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Nate had reached the heights he’d envisioned that long ago night, and had soared higher still. He had property all over the world, a stake in some of the most successful businesses in the country, and more money than he could count. And yet the heart of that dream, the pinnacle he’d aspired to, the moment when the pendulum of success had hit its peak and he could ease back, content with his success and enjoy the spoils, had never eventuated.
Every decision, every purchase, every paperclip was still under his tight control—as though if in letting go he’d lose it all. And it wasn’t lost to him that he was nearing the age when his own hard-working father had gone to work one day and never come home.
Gabe hung up and said, “You free for lunch? The gaming guy I was telling you about is meeting me at Zuma at one, and I’m sure having us both there’ll put the requisite sparkle in his eyes to get his scrawl on the dotted line.”
Nate ran his hands over his face, pushing the mounting signs of frustration down deep. “I can swing by at quarter past.”
“Better. Keep ’em keen.” Gabe pressed himself from the chair and only when he reached the door did he look back.
“So, have you got a date for Mae and Clint’s wedding, or what?” Gabe asked.
Nate lugged his stapler all the way across the room. It bounced off the wall a foot from Gabe’s shoulder.
“I take it that’s a no?”
Then Gabe was out through the door, leaving Nate to deal with the onset of a new range of throbs in his temples.
It was a no. And yet he’d told Faith and Hope he was seeing someone. When the actual truth was somewhere in between.
He’d get a damn date, if only to get them off his back for the next few weeks till the big day. But it wouldn’t be anyone they knew. Or even anyone he knew for that matter.
Asking a woman on a date was one thing. Asking a woman to a wedding was akin to smothering himself in catnip and taking a swan dive into a pride of lionesses. There wasn’t a kind way to tell someone with confetti stuck to her eyelashes that it was never going to happen.
But it was never going to happen.
For the six years between the day of his father’s heart attack and the day his trust fund had been opened to him he’d devoted himself to being the man in his young sisters’ lives. They’d repaid the favour by using his toothbrush, and wearing his shirts to bed. He’d asked them to stop and they’d acted out by dating his friends. And no matter how he’d managed to swallow it down, to let them do what they had to do, they’d cried themselves to sleep. He’d heard them, night after night, the sound tearing away at his insides. Until he’d become impervious to tears, to mood swings, to raging hormones and wily feminine ways. It was the only way he’d lived to fight another day.
Two hours after Mae had told him to “save the date,” he’d tagged a research team to find him a dating website. All he’d told them was that it had to boast discretion and success; they didn’t need to know why.
Since then he’d met six perfectly nice, attractive, elegant, smart women, every single one of whom had taken one look at him and sized him up for a tux, a four-bed house and a Range Rover with a reversing camera.
But time had run out.
He checked his email to find another of his “Maybes” had come back with a “Why not?”
More determined than ever, he opened the email. Her tag was Bloomin.
Favourite Pizza Topping: ham & red peppers
Favourite Music: retro grunge
If I Could Be Anywhere in the World I’d Be: right where
I am
Looking for: someone to talk to
Retro grunge? What the hell was retro grunge? Sounded dire. And yet he opened her picture for a second look. And then he remembered.
After an hour of trawling the site that first night he’d hit a point where the string of women in bikinis grinning suggestively at the camera had become a blur. He’d rather have tugged out his own eyelashes than read another thing but the very next picture that had appeared on the screen had been so unexpected it had stopped him short.
A woman in her late twenties sitting in a café, with a shaggy scarf-thing around her neck, dark hair in a messy twist that just reached one shoulder, and an old felt fedora perched on top of her head.
Nate leaned his elbow on the desk and rested his chin between thumb and forefinger. With the other hand he zoomed in till her eyes filled the screen. She was attractive, in an off-beat kind of way, with her fine chin, fine nose and soft pink lips curved into an easy smile. But those eyes of hers were something else. Wide-set, the colour hovering on the edge of brown, the long dark lashes creating sultry shadows below.
But within them was the most captivating thing about her, that one thing that had eluded him for so long…Contentment.
