The Tycoon's Fiancée Deal

“I am,” he said.

When wasn’t Derek sure? She should have already known that would be his answer.

“If we’re engaged, why would we have kept it quiet?” she asked.

He leaned in closer to her. “To give Hunter and Nate time in the spotlight. Hunter’s wedding is really taking up everyone’s energy.”

“It is. And Kinley is busy planning it. She’s going to wonder why I never even mentioned we were dating.”

Bianca and Kinley were good friends. They both had been single mothers with toddlers the same age. Of course, Kinley wasn’t single anymore and had found happiness with Derek’s brother Nate.

Derek took her hand in his and a tingle went up her arm. “Tell her I asked you to keep it quiet.”

“Hmm...it might work. Could I have until the morning to think about it?” she asked.

He nodded.

She pulled her hand away and then sat back, linking her hands together in her lap. Her palm was still tingling. She knew that saying yes would be the easy choice. But what about her son? Benito wouldn’t understand that they were just pretending. Though given that he was only two years old he might not understand much of anything that was going on. He was good friends with Kinley’s daughter...so he had been asking about his papa lately. He really didn’t remember Jose at all.

“That sounds like it would be ideal but we live in the real world.”

“Really? I hadn’t realized that when I was operating on two different patients today,” Derek said.

She recognized the sarcasm as one of his defense mechanisms and she didn’t blame him. She was scared. The last time she trusted a man it had been Jose and his word hadn’t been worth much.

“I’m not bringing this up to be difficult. I have a son. He’s not going to understand why you are in our lives for a short time and then gone,” she said. “We aren’t twenty anymore, Derek, it’s not like when you came to Monaco and we were wild. I’m a mom. You’re in line to be chief of cardiology. We’re...we are adults.”

“Dammit. We can be adults and still be ourselves. You know me, Bi. You always have. I’m not going to disappear from your life when this is over. We’re still going to be friends and I’d never cut Benito out. He’s your son and just as important to me as you are.”

Derek stood up. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk where we can talk without worrying who might hear us.”

She looked around and noticed they were gathering attention. She should have realized it sooner. “What about the pool game?”

“The boys can make do without me,” Derek said. “This is more important.”

There was a sincerity in his eyes; she wanted to believe in him. Well, that stunk, she thought. She’d thought she’d somehow become immune to the charm of handsome men. Of course, this was Derek and not some playboy whose parents she didn’t know.

But still she’d like to think that her heart beat a little faster when he said she was important. She’d always liked Derek. He’d been one of her closest friends in middle school. He’d had the classic Caruthers good looks, but he’d been supersmart and once he’d graduated high school early and gone off to college and then medical school, they’d kept in touch first on AOL messenger, then on the different social media apps.

Years had passed before she’d seen him as an adult and she’d been blown away by how attractive her old friend had become. Of course, she had a different life by then, but there were times when it still surprised her. She never grew tired of the strong, hard line of jaw, his piercing eyes and the way his hair curled over this forehead. There was something about him that made her want to keep looking at him.

Dangerous.

As dangerous as listening to his idea for this fake engagement. Was there ever an idea that sounded dumber?

Maybe her mom setting her up with young men she knew in the South Texas area.

“What would this entail?” she asked.

* * *

Derek didn’t allow himself to relax. This was Bianca. Bianca Velasquez. She’d been the prettiest girl at the Five Families Middle School. Though he’d taken an accelerated course in Houston so he’d be able to leave Cole’s Hill and go to college early, they’d always kept in touch. At first he’d thought it was because of their families. Growing up there had been a lot of cotillion dances and Junior League events where their moms had thrown them together. But then as they’d both become adults, he’d thought the crush would fade.

It hadn’t.

He knew that she wasn’t the girl he’d dreamed about in middle school and high school anymore, but there was another part of him that wanted to claim her. That wanted to know that he had won over the prettiest girl from the Five Families neighborhood. That she was his.

Even just temporarily.

She was watching him cautiously. Almost as if she were afraid to trust him. That hurt.

More than it should have.

Granted, he was coming to her with a harebrained scheme, the kind that make his dad laugh his ass off at him. But she did need a break from the blind dates. And he did need a fiancée. He wasn’t about to get involved with Marnie again and she would be relentless if he didn’t provide a distraction.

“The hospital board has promised to make a decision in two months’ time. So I’d need you to be my fiancée for about three months just so that you can attend the gala after I’m announced chief and the wing is opened,” he said. Three months. That should be enough to convince him that any crush he’d had on her was well and truly dead. He could go back to being her friend and stop having hot dreams about her.

“Three months? Would we live together?” she asked. “I’ve been looking for a job and have some modeling gigs set up so I won’t be in town continuously during that time. Would that be a problem?”

Derek leaned back in his chair trying to stay cautiously optimistic, but it seemed to him that she was almost on board with the idea. “I don’t think so. In fact, I might be able to swing some time off and go with you. It would probably enhance the entire engagement story.”

“Fair enough. What about the bachelor auction? I see you’re already on the list. Would an engaged guy be on there?” she asked.

“Yes, because we were hiding our engagement. You can bid on me and win me now,” he said with a wink.

“If we’re engaged why do I have to bid on you?” she asked with a wink back. “My brother is already into me for a month of babysitting if I win him.”

Derek had to laugh. The bachelor auction might have been one of the Five Families Women’s League’s largest fund-raisers but the men were always trying to get out of it. He just didn’t like the idea of being at the mercy of someone who’d “won” him.

“I’m offering you three months of no blind dates,” he said.

“That’s something that Diego can’t match.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure people would not believe you were dating your brother.”

“Thank God,” she said, laughing. This time there wasn’t the manic edge to her tone that had been there earlier when he’d first mentioned the whole engagement scheme.

“Yes. So what do you say? Are we going to do this?” he asked.

“Where would I live?” she asked.

“With me or not. Your choice,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

He hadn’t thought of anything beyond finding a woman who’d agree and then telling Marnie about her. But now that Bianca had mentioned living with him he knew he wanted her in his house.

Then he immediately had a vision of her in his bed. That thick ebony hair of hers spread out on his pillow, her chocolaty brown eyes looking up at him with sensual demand. Her limbs bare...

“Derek?”

“Huh?” His mind was fully engaged in the fantasy that had taken hold.

“I said, would you mind if I lived with you? I’ve been staying with my folks but we really need our own space.”

He nodded. Living with him worked. “That sounds perfect. What do I need to do to get the place ready for you? Are we doing this?”

She leaned forward and he saw that same concern and uncertainty in her eyes and he realized that fantasies aside, he never wanted to put Bianca in a position where she was anything but a friend to him. He wanted her to be able to count on him. Even if that meant ignoring his own need for her.

“I want to say yes. Can I have the evening to think it over?” she asked, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I want to make sure I haven’t missed any details and I want to run it by Benito. Make sure he’s okay with another man in my life.”

“He’s two, right?”

“Yes, but he and I are very close and I just...after losing his father, I want to make sure he’s going to be okay,” Bianca said.

Derek nodded. He wasn’t going to force her. He was surprised she’d considered his offer and was willing to go along with it as far as she had this evening.

“That sounds fair,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket and checking his calendar. “I don’t have any surgeries scheduled for tomorrow morning so I’m free. Would you and Benito like to come over to my place for breakfast? You can check it out and he can meet me.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Too bad she didn’t seem so convinced of that. He wasn’t too sure how to convince her. This wasn’t like the operating room where he knew all the variables and could make sure nothing went wrong. This was life where he tended to make mistakes, and he really hoped this didn’t turn out to be a big one.

* * *

As she sat there with Derek, Bianca knew that one night wasn’t going to be enough time to ensure she made the right choice. But then a two-year-long engagement to Jose hadn’t really been beneficial in hindsight. This would work. She needed it to.

She had been struggling since she’d returned to Cole’s Hill. She’d stayed in Spain for nine months after Jose’s death and then just after Benito had turned twenty-two months old had decided to come back to Texas but she was no closer to figuring out what was next. She was the first to admit that her knee-jerk reaction of divorcing Jose when she’d found out about his mistress had been just her way of getting out of a bad marriage. She’d never thought beyond hurting him the way he’d hurt her. Now that he was dead, she’d hoped the anger would be gone, but she knew it was still there.

And not working, living with her parents where they had a cleaning staff and wanted to hire a nanny for her, just gave her too much time to think about—dwell on—the past. It was humiliating and not productive.

This idea of Derek’s was a little bit on the crazy side, she knew that, but there was a part of her that really liked it. From certain angles, she saw it as the solution to all of her problems. She wanted to be out of her parents’ house and out from under their overprotectiveness. She could research some career options besides modeling and give her a chance to be the kind of mom to Beni that she wanted to be.

“Yes. That sounds good to me,” Bianca repeated. She realized she might have been staring at Derek. As their eyes met something passed between them that never had before.

A zing.

An awareness.

Oh, no. Had he figured out that she’d been secretly crushing on him for the last few months? How embarrassing. She gave him her cotillion smile—the one she always used to put boys in their place back in the day—and then pushed her chair back. “I think I should be getting home.”

“I’ll walk you back,” he said. “Or we can steal one of the golf carts.”

She shook her head. “I thought we both agreed to never speak of golf carts.”

“No one will suspect a thing,” he said.

“That’s what you thought the last time. And I’m pretty sure that the groundskeeper knew it was us, even though he could never prove it.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re right. So, walking might be the safer option,” Derek said in that easy way of his.

She felt silly thinking that there might have been something between them. It was probably all on her side. It had been a very long time without sex—since before Beni was born—and she wasn’t dead. She had been hoping she’d at least feel okay hooking up with one of her mom’s blind dates. But so far it hadn’t worked out.

“You okay?” he asked, coming around to hold her chair while she stood.

“Yes. Sorry. Just tired. Being ‘on’ with a stranger is draining,” she said.

Derek put his hand on the small of her back and she felt that zing again. This time a shiver spread up her spine and she stepped aside, fumbling for her handbag.

He followed her out of the dining room. She had an account at the club like all of the families who were members, so they didn’t have to settle any bill.

“I need to let my brothers know I’m leaving,” Derek said.

She nodded, still more in her head thinking about what he’d asked of her. His family was large, like hers, and she understood the dynamics of having siblings around.

The evening was warm; the unseasonable heat of the day hadn’t dissipated yet. The parking lot was full of cars and though it was the middle of the week it felt like the weekend. The night was busy and full of life and she realized that was what she’d been missing.

She hadn’t felt busy in a long time. She wasn’t saying she had the whole mothering thing licked but she and Beni had fallen into a routine where she knew what to expect. And life had become routine instead of fun. She knew that was why she was thinking of taking Derek up on this idea. It was the first unexpected thing to happen to her since...well, for a really long time.

“I’m glad you’re back in Cole’s Hill,” he said.

“Me, too. Remember how badly we wanted to get out of here?” she asked. “I really thought modeling was going to be the life for me. I mean I figured I’d be like Kate Moss and spend the rest of my life living in the jet set...but now, I’m sort of glad that I’m right here.”

“Was Benito planned?” he asked.

“That’s kind of personal,” she said, but only because he’d stumbled onto an argument she and Jose had had many times.

“We’re going to be ‘engaged’ and we’re friends,” he said. “Just asking because your dream life didn’t sound like it included motherhood.”

“It didn’t. With all my brothers, I never thought about having a family of my own. I figured I’d be the cool auntie to my nieces and nephews,” she said.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“Well...” She paused as they turned off the sidewalk onto the path that led to the manmade lake adjacent to her parents’ house. She stopped on the bridge over the lake.

“Well?”

She put one hand on the railing and looked over at Derek. He was her good friend but there were so many things about her he didn’t know. The embarrassing stuff that she shared with no one. And this was something that she never needed to tell him. This bit of humiliation had died with Jose.

She looked into Derek’s eyes and started to tell him what she always did when she was asked about the baby. But in her heart, she remembered Jose saying that a baby and a family would stop him from looking outside of their marriage bed for company. That a family would ground him in a way nothing else could.

Three

Derek thought she’d have some sort of easy answer. Her modeling career hadn’t been conducive to children, but she came from a big family as he did. It might be a bit old-fashioned but he had assumed she would end up wanting kids after she married. But her hesitance told him there was something more to it. He’d struck a nerve that he hadn’t meant to and he should have just let it go.

But this was Bianca, and there was that look of sadness in her eyes that he didn’t glimpse very often. He put his hand on her shoulder, felt that spark of awareness and shoved it down. She needed a friend not a guy who was turned on by her. That damned perfume of hers wasn’t helping. It was subtle and floral and when the wind blew, he couldn’t help inhaling a little more deeply.

“Bia?” he asked. “It’s okay if you don’t want to answer me.”

She just glanced over at him with those big brown eyes of hers and he was lost. He realized this was exactly how he’d let himself get friend-zoned by her. She had very emotive eyes and he had always been suckered into wanting to comfort her, to be there for. To slay dragons for her. But Jose was dead so if he was the dragon there wasn’t anyone to slay.

Besides she’d had the fairy tale: first-love marriage with Jose. That wasn’t the problem.

“Hey, forget I asked. I was just making small talk,” Derek said even though that was the farthest thing from the truth.

He heard his old man’s voice in his head: start out as you mean to go on. Well, lying didn’t seem like a really good place to start. But he’d asked her to be his pretend fiancée, not his real one. So maybe that meant they both were entitled to their secrets.

“It’s okay. It’s just that once I got married my life changed... I mean my priorities changed and then I got pregnant and once I held Beni in my arms, everything just sort of...” She paused, glancing over at him and arching one eyebrow. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“Why would I?”

“Well, when I had my son it was like a veil was lifted from my life and I realized how shallow I had been. When I considered that little face I wanted to be more. To be better. To give him the world—not material things—but experiences. It changed me.”

He could see that. She pretty much glowed whenever she talked about her son. And Derek had seen her in town with the little boy and she seemed to be in her element when she was with him. He couldn’t reconcile it but she almost seemed prettier when she talked about her son.

He remembered something his brother Hunter had said once...that women in love were more beautiful. And he finally saw that. He saw it on Bianca’s face when she talked about her son. He had to be very sure that he was careful when she moved in with him. She might be his secret crush from adolescence but she was a woman now, a mother, and he couldn’t afford to explore a “crush” unless she was looking for the same thing.

He took a deep breath, put his hands on the wooden railing and looked out over the lake. He’d grown up on the Rockin’ C but he’d spent a lot of time with his dad on the golf course and hanging out at the club after school.

And as he looked at the moonlight reflecting on the water he thought about how much his town had changed. There was now a NASA training facility on the Bar T. Bianca was a famous supermodel, his brother a former NFL wide receiver. It was crazy.

“I don’t think anything has lifted a veil from my life,” Derek said out loud. He was still the same inside as he’d always been: determined to do whatever he had to in order to keep on track with his medical career. He’d left the ranch at fifteen and Cole’s Hill to go to college, finished undergrad in three years and then gone on to medical school. There had been no stopping him.

“Maybe that’s why this setback with being named cardiology chief has been such a shock. I just have always been focused on becoming a surgeon and then on making sure I was the best.”

“You are the best,” Bianca said. “You’re lucky, Derek. You’ve always known exactly what your purpose is. Some of us stumble around until we find it.”

“You? You never seemed to be stumbling.”

She threw her head back and laughed, and he listened to the sound of it, smiling. She had a great laugh.

“That’s just because I only let people see what I want them to.”

“Like the Wizard of Oz?” he asked. They’d both been in the play in middle school. He’d been the Tin Man and she’d been Dorothy.

“Just like that. ‘Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain’ should be the motto for my life.”

“But not now, right? You have Beni,” Derek said.

She shrugged. “I’m still faking it sometimes. I mean, he has given me purpose, but being a mom is tough. Every day as I reflect on what has gone on, I wonder if I’ve screwed him up...that’s why I want to think this engagement over. I don’t want to say yes and then realize that this decision is the one that ruined him.”

Derek nodded. He was pretty confident in his personal life and in the operating theater but there were times when something went wrong and he had to keep going over the surgery to see what had happened. Had he missed something? Had the error been his? How could he keep it from happening again? He’d never thought that Bianca would be like that.

She seemed confident and able to conquer anything. Seeing that she wasn’t perfect made him want her even more. It made her real. Not the image of the girl he’d had a crush on, but the real woman.

* * *

This night had taken a turn and she wasn’t sure she was that upset by it. She had been saying that she wanted something different to happen. That she was tired of the Wednesday night blind dates set up by her mom that coincided with her dad taking Beni and her brothers out to dinner at the Western Two Step. Her father had missed out on bonding with Beni after his birth as they had been living in Spain. So her father was determined to make up for lost time. And the Wednesday nights with the boys were a long-established tradition in their family. It was a sports bar of sorts that had a huge gaming area in the back; they served what her father called “man food.” Pretty much just burgers, steaks and fried everything. It was a tradition in their family for as long as Bianca could remember.

When she’d been in her teens every Wednesday she and her mom would have a spa night and go and get pedicures and manicures or facials or massages. And have a “girl’s night out.” Somehow her mom’s desire to see her with a new man had taken over girl’s night. Bianca knew that saying she was engaged to Derek would probably make her mom happier than just about anything else right now. The top of her bucket list was seeing her daughter happy again.

She’d said that to her.

And now she was standing next to the lake with the cicadas singing their song in the background and Derek was watching her with that too intent look of his. It was something she associated mostly with him when he was in surgeon mode. But tonight, he was concentrating on her.

She knew how important being named chief of the cardiology department was to him. He’d laid out his life plans when they were fifteen; at the time, he’d been getting ready to leave for college and she’d just gotten her first modeling job in Paris. They had been sort of thrown together as the two outsiders. The two who were leaving. And here they were again.

There was a bubble of excitement in her stomach, something that she hadn’t felt since Beni had started walking and talking. She shook her head and cursed under her breath.

“What? Are you okay?” Derek asked.

She nodded wryly at him. “I just hate it when my mom is right. I mean, it would be nice if she started screwing up sometime. But every time I rail against her interfering in my life, something happens to show me she’s onto something again.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

She realized she couldn’t tell him how she felt. He wanted a friend. Not a woman who was feeling all tingly and very aware of the shape of his mouth. He had a great-looking mouth. Why was she noticing it now? And now that she’d noticed it why couldn’t she stop wondering how it would feel pressed against hers?

“Nothing... I think I can make it safely home from here if you want to get back to your brothers,” she said. The sooner she got away from the temptation that Derek offered the better she’d be. Maybe it was just her reaction to being with a guy who—what? The nice man her mom had set her up with had been good-looking, too. So why was she attracted to Derek and not to him?

And shouldn’t that be a mark in the con column for going through with the pretend engagement?

But she knew she wasn’t going to say no. Not now. Not since she’d noticed his mouth and couldn’t get out of her mind if he was a good kisser or not.

It was shallow, but for once the weight that had been on her since Jose’s death seemed to be long gone. She didn’t feel like the hot mess she’d been. She felt almost...well, almost like her old self and there was nothing that would make her walk away from this.