His Convenient New York Bride

She could never repay Jin for all he’d given her. Yet every night for the past thirteen years she went to sleep longing for what he hadn’t.

“What are you actually going to do?” Aaron asked Jin two days later as they went one-on-one at the public basketball court near his apartment. “Is there a way to contest Wei’s will?”

Jin swooped around Aaron’s left side as he tried to steal the ball. Aaron pivoted away to keep his dribble going. “I spoke with my lawyer about it. I would have to establish that he wasn’t of sound mind when he wrote it and that’s almost impossible to do after the fact.”

“You’d have some witnesses.”

“Being an infidel and a drunk doesn’t mean you can’t make decisions. My lawyer said I didn’t stand a chance.”

“So, what then?”

“I’m wracking my brain trying to figure it out.”

Aaron took a shot from midcourt and missed, Jin grabbing the ball on the rebound. He swerved left and right to avoid his friend’s vigorous attempts to get it back.

“Consider this for a minute,” Aaron said with a lunge. “Is there any way you could work something out with Helene to make it seem on paper like you were back together?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Jin dodged Aaron’s attempt to steal the ball.

“Desperate measures.”

Helene was out of his life forever. He’d never speak to her again. Let alone involve her in something as important as his inheritance of LilyZ. To think, there was a time when he thought he’d always be with her.

When he’d first met Helene Carlson, she was working for an advertising agency with several clients in fashion. She introduced Jin to a New York party world he had never been a part of, preferring to keep his nose down and his mind on work and graduate school. Ironically, the same qualities she said she had liked about him.

With her swinging blond ponytail that was always in motion, Helene was fun and Jin got temporarily swept into her orbit of nightclubs and red carpets. Until the late-night revelries got to be all the same, and not worth the tired mornings. By then they were already married. Busy with the constant job of cleaning up the disasters his father had created, Jin couldn’t keep up with his wife’s social life. However, Helene wasn’t done with that lifestyle, and continued to stay out until all hours most nights of the week.

Word trickled back to Jin that Helene wasn’t spending her time away from him alone. When confronted, she claimed innocence but when photos of Helene with other men appeared on fashion gossip sites, Jin had had to face the truth. That time, she hadn’t denied the accusations. He’d ended their marriage certain he’d never trust anyone ever again.

Jin had had two people in his life show him how easy it was to betray marriage vows. His father and his wife. And both had managed to put a cherry on top. Wei with his will and Helene by having an affair with LilyZ’s lead designer, Javier Ferrer.

Aaron hustled Jin’s attempt at a basket. The ball tipped the rim but didn’t go through the net. Aaron was able to retrieve it on the bounce and regain possession.

It was a fair question Aaron had asked, but Jin couldn’t bear the idea of even calling Helene again, so that was out.

What did make sense was the idea of marrying someone in name only. He knew he’d never marry again for love and he also knew he wouldn’t lose LilyZ. Something had to give.

What would in name only actually look like? Some sort of marriage arranged for mutual benefit.

Jin took a shot at the basket and made it. “He shoots. He scores.”

It wasn’t that weird. People got married left and right for all sorts of reasons.

Aaron overtook the ball and dribbled away from him. “Show-off.”

Jin stole it from him and did a quick-footed spin away.

If Jin was really going to consider this, he could call his cousin Ling in Hong Kong. He and his uncle Fu owned the manufacturing end of LilyZ. Perhaps they employed a young woman who might want to have a career in the States.

In the distance, Jin saw Mimi among the throngs climbing up the steps from the subway station by the basketball court. Aaron must have texted her that they were here.

He had no trouble picking out her face in the crowd with the alabaster skin and plump lips that he’d seen develop from those of an awkward teenager into a full-blooded woman. She and Aaron both had the same light brown eyes as their mother. Mimi’s hair was tousled and tumbled down her shoulders. She spotted him and lifted her fingers to give him a gentle wave.