He wasn’t sure he even knew what that felt like any more. And here, at his fingertips, was a woman who claimed to be happy being right where she was.
Without another thought he hit “Reply,” picked a time, asked her to pick the place. Even if he’d built a client base on becoming on a first-name basis with some of the best chefs in town, in this case it was far better to go somewhere atypical or it would get back to his sisters.
It always did.
And a man had to have his priorities straight.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR ALL ITS family name, Mamma Rita’s Italian restaurant in Fitzroy was dark, sensual and bohemian, a hotspot for artists and hipsters. If conversation was your bag the beer garden at the back rarely saw beer and reeked of the sweet smoke of the philosophical thinker. Saskia, though, loved it for the great food, and for a girl on a budget one decadent meal filled you up enough not to have to eat for another twenty-four hours.
Dolled up in her favourite batik pants, sandals made in Nepal and an upcycled scarf she’d made herself from an old T-shirt, Saskia sat fiddling with the piece of string she’d tied around her wrist to remind her of…something as, with scientific appreciation, she watched the man who’d just walked through the front door.
The photo of NJM hadn’t lied, though it could be accused of under-representation. He looked immaculate; his dark suit crisp, the knot of his deep red tie tight, his shoulders broad and proud. And as a waitress approached the naturally provocative curve of his mouth hooked slowly into a nearly-smile. Even from across the restaurant Saskia saw the poor girl’s knees buckle.
He really was beautiful. But, even better to Saskia’s mind, beautifully anomalous.
It didn’t make sense, and to a mathematician there was no more satisfying moment than when the seemingly senseless finally added up. Lissy dated bad boys because she wanted to drive her rich parents crazy. Ernest liked Oreos because she’d shared hers with him the day Stu had left. But why would a man who looked like that need to go online to find a date to a wedding?
Saskia ran a hand over her hair which was—by feel at least—not doing anything overly crazy. He must have caught the movement as the next moment his eyes found hers.
Wow, she thought, her lungs tightening and her tummy tripping over itself in rhapsodic pleasure, those eyes should be classed a lethal weapon.
He lifted his hand in a wave. She did the same.
Thus unfrozen, Saskia shuffled her fork as if it was important she do so at that very moment, and told herself to get a grip. This was research, not a real date. And if a chat with NJM of the blue eyes, dark suit and sinfully sensuous mouth could help her nail the angle that would take her infographic from informative to viral, then she’d just have to suffer through a date with the guy.
As her research subject began to stride her way Saskia made to stand. In pressing her hand to the table, her palm landed on her fork, sending it flying across the room.
Saskia watched, mouth agape, as it spun towards the table of a young couple, where it landed with a series of less-than-musical crashes, causing the girl to scream at the top of her lungs.
A pair of waiters in black and white zipped out to clear the mess, calm the girl, and offer free desserts.
“Need this?”
Saskia dragged her eyes from the disaster zone in the direction of a rumbling deep voice. Her eyes hit jacket button, rich red tie, jaw carved by the gods, a mouth tilted at the corners, a nose like something freed from Italian marble and smiling blue eyes that made the straight lines and curlicues flittering through her head scatter like bowling pins.
And then her focus shifted and she noticed he was holding a clean fork.
“Right,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “Thank you. Not one of my more elegant moments.”
NJM’s mouth curved into a deeper smile. It was a mouth made for smiling, she decided, amongst other things.
“Shall we?” he said, motioning to the table.
He waited for her to plonk into her chair before he eased his large frame into the seat opposite, popping his jacket button and running a hand down his perfect tie. His nails were as neat and tidy as the rest of him. His fingers were long and graceful, yet exquisitely masculine.
She lifted back out of her chair and held out a hand, “I’m Saskia. Saskia Bloom.”
“Nate Mackenzie,” he said, his nearly smile stretching out into the real thing, taking him from beautiful all the way to heartbreaking.
Maybe he had a third nipple. Or ate with his feet. But so far, Saskia saw no obvious reason a man like him couldn’t find love on any street corner in the free world.
