Her So-Called Fiancé

“We’re not looking for someone who can whip up the sympathy of the man in the street,” Silver Hair said. “We need to impress legislators, educators, corporate sponsors. People with serious concerns.”

“I’m pleased you said that.” Sabrina shot her a dazzling smile. “Because people with serious concerns don’t pay much attention to tabloid headlines. The media will soon lose interest in my, uh, deficiencies. What won’t change is that I’m the best fit for this job.” She squared her shoulders as she glanced around the table. “Do you think you’ll find another spokesperson with my public recognition at all levels of society, who knows what it’s like to put an education on hold because of an injury? Someone who truly understands the difference our school will make?”

Richard leafed through the papers in front of him as if he had two dozen such candidates right there in black and white.

Sabrina knew he didn’t. She breathed a little easier and spread her fingers on the table’s polished surface. It was natural that the board should have questions about the headlines. What mattered was that she could show them she was unique.

“The other possibility,” the man in the blue tie said, “is that we recruit a family member of someone affected by serious injury. Someone who can talk about the effect on the entire family.”

“It lacks the same emotional impact,” Sabrina said with all the authority she could muster.

“Perhaps, but that person might have other qualities that lend themselves to the job. More orthodox qualities.”

Sabrina’s spine tingled. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“One of the reasons I welcomed your approach,” Richard said, “was because your father’s firm has a strong track record fighting legal battles in the education system.”

Okay, maybe she was as stupid as they appeared to think, because it took a full five seconds for Sabrina to see where this was going.

“My family? You’re thinking one of my sisters could front the trust?”

She would rather they gave the job to Miss Maine. To not only have her dream snatched from her, but then to see it handed to one of her fearsomely intelligent, supersuccessful sisters…

I won’t let them do this.

“It’s only a thought,” Richard said.

Sabrina whisked her trembling hands into her lap, and was embarrassed to see her fingertips had left ten smudges on the glossy tabletop. “Neither of my sisters would dream of accepting the position,” she said. “Not when they know how important it is to me.”

She hoped she was right. Her sisters loved her, but they’d thought her winning Miss Georgia and the gusto with which she’d thrown herself into the role was cute, rather than a worthy achievement. They didn’t take her seriously, and she knew darned well they didn’t respect her. Why should they?

She’d spent years letting people do things for her because they’d worried she would overdo it in the aftermath of the accident. Had a string of unlikely, unfulfilled ambitions, culminating in the ignominy of the Miss U.S.A. Pageant. And now the injured children she wanted to help would have to rely on someone else to champion them. To think, she’d even imagined announcing her new role to her family and, yes, impressing them.

She didn’t really believe either of her sisters would snatch the job out from under her if she asked them not to. But she was glad she hadn’t told them about the appointment, glad she didn’t have to witness their lack of surprise when they learned she’d been fired before she started.

Jake wouldn’t be surprised, either. He was about to be proven right—she couldn’t hold down a job.

The only person who believes in me is me. The thought left an unpleasant, metallic taste in her mouth.

If I’m the only person who believes in me, I’m the only person who can fix this.

Okay, she hadn’t expected establishing her independence and earning some respect to be so fraught. But she couldn’t give up now. “The problem with a knee-jerk reaction to the headlines,” she said, interrupting Silver Hair, who’d started pontificating about credibility, “is that it fails to take some important considerations into account.”

“And those are…?” Richard prompted.

At last, someone was giving her a break. She smiled at him, more warmly than he deserved. “You don’t just need someone to recite whatever words you put in their mouth. You need someone who’ll have active input into your strategy.”

Sabrina spread her palms on the table again, not caring if she perspired right through the wood’s high-gloss polish. “For instance, you’re relying on the education department and a few private backers to open their wallets to build the school. That’s not good enough.” Richard’s chin jutted at her temerity, but she didn’t stop. “The school should be fully state funded, so we don’t go through the cycle year after year of begging for donations. We need backing at the highest level of the state legislature.”

Silver Hair let out a condescending laugh. “That’s the dream scenario, but it’s not going to happen. Certainly not because of your involvement.”

The woman’s rudeness was breathtaking.

Spots floated before Sabrina’s eyes. She hadn’t felt this angry since a resident physician had told her she’d likely never walk again.

She needed to say something to shut these people up, once and for all. Something big, no half measures.

Her high profile and her medical history wouldn’t cut it. She needed something that would trump her sisters’ brains, business connections and lobbying capabilities.

What would Jake do? Just yesterday, he’d asked a woman he despised to endorse him. A desperate measure. Jake would do whatever it takes.

Jake.

Desperation.

