking in comparison to his usual companions stung.
The Engagement Project Page 9