“A friend and I had a bit of fun guessing what the NJM stood for,” Saskia said.
“Care to fill me in on your guesses for the J?”
Juicy, she thought. Jpeg. Junk. “Not so much.”
The smile was back, and so were the curly tingles in her belly. Charisma, she told herself. Something chemical—hormonal, perhaps, or to do with endorphins. Not her field.
“Jackson,” he proffered. “It was my father’s name.”
Her researcher’s ear pricked. “Was?”
A beat, then, “He passed away several years back.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Mine too. I mean, his name wasn’t Jackson, but my father passed away a few years ago.” When, Nate gave her nothing, just that face, and the promise of that smile, she blundered on. “I don’t have a middle name, though. My mum died having me and it was all my father could do to name me at all. Even then it was after the doctor who’d given him the bad news. Or so went the story he told me every day on my birthday—”
Apparently she was going to blunder on till the end of time, as her research subject sure wasn’t about to stop her. To stop herself, she reached for the massive jug of iced water, but Nate got there first. Perhaps it was gentlemanly behaviour. More likely, considering the fork incident, the guy was a quick learner. She sat on her hands as he poured her drink.
“So,” she said, after managing a drink without spilling any on herself, “is this how your blind date’s normally go? A slapstick show followed by the comparison of dead parents?”
“Not so much,” he said, his smile only going as far as his eyes, which somehow didn’t diminish the effect one jot. “Yours?”
“You’re my first.”
“Ah, a virgin.”
“Noooo. Not for a looong time.” Then, as it sank in, “An online dating first-timer? Yep.”
She wasn’t a natural blusher. Not by a long shot. But something about this guy had her blood in a spin.
“Ready to order, cara?” asked the owner, affectionately known as Mr Rita—a tall, skinny man in his sixties who sported a nifty little moustache.
Saskia shook herself upright. “Um, sorry! Haven’t even looked at the menu. Can you give us another five?”
She shoved a big plastic menu at Nate to distract him from Mr Rita’s not so subtle winking and thumbs up, then she set to studying the menu as if she didn’t know the thing off by heart.
As they put their orders in with Mr Rita a few minutes later Saskia’s phone rang. She didn’t need to glance at it to know it was Lissy, calling in case she needed a fake emergency. She quickly switched it to “Do not answer.”
“Your back-up plan?” Nate asked, motioning to a passing waiter for the wine list. “That was early.”
“My what?” she said, sliding her phone into the big bag at her feet.
His eyes slid back to her. Knowing. And blue. So very, very blue.
With a laugh, she admitted, “Spot-on, smart boy. Like you didn’t have me pick the restaurant so nobody you know would see us together.”
For the first time his eyes lost that permanent glint and he looked honestly surprised. And for the first time she felt as if she wasn’t on the back foot but leading from the front, where she much preferred to be.
“Am I wrong?” She leaned a little his way, her palms flat on the table.
“No,” he said, blinking. “And now I hear out loud how that sounds I feel like I ought to apologise.”
She shrugged, pointed out a bottle of red from the list in his hand. “If you’d taken one look at me and walked back out the door then you would have owed me an apology. It was only sensible of us both to take measures. I mean, you should see the lies the other guys on the site tell about themselves.”
“Lies?” he repeated, as if it had never occurred to him.
Saskia counted off her fingers. “Your photo might have been a fake. You might have been lying about your age, your weight, your occupation, your name, your reason for joining the site. You might have been a psycho killer.”
With each less-than-flattering “might have been” Nate’s surprise, if anything, seemed to wane. The glint was back, and he too leaned forward. She caught a hint of purely masculine spice curling above the saucy scents of herbs and garlic.
“So, if you met a man in a bar, on a train, or jogging in the park, you’d have more faith that he wasn’t a psycho killer?”
“I don’t jog.”
His mouth kicked, as if his smile surprised even him.
Her cheek twitched in response. He noticed, and the glint in his eyes changed. Deepened. Found some kind of heat. At which point his gaze dropped to her mouth, the dip at the bottom of her neck, then moved back to her eyes.