“You’re probably aware that Jake Warrington, my—” Sabrina drew a shuddery breath “—my fiancé, is running for governor.”

Every person in the room sat up straighter. Including Sabrina, who was fighting the instinct to slink down in her seat.

“You and Jake Warrington are engaged?” Silver Hair asked.

“He asked me to marry him yesterday.” Incredible how easily the lie tripped off her tongue. But then, Jake always said she spoke before she thought.

Richard addressed the board members. “You might have seen Warrington on the TV news, meeting Sabrina at the airport.”

“There hasn’t been anything in the papers about you and Warrington, uh, being involved,” one of the men said.

“We’ve been discreet.” So discreet, Jake doesn’t even know about it. “You may recall that Jake and I have a, er, troubled past.” Heads nodded—anyone who’d been in Georgia during the Warrington bribe scandal knew Ted Warrington’s son’s girlfriend, working as an intern in the governor’s office, had broken the story. “We wanted to be sure of our feelings.”

“So, as Warrington’s fiancée…” Richard prompted, losing interest in the romantic details.

“Jake fully supports the idea of state funding for the school,” she said. “Education is his main campaign platform.” At last, the truth! “So our school will be very much on his agenda.”

“He’s not exactly the fron-trunner in the election,” Silver Hair pointed out.

“Jake’s commitment to education will put pressure on the other candidates throughout the campaign.” That sounded convincing, to Sabrina’s ears, at least. “Special-needs education will be on the political agenda whether the others like it or not. If they won’t make the same commitment as Jake, they’ll look hard-hearted. Kids with severe injuries are an emotional issue—every parent dreads their child being in an accident.”

“Good point,” Richard said.

“As his fiancée,” Sabrina continued, “I’ll be on the campaign trail with him. That is, as far as my commitments to the Injured Kids Education Trust allow.” She smiled brightly. “I’ll be meeting people who are in a position to support the school, and I’ll be doing my utmost to convince them.”

Any more and she risked betraying her ignorance of Jake’s campaign. Sabrina sat back and waited.

Significant glances fired across the room. Richard picked up his pen, made a few notes. He cleared his throat. “The board would like to—”

Yes!

“—congratulate you on your engagement,” he said.

Sabrina held her breath as the earlier contempt evolved into congratulatory murmurs.

“I think we’re all in agreement—” Richard looked around, received emphatic nods in reply “—that this news changes our perspective.”

Sabrina tried not to feel insulted. It didn’t matter if they were impressed because she was engaged to Jake. What mattered was that she could do this job.

“We would be delighted if you would come on board as spokesperson for the trust,” Richard said.

Her exultant whoop took the directors aback. She toned it down to an emphatic nod. “I would be delighted to accept.”

Smiles and handshakes followed, with the men taking the opportunity to kiss a beauty queen.

“This calls for a drink.” Richard crossed to the sideboard. “I have a rather fine single malt here.” He tilted the bottle in her direction.

Now he brings out the whiskey.

“Not for me.” The enormity of what she’d done was starting to sink in, and Sabrina’s knees began to shake. One sip of single malt and she’d be laid out on the floor.

The oblivion was tempting. But she was responsible for her own future now. She stretched her mouth into a smile. “I need to tell Jake the good news.”

Chapter Three

THE BEAUTY QUEEN’S instruction manual was conspicuously silent on the protocol for telling a man who hates you that he’s now your fiancé.

Which meant Sabrina had to figure out her own way to tell Jake, and to enlist his support. Soon. The trust planned to announce her appointment tomorrow, and although she’d emphasized to the directors that her engagement wasn’t yet public, was in fact totally secret, one of them was bound to let slip what was apparently her highest qualification for the job.

As soon as she left Richard’s penthouse, she called Jake’s campaign office from the sanctuary of her lime-green VW Beetle. A staff member told her Jake had a couple of media interviews this afternoon, after which he would go directly to the senior art exhibition at Wellesley High, a private school in Buckhead.

The staffer gave her Jake’s cell-phone number, but his phone was switched off. Sabrina left a couple of urgent but non-specific messages. Though she kept her phone close as she ran errands around town, he didn’t call back. You’d think he’d return calls from the woman who held his political future in her hands…The thought of wielding so much power cheered Sabrina as she walked into Happy Hands for her five-o’clock manicure appointment.

“You poor sweetie.” Tina, the manicurist, hugged Sabrina. “Vile reporters, saying those things about you.”

“I’m over it,” Sabrina told her as she settled into the chair and immersed her hands in a steaming bowl of scented water. “I’m moving on.”

“Good girl.” Tina chatted for a minute about the evening dresses worn at the Miss U.S.A. Pageant, then patted Sabrina’s hands dry with a soft towel. She pumped some moisturizer into her palms, and began massaging it into Sabrina’s skin. “What color today? Scarlet Woman?”