Once he saw Mimi coming toward them, he realized he’d never be able to go through with an in name only situation with a stranger. It had just been hypothetical thinking. Because if he was ever to do something like that he’d be sharing his life, his mother’s life, and the life of LilyZ. He surely wasn’t going to do that with someone he didn’t know.

Perhaps that’s why, as soon as he’d conjured the idea, he wanted to be sure Mimi never knew about it. It was too preposterous, too dishonest. Despite what he’d gone through with his father and with Helene, he wouldn’t destroy the sanctity of real love for people who still believed in it. People like Mimi. She’d missed the mark completely with that idiot Gunnar. But he knew that she and Aaron thought in terms of the happiness their parents had shared before death took them too young. Mimi and Aaron hadn’t grown up like Jin had, witnessing how little the marriage contract meant to some people.

“Hey, you guys,” Mimi called out as she approached the court. Her hips swung side to side in that va-va-voom way as she walked, her sloping curves sashaying. Jin liked that she always wore fitted outfits and never hid her hills and valleys under sloppy clothes.

“Hey, Mimi.”

“Sis.” Aaron got control of the ball while Jin focused his eyes on Mimi. Was there something different about her lately, or something he hadn’t noticed before?

He wished that she was more successful in love than he had been. She was the total package. Men should be lined up around the block.

“Are you done, do you want to walk home together?” Mimi asked as she reached the chain-link fence separating the court from the New York sidewalk.

Jin and Aaron moved to the bench where they had their bags. Each located their water bottle and took in big gulps. Then found their towels and wiped the sweat dripping down their faces. Jin mopped up his hair as well and when he pulled the towel off noticed the side-eyed way Mimi had watched the whole maneuver.

“I’ll walk part of the way with you but I’ve got a cocktail reception thing tonight at Boutique Charli.” New York Fashion Week Spring was upon them, when the international fashion industry converged on the city. Buyers, media, VIPs, celebrities and invited members of the public gathered for event after event that showcased the latest creations.

The major design houses mounted elaborate runway shows and extravagant parties. Exclusive ready-to-wear labels like LilyZ tended toward private showings. Boutique Charli was an influential shop in Chelsea and Jin had to make everyone he encountered believe it was business as usual for LilyZ. That while they didn’t have a collection to show this season, which he could blame on Wei’s death, they were still on track.

To redeem the lies he’d be telling, Jin needed a new designer. Immediately. Of course, it couldn’t be just anyone. He’d interviewed five people in the past two days and none of them were right.

Even though shooting hoops with Aaron had helped clear his mind, his to-do list came flooding back into the stress points of his temples.

After he bid farewell to Mimi and Aaron, he went home to shower and dress. When he arrived at the Boutique Charli party he was distracted, and it wasn’t as easy schmoozing with the crowd as he’d hoped. He accepted the cocktail a waiter offered and struggled with the chitchat he needed to do.

A runway model trotted toward him. He couldn’t remember her name. With a kiss on each cheek she almost choked him with her flowery perfume.

“Hi Ji-in.” She somehow made his name stretch out to two syllables. “You remember me from the De La Costa show.”

He didn’t, but smiled politely. Looking ready to swallow him whole like a snake would, she had no reason to know that women were off-limits in Jin’s life. That he’d never put himself out there and chance getting burned again.

A typical rail-thin, six-foot-tall fashionista, the model wore a blouse made of peach-colored rayon. Styled after a man’s shirt, it had buttons down the front. On one side the shoulder was cut out completely, revealing the wearer’s bony clavicle and her bare arm down to the elbow. The other side of the blouse was a regular cut with silver trinkets shaped like bunnies sewn down the line of the sleeve. Jin knew that rabbits were part of Milan label Fortnight’s theme this year so guessed it was theirs.

Fashion was so subjective. That blouse could look ridiculous to one person and be the height of couture to the next. When Shun Zhang started LilyZ, he’d never had aspirations to see his clothes on the catwalks of Paris or in wild editorial spreads of fashion magazines. His intention was to create expertly made clothes that a woman could wear for decades so Jin’s grandfather chose the finest fabrics and used time-consuming craftsmanship.

Shun had an innate sense of how to foreshadow or interpret a trend but work it subtly into his collections, so that his clothes never went out of style when the fashion winds blew in a different direction. Customers responded and LilyZ became a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

To uphold those traditions, Jin needed a designer. While he himself occasionally generated ideas that ultimately became finished pieces, he was not a designer and couldn’t develop a sketch into a pattern and then into a sample and finally to perfection. What he needed was somebody talented and trustworthy to come into his troubled company and turn it around. Somebody like… Mimi!

Looking at the model’s rabbit trinket shirt, Jin thought of that smashing pink dress Mimi was in the other day. She had a real knack for sensing what would look good on someone. It wasn’t just that she was a woman with hips and an ample bosom, a shape that was still outside the norm for the industry. No, what Mimi had was real artistry in merging a classic look with a mood, creating something that made a statement with delicacy and grace.

If only everything was happening a few years from now. If Mimi had more experience, he could hire her as his designer. She was part of the family already and, as a unit, they could take LilyZ as far as it could go. He could count on her.

But a company of LilyZ’s standing couldn’t name a junior designer to lead. He, and she, would be the town’s laughingstock.

Unless? An idea popped into Jin’s mind.

It was too crazy.

But what if it wasn’t?

CHAPTER TWO

“CAN I TAKE a shower, please?” Mimi poked her head into her brother’s bedroom. It was inconvenient that she had to go past his bed in order to get to the bathroom but that was the price paid for camping out on his sofa bed while she was unemployed.

“Gaaaaah…” was Aaron’s half-awake reply as he rolled over and pulled the blankets over his head. “Get. A. Job.”

“Working on it, bro.”

As she showered and dressed, she knew she was at the point of overstaying her welcome. Aaron’s place was, plain and simple, a compact New York apartment meant only for one person or a couple at most. Minimalist and sleek with black furniture, it was perfectly detailed for the up-and-coming lords of Wall Street such as her brother.

Aaron had offered to lend her money to get her own place when she broke up with Gunnar and moved out from the apartment she shared with him. But a junior designer didn’t command a very big salary and she didn’t know how she’d pay her brother back. She knew he’d absorb the cost if he had to, but she also knew that he was saving money to buy an apartment rather than continuing to lease, and she didn’t want to derail his plans.

After showering, she made breakfast.

“You interviewing again today?” Aaron asked when he emerged clean and suited up for his workday.

“Yep.”

“Maybe you’ll get this one.”

“We’ll see if Gunnar has managed to ace me out of yet another job.” Mimi shrugged as she portioned out the eggs she’d just scrambled, handing one plate to Aaron.

He went to sit down at the table but there was nowhere to put his dish. The surface was piled high with everything from Mimi’s sketch pads to her electronics to her sewing machine. She rushed over to make room, stacking things on one of the chairs and the sofa bed. “Sorry.”

The coffee table had been moved aside in order to open the sofa bed, which was not yet folded up for the day. Mimi’s clothes and shoes and whatnot were also spilling out of two suitcases in the middle of the floor. There were fabric swatches and sewing tools everywhere, and even a pair of slippers on the end table. In short, Mimi’s life lay in front of them.

“Honestly, Mimi, I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. You know, Jin asked me again if you’d want to stay with him. He’s got the huge flat all to himself now and there’s plenty of room.”

“No, I, no…” Mimi tripped over her words.

It was true that the whole third floor of Jin’s Chinatown building was living space. The showroom was at street level and the second floor was the studio. Shun had bought the building when he’d started to make some money with LilyZ and it had never been occupied by anyone other than the Zhang family ever since.

When Bai finally couldn’t stand Wei’s disrespectful ways one minute longer and divorced him, she moved to the Upper East Side to be near her sister. No one knew where Wei had stayed before he died. Jin had lived in the Chinatown flat by himself until Helene moved in, and was now alone there again.

However, Mimi staying with Jin would be intolerable. How could she ever tell him or her brother that just the proximity she typically had with Jin was, and always had been, enough of a struggle? Seeing him several times a week, sharing meals, hovering together over a garment, confiding their joys and sorrows.

Feeling his sparks.

It was all already too much.

If Jin was behind her in a room, even if she didn’t see him she’d know he was there. She could recognize the sound of his breathing. Knew what size shirt he wore. His favorite movie. Song. Flavor of ice cream.

But while they’d shared cottages in the woods and summer beach shacks, moving into his flat would be another matter entirely. Going to sleep under the same roof, waking up to each other day after day, night after night.

That would be skidding too close to thoughts that were only allowed out in the wee hours.

Aaron and Mimi finally sat down at the cleared table with their breakfast. Changing the subject, she reminisced, “Remember how Dad used to snip fresh chives onto eggs?”

“I like that you always put cheese in them. But yeah, he’d bring the little potted plant from the windowsill over to the table.”

The siblings had grown up in a happy home full of warmth. Delia and Benjamin Stewart walked arm in arm together down the street just as they did through everything in their lives.

Until the death do us part bit came too soon.

“Mom and Dad had something very special.” Which is what Mimi longed for. That kind of union, a friendship and a romance all mixed into one.

“Unlike Wei with Bai.”

“It must have been so hard for Shun, to have an alcoholic son he didn’t know how to help.”

The siblings forked up their eggs.

Shun had only recently died when Aaron first met Jin. The two teenaged boys played together on the high school basketball team. Their moms got to know each other while cheering on their sons during games.

Mimi was two years younger, fifteen at the time, and not that involved in her brother’s life. When she’d come home from her after-school babysitting job, her pulse would pound to see dark, handsome Jin sitting at their kitchen table eating her mother’s food.

Little did she know at the time that the Stewarts’ apartment had become a refuge for Jin, a place to escape the negativity of the Zhang home. Nor did young Mimi understand how to interpret the intense stares Jin always gave her. Over the years, she’d come to learn that the look in his teenaged expressive eyes was pain and emotional fatigue.

Aaron put his fork down. “I wish there was a way we could help Jin.”

“That’s what I keep thinking.”

“Can I show you something?” Jin asked Mimi while she was sitting at a sewing machine in his studio a little later. “Just a couple of new things I was playing around with.”

“Sure, just let me finish up this seam,” Mimi said as she turned her head toward him and then back to the dress she was doing in muslin as a prototype. She’d come in after her interview to use one of Jin’s industrial machines, as she had been doing for years.

He kept a few machines near his office in the back, along with a cutting table, tools and shelves with fabric set aside for special projects. Now with his grandfather and father gone, nobody but Jin used the office.

Employees busied about in front creating virtual models on the computers, fulfilling back orders and doing alterations for the customers who had bought pieces from the showroom downstairs. While the major manufacturing was handled by his uncle Fu in Hong Kong, there was always plenty of activity at Jin’s building.

He pulled out some drawings he’d done.

“I was toying with this,” he explained as she got up from the machine to join him. Pointing to details on the sketch he explained, “Wouldn’t this be kind of a practical look? Comfortable separates but with fine tailoring so that a woman can wear them anywhere? Business casual. With this maybe,” he said as he pulled over some fabric swatches.

He handed Mimi a twill he was considering. Their fingers brushed in the process. The Jin sizzles that were as familiar to her as her own heartbeat crackled up her spine.

A smirk she fought to hide reminded her of Aaron’s suggestion of her moving in with Jin. Living with this man, who occupied her dreams day and night, was out of the question.

Although, really, she’d have nothing to worry about because in all the years she’d known him, he’d never done anything to encourage her secret feelings. There was no reason to think he ever would. The big brotherly hugs, chaste kisses on the cheek and the professional cheering on was the way they were with each other. For so long now it was set in stone.

She rubbed the fabric between her fingers. “This would be wrinkly by the end of the day. Can you go with something stiffer?”

“Will you work it through with me? I can’t meet my retailers with nothing to show.”

“And you have no designer.”

“I haven’t found anyone suitable to hire.”

“You’re thinking of doing your own collection?”

Jin slowly nodded as he looked over his drawings.

“Was I wrong to fire Javier so hastily? Right before Fashion Week?”

“Once you found out about him and Helene, how could you be expected to work with him every day?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Mimi lifted one sketch off Jin’s desk and inspected it carefully. Then she reviewed another. She trailed her finger along the drawing of a blazer jacket, commenting, “You could run a curved seam here, and here, and give it a little flare at the hem.”

Maybe this was how she might help Jin. Offer what assistance she could in pulling together some pieces without a designer.

“I like that,” he said, understanding her concept.

“Kind of a nineteen-seventies vibe.”

“Hmm. You’re good.”

“I know! If I could ever get a job.”

“How did it go today?”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

Mimi had always wanted to be a fashion designer, even before she met the Zhangs. Whereas others loved music or books, she loved clothes. The artistry of fashion. The details. The variety. The act of personal expression that had to be combined with an almost science-like approach to construction. She’d taught herself to sew as a young girl and sitting in front of the hum of a machine was her happy place. For birthdays or holidays, she’d ask for gifts of fabric and supplies. Her parents encouraged her to chase her ambition so she’d gone to design school.

Now here she was, unemployed.

“Gunnar Nilsson is not going to bring me down.” Mimi grabbed a pencil from the holder on Jin’s desk and was quickly drawing a revised idea for his casual suits. “Didn’t your grandfather do a collection like this way back when? I feel like I’ve seen some photos.”

“Yeah, it was a big hit in the eighties. With exaggerated shoulders and peg-leg pants but the same theory. I’ve heard that half of New York produced imitations after that.”

“It will be a tribute to him, then.”

Mimi continued making adjustments to the sketch. “See, I’m saying do a subtle pouf at the shoulder. A little all-business and a little rock star.”

“That is fabulous, Miss Stewart.”

Jin moved toward her for a hug that included three friendly pats on the back, like someone might give their long-lost uncle. Never did he give her the kind of embraces that Mimi fantasized about. “You’re a pal.”

A pal to Jin, she was. Always would be.

She pointed to her sketches. “Can I apply for the designer job?” she kidded. Was she really kidding, though?

“Good night, Cynthia,” Jin called out to the last employee to leave the studio. He leaned back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head. Closing his eyes for a moment, he listened to the unusual din of nothingness. With equipment running, and people collaborating and coming in and out, the LilyZ headquarters was never a quiet place.

As his staff walked or took buses, subways and trains back to their homes for the night, Jin experienced urban solitude. Something he might have enjoyed after the chaos of his marriage. Right now, though, he had too much on his mind to relax.

His eyes sprang open again.

The drawings he and Mimi had been working on earlier were scattered at the side of the desk while Wei’s will sat front and center. Jin read the words legal and lawful marriage a couple of times, as if he’d find something different in the words than he had before. A new solution.

He was still musing on that marrying in name only concept. He’d ruled out any strangers because he couldn’t take any chances with LilyZ. Whoever he chose, that was if he chose, would have to be someone he already knew well.

The prospect seemed impossible.

Jin glanced over to Mimi’s drawings. She was really so bright and intuitive. Like today when she’d made such fabulous improvements on what he was imagining, the two of them talking in the shorthand of two people who had known each other for a very long time.

Known each other for a very long time.

Mimi had asked him straight out if he could hire her as his designer. The weird thought that had been nagging at him for days surfaced again. His brain focused on it, on seeing it all the way through.

What if? How desperate was everybody at this point? No! It would never work. A nice fantasy, though.

A new notion popped into his head out of nowhere. If there was any hope of him finding some kind of pretend wife that was someone he already knew, what about an ex-girlfriend? He’d dated women before he married Helene.