While Saskia struggled to remember how to breathe.
But while Nate Jackson Mackenzie, with his good looks, air of money and charm that could lure a siren to dry land, was probably used to having women fall all over themselves whenever he walked into a room, Saskia wasn’t most women.
Which was why, when he stretched out a leg beneath their small table, his calf connecting with hers and shooting sparks up her leg, she said, “I didn’t sign up to Dating By Numbers in an effort to find my one true love.”
The slight rise of an eyebrow gave her the impression he didn’t believe her.
Wow. Okay. So that irked. Maybe that was his great flaw: he could be irksome.
She whipped her bag onto her lap, found a business card and thrust it in his direction. “I’m a freelance statistical researcher working on an infographic about online dating for the website.”
She could have pumped a fist in the air at the surprise that coloured his eyes at that one! And then from one heartbeat to the next his brow furrowed and she saw the brain behind those dauntingly beautiful eyes whir into life. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might leave, but the longer he sat there, staring at her card, the more she wondered. And hoped that he’d stay.
He finally, finally, pocketed her card and said, “And to think you all but accused me of being a possible psycho killer.”
“I’m a mathematician,” she said. “Not exactly the same.”
“I thought the point was that people lie.”
“I—What?” Irked didn’t even touch on how that made her feel. Punctuating her words with a waggly finger, Saskia said, “I said I was looking for somebody to talk to, which is completely true.”
One eyebrow cocked. “Safer to say it was bending the truth?”
“Not even slightly. It’s not my fault if you misunderstood my meaning.”
She crossed her arms, knowing she sounded defensive. But it was hard to be all sweetness and light when he was watching her the way he was. All charm and half smiles were gone as he looked her over, as if he was sizing her up for something. Hopefully not a hole in the ground.
Then he did some surprising of his own when next he said, “My motives for dating online aren’t altogether pure either.”
Ignoring the “altogether pure” jab, Saskia attempted to raise an eyebrow right back at him. But she’d never mastered the skill, so probably ended up looking astounded. She schooled her features back to normal. “You said you were after a date for a wedding?”
“I am. But recent events have meant my needs have altered a little.”
“Do I need to call my back-up plan?”
He laughed—a deep, rumbling sound that made her knees clench together.
“The greater problem, for me, is that I have three sisters who seem to think it’s their mission in life to find me a wife. Thus, I let slip that I already have a date for the wedding, and that this date and I are…seeing one another.”
“Let me get this straight. There are no women in your life who would happily go with you to a wedding, so you made one up?”
“Not one who would understand that it wasn’t the beginning of something more.”
Okay. Now she’d met the guy, she could see that. Saskia felt herself nodding.
He went on, “What I need, Saskia, as well as a wedding date, is someone who would be willing to pretend to be my girlfriend.”
Still nodding, she realised he’d stopped talking and was looking at her intently. As if waiting for an answer.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?”
“Are you dating anyone at the moment, Saskia?”
“Am I—?” Saskia thought of Lissy, Dropkick Dave and snapped carrots. “I wouldn’t have signed up to a dating site if I was.”
“But you’ve signed up even though you’re not looking for ‘The One’?”
Her mouth twisted. He had her there.
“So, how do you feel about bending the truth just a little while longer?”
Saskia blinked, the meaning of his words coming through slow and sluggish. “You want to do all that…with me?”
His nostrils flared slightly, as if he was weighing his options one last time. Well, to hell with that. She was nobody’s—
“Yes,” he said with a determined nod.
“Right.”
Saskia so wished she had pen and paper at hand as whatifs, problems and possibilities, questions and escape routes burst inside her head, spearing away into a million tangents.
“But…can’t you just tell your sisters no? Tell them…what-ever your problem really is?”
Secret wife? Secret difficulty in the bedroom? Secret identity? She itched to ask.
But when a muscle flickered in Nate’s cheek and a moment later he lifted a thumb to his right temple, she thought best not. Best not tell him his idea was crazy either. Pretend girlfriend. Sheesh! Only he didn’t look crazy. He looked as if he was at the end of his rope.