Sabrina flinched. “Make it Lilac Surprise.”

Surprise was perhaps an understatement for how Jake would feel about her announcement. But he couldn’t get too mad, not when their engagement would help him.

She just needed to tell him about it before anyone else did. He’d invited her to attend the high school exhibition, and that was what she would do.

Sabrina tipped her head back, closed her eyes and tried to plan what she would say.

Despite Tina’s relaxing ministrations, the forty-five minutes Sabrina spent at Happy Hands weren’t as productive as she’d have liked. Her mind persisted in playing out scenarios that left her…nervous.

She could see herself telling Jake about the engagement, burying the E word discreetly within the wonderful news that she was willing to support him for governor. Unfortunately, she couldn’t envisage Jake’s gratitude. It seemed more probable that his laser mind would zoom in on the fiancé thing and…mostly, the scenarios ended with him strangling her and burying her in a shallow grave. Yikes.

THE WELLESLEY HIGH art exhibition and auction was an annual event that attracted a strong turnout from the Buckhead locals, many of whose children were current or former students at the school. Several professional artists, some of them quite well-known, had donated works that hung alongside the teenagers’. The school probably hoped to raise tens of thousands of dollars from tonight’s soiree.

Sabrina still hadn’t heard from Jake as she wandered through the growing crowd. The official opening was at seven-thirty. It was seven now, and there was no sign of the guest of honor.

Maybe he was picking up his date. Sabrina almost dropped her smoked-salmon canapé. Did Jake have a girlfriend? She popped the canapé into her mouth, where it promptly turned to cardboard. A girlfriend would complicate matters, to put it mildly.

Tyler would have told her if Jake was seeing someone, he always did. As if he worried she might be hurt at the unexpected sight of Jake with another woman.

Sabrina tugged at her dress to make sure it hadn’t ridden up on her hips. She’d dressed for tonight with expert attention to her appearance—the one thing she was invariably good at. Her knee-length white silk shift dress, its high collar threaded with gold and silver, was very classy. Lots of gravitas.

Perfect for the spokesperson of a charitable trust. Or for a governor’s fiancée.

She abandoned her mineral water and accepted a glass of chardonnay from one of the school’s senior students acting as servers.

Several people greeted her, mostly friends of her father’s. Her dad should be here, too. He’d gone straight to his office when he flew in from Dallas this morning, which meant so far, she’d been spared a rehashing of the chunky-thighs fiasco.

Sabrina made the requisite small talk, but with more difficulty than usual. With every passing minute her sense of urgency grew.

She sipped her wine, but the excellent vintage, which she knew should taste peachy with a hint of oak, might as well have been antifreeze. She paid scant attention to the artworks people pointed out to her. The exhibition was titled Climb; students had been asked to create paintings or sculptures on the theme of upward movement. Maybe it was a good omen, she thought in an attempt to be positive, of the direction her career and Jake’s were about to go.

She was talking to Duncan Frith, the school principal, when she saw Jake shouldering his way through the throng. At first glance he looked ultracivilized—not to mention gorgeous—in his dark custom-made suit and white shirt. Every woman in the place followed him with her eyes. As he neared her, Sabrina realized his expression was thunderous, his mouth set in a grim line that promised zero tolerance for accidental announcements of impending nuptials.

He knows.

His eyes found her, and she had the sense of being lined up in a rifle’s sights. Even as her brain reminded her she needed to speak to him, the instincts honed by a lifetime of pampering told her to run. She would grow up and take responsibility next week.

She’d barely managed to maneuver around Duncan’s considerable girth, when her elbow was clamped in a viselike grip and Jake muttered, “Oh no you don’t.”

“Jake!” She pinned a bright, sociable smile to her lips, while her eyes clung to her destination, the red fire-exit sign gleaming at the back of the room. No longer an option, she conceded reluctantly.

“Jake, glad you could make it.” Duncan Frith shook Jake’s free hand then consulted his watch. “We have ten minutes until the official speeches—let me get you a drink.”

“I need a word with Sabrina first.” Jake tugged her arm.

She could almost smell the damp earth of the shallow grave. She would be insane to go anywhere with him. “Duncan was just telling me how about the senior history curriculum, and it reminded me of your encyclopedic knowledge of Georgia state history.” Under the circumstances, a touch of flattery could do no harm.

“Geography,” Duncan corrected her tolerantly. “We were talking about geography.”

Jake growled. “Excuse us, Duncan.”

Without waiting for a reply, he dragged Sabrina toward the far end of the room, where a cordon marked the end of the exhibition.

