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1013 Words
“Yes. I want you to hire my best friend’s husband to work for your company.”
“Done. Next?”
I blink in surprise. “Don’t you even want to know what he does?”
“I don’t care what he does. We’ll find a position for him. And we’ll pay him double his former salary.”
That’s too important to go unchallenged. “Oh, yeah? What if he was making a million a year?”
Callum sighs.
“Okay, fine, he wasn’t making a million a year. I just don’t understand how you can promise to hire someone you don’t know anything about.”
In a hot, dark voice, he says, “Because my wife asked me to. And I’ll give her anything she wants.”
I sit there breathing unevenly and marveling at the gymnastics my heart is doing inside my chest, until he prompts, “Are you still there?”
“Most of me. My brain went on vacation.”
“Why is it so hard for you to believe I’ll give you whatever you want?”
I laugh. “Gee, I don’t know. All the handsome rich guys who propose marriage to me over oysters say the same thing.”
His tone sharpens. “Handsome?”
“Oh God. Here we go again.”
“Don’t sound so disgusted.”
“Why must you always be hunting for compliments from me? Isn’t having every other woman in the world constantly slobbering over you enough?”
The silence that follows is electric. Then, in a voice both soft and dangerous, he says, “No. I don’t care what other women think of me. Because they’re not you.”
Damn, he’s good at that. I swallow nervously and fidget in my chair. “I have something to say.”
“You can just say it. You don’t have to make an announcement first.”
His reply is imperious. If only I could reach through the phone and strangle him.
“There’s no need to try to dazzle me with the whole sexy smoke show. I’m under no illusions that this arrangement is anything other than a business deal, so you don’t have to flirt.”
Another electric pause. We’re really starting to rack them up in this conversation.
“Emery.”
“Yes, Callum?”
“Do you want to have s*x with me?”
I groan and slump over on the desk, pressing my forehead to the wood.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No, that was the sum of my feelings about the question.”
“Do you?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that.”
“Why not? It’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a husband to ask his wife.”
“Yeah, except we’re not husband and wife yet!”
He pounces on that like a tiger, saying slyly, “Yet?”
I sit upright and glare at the poster of the actor Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser in the television version of Outlander hanging on the wall across from my desk.
“You know what we need to put into this contract? A section about mental health care. Because if I were to marry you, I’d need massive therapy on an ongoing basis to deal with the strain of being married to such a pain in the ass.”
He chuckles. “That’s another thing we have in common.”
I say flatly, “Put in a clause about murder being an acceptable way for me to end the marriage.”
“Darling,” he purrs, “you’re so adorable when you’re angry.”
“Stop being flirty. And stop calling me darling! It drives me mad!”
“I know it does. Why do you think I do it?”
“You know what? My blood pressure can’t handle any more of this conversation. I’ll call you back when I’ve stopped plotting ways to hide your dead body.”
I disconnect, toss my phone onto the desk, and sit there seething until the urge to dismember a certain cocky billionaire passes.
Which is exactly when Callum calls again. His timing is uncanny.
I pick up with a terse, “What?”
He snickers. “You forgot to tell me you love me before you hung up.”
I close my eyes and grip the phone so hard, it’s a miracle the case doesn’t shatter.
“All right, I’ll be serious. Are you listening?”
I mutter, “Unfortunately, yes.”
“There’s nothing in the contract about divorce because if you agree to marry me, you also agree to never leave me.”
“I want to leave every time I spend more than ten minutes with you. How am I supposed to promise I’ll stay with you forever?”
“Simple.”
When he doesn’t continue, I say, “Waiting over here in nail-biting suspense, Hitchcock.”
“Because you’re going to make a vow,” he says softly. “A very serious vow that includes the words ‘Until death do us part.’ And every time you think about leaving me, you’ll remember those words and that vow, and it will stop you.”
“I hate to break the news to you, but thousands of other couples make the same vow every day all around the world, and they end up getting a divorce later.”
“We’re not like other people. Our marriage won’t be like theirs either.”
He says that as if it’s written in stone, like some bearded guy in robes descended from a mountaintop carrying a granite tablet with the words engraved on the front.
I demand, “What exactly makes you think we’re so different from everyone else? I don’t even know you! No, be quiet, that wasn’t an invitation to speak. Now listen, Callum, I’m trying my best to take you seriously and not call the nearest asylum to try to get you committed, but you have to work with me here. Stop playing around with me and be straight.”
- Writer