And just like that the curly tingles in her belly pinged into perfect straight lines.
Could it be possible that Nate Mackenzie needed her after all?
It had been months since she’d felt that flicker of purpose. Just because one man had thrown her benefaction back in her face so cruelly, it didn’t mean she wasn’t damn good at it.
“You’re serious?” she asked.
Nate’s thumb stopped rubbing his temple and he looked her dead in the eye. Saskia tried her very best to not wriggle as all that gorgeous intensity trickled through her like over-carbonated bubbly.
“As serious as a man can be,” he said.
Mr Rita and his boys arrived at that moment, with plates of colourful bruschetta and fat, shiny strips of barbecued calamari and green salad. But, while Saskia usually had to stop herself from leaning over and kissing the plate, her eyes never once left Nate’s.
“Buon appetito!” said Mr Rita.
As one Nate and Saskia said, “Grazie.”
And then they both smiled.
Saskia took a breath. “I’m…” Flabbergasted, bemused, actually considering this? “I don’t know how to put this, but I’m not sure if I can pull it off. You’re—not the kind of man I usually date.”
“You might be surprised to know you’re not the kind of woman I usually date either,” said Nate, laughing as if the world had finally found its natural order.
She kind of wanted to kick him in the shin. In fact…
“Oof!” he said, sitting up and rubbing at the spot.
“Sorry.” She shuffled on her seat, as if that had been her intention the whole time. “So how would this work, exactly?”
“It’s the first Saturday in spring. You free?”
She did the math in her head. “I believe so.”
“That’s how it’s done.” And then he smiled, as if the deal was done. Poor love. He had no idea what he was in for.
Saskia bit into her calamari, enjoyed every succulent drop, before asking, “So, what do I get out of it?”
“Hmm?”
“The deal. You’re getting a girlfriend…” She paused when the guy actually winced at the word.
“What do you want, Saskia?” he asked, charm forming between the words like mercury.
“I want what I wanted from the beginning. To get the low-down on online dating.” But if she could save time, money, by having a guinea pig do it for her…
“Here’s the low down,” said Nate. “It’s as much of a crap shoot as closing your eyes and picking someone out of the phone book. I should know. You’re my seventh.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You’ve asked six other women to pretend to date you?”
His mouth kicked into a smile while his eyes came over all dark and intense, lit with that flicker of heat. “I’ve been on six dates,” he corrected. “I asked only you.”
“Oh.” Well, that was kind of nice. “But I still need first-hand experience for my study—”
He shook his head, his eyes not leaving her. “No dating between now and then. I won’t either. Goes without saying.”
“Good to know. But I was actually going to suggest that maybe you could be the subject of my piece.”
A muscle flickered in his cheek and she wondered how long it would be before he was rubbing at that temple of his again. “Saskia, I’m not talking to you about my dating habits. My private life is just that. Private.”
He looked as if he meant it. But Saskia had always found that men liked talking about themselves. So she wasn’t really worried on that score. She’d find a way to get to the heart of the man—especially if she had a few weeks to do it. At the thought of a few weeks in the company of this man the curls of sensation were back in her belly.
“So when’s our next date?” she asked.
A frown creased his brow. “The wedding.”
“But what if someone asks how we met? If they ask you about my home, my family, my friends, my work? What’s an infographic?”
“I’m sorry—a what?”
“An infographic. It’s what I am working on for the dating site.”
He looked pained.
“It’s a diagram that shows information—stats, links, comparisons—in a bright, attractive, easy-to-digest contained image. We need a little background to do this properly, Nate. I can put it together, if you’d like. Research is my thing.”
A list of dry questions, she thought, warming to the idea, with some curve balls thrown in. Classic stat-collection technique. He could tell her a lot that way without even meaning to.
“Or how long will it take for your family to think you’ve just made me up?” When his cheek twitched again she knew she had him. “We’ll need to set up a couple of meetings between now and then. Casual get-togethers. Coffee, perhaps. We both like coffee. The Art Gallery has an Impressionists exhibition. Or we could go ice-skating. I don’t mind.”