She glanced over her shoulder, but didn’t see any gorgeous, sophisticated woman in their wake. “Did you bring a date?” she asked.

He paused in his Neanderthal dragging. “Why do you ask?”

“Neither did I. Rather a coincidence,” she chirped, “that you and I should be single at the same time. Usually one of us is dating and the other…” She trailed off. Not only was she babbling, a habit Jake despised, but she was also revealing that she paid attention to his love life.

He unclipped the cordon, pushed her through and clipped the velvet rope behind them again. As barriers went, it did little to separate them from the masses…So why did Sabrina feel as if Jake had her alone on a precipice?

“Why did a Richard Ainsley call my campaign office and ask Susan when I plan to announce my support for his school for injured kids?” he demanded. “I assume that’s the school you work for.”

Sabrina’s mind raced. “Er…was that all Richard said?”

“What else might he have said?” Jake asked silkily.

She took a slug of wine. “Did he mention my, uh, relationship with you?”

“Relationship?” Jake frowned. “No.” Then, just as Sabrina relaxed, he snapped, “Unless you mean our engagement!”

Sabrina took a step backward. “I can explain.”

“Tell it to my campaign manager,” he said grimly. “I’ve spent the past half hour convincing an ecstatic Susan there’s no engagement. I think she finally accepted it, but your explanation as to how the confusion arose would help.”

Hmm, some backpedaling required with Susan Warrington tomorrow, Sabrina feared. “Susan will be pleased to hear,” she said, “that I’m willing to support you publicly in the race for governor.”

He stilled. “Is this in exchange for me supporting your school?” His hand went to his back pocket, as if he might write a check this instant.

“That…and more.” She finished the glass of wine. “You have to be my fiancé. Not my real fiancé,” she hastened to add. “And not forever. Just until I’m settled in my new job.”

Something dawned in his eyes, and it wasn’t gratitude. “The new job you got all by yourself, the one that proves you’re finally grown-up and independent?”

She swallowed, and wished someone would hurry up and invent the self-replenishing wineglass. “There’s been a glitch. A temporary one. My recent media exposure damaged my credibility as a spokesperson for the trust.”

He snorted. “The Miss U.S.A. garbage?”

“The trust—the directors—said I lack gravitas.”

“Well, you do.”

“Thank you so much,” she hissed, seeing a chance to reclaim the moral high ground. For good measure, she let her lower lip quiver, a tactic she’d been known to employ in her younger days, but one she wouldn’t have resorted to now in anything but the direst emergency.

The quivering bypassed Jake. “Sabrina, you’ve never been serious in your life.” He paused. “Except when you were learning to walk again. You were damn serious about that.”

“That’s how I feel about this job,” she said urgently. “It’s that important. All I need to convince these people I’m more than a pretty face is you as my fiancé—”

“Let’s get this straight,” he interrupted. “You actually told this Richard Ainsley we’re engaged? It’s not some wrong conclusion he jumped to?”

This was it. She closed her eyes, and jumped. “Yes.”

She peeked through her lashes as he flung a wild glance around the room. When he turned back, his eyebrows were a dark, angry slash. “But it’s a lie. A crazy lie.”

“I only told Richard. And the other members of the Trust’s board. I said it’s a secret, but obviously—”

“You lied.”

Did he have to keep stating the obvious? Several people were looking at them. Sabrina leaned into Jake, trying to signal the need for discretion.

“Think about it, Jake, this could be good for both of us. Getting engaged is far better than my endorsement of your campaign. You said yourself I’m more popular than ever thanks to my legs.”

“You would marry me to get this job,” he said, dazed.

“Technically, no. But it will appear that we’re getting married.”

He clutched his head. “You’re sabotaging my campaign.”

“I’m saving your campaign. In the past few weeks, the newspapers have speculated that you’re having an affair with a married woman, that you’re dating a coed, that you’re secretly engaged to the daughter of a former Indian prime minister.”

“None of that’s true,” he snapped.

“Now people will know for sure.”

There was a charged silence while he absorbed her logic.

“All you have to do is say yes to my proposal.” Bad choice of words; Sabrina winced. “Proposition,” she amended.

He rubbed his temples. “This is the kind of idea only you could come up with. Breaking up with you was like breaking out of Fairyland.”

Her eyes smarted, but she said airily, “And I’ll bet you miss the magic.”

He held her gaze, staring her down for several long seconds. Long enough for Sabrina to regroup. She grabbed his arm, determined to make her point before he stormed out and denounced her to Richard Ainsley. “I’m sure you have interns hitting on you all the time—” she swallowed her pride “—just like I used to.”

He scowled as he looked down at her hand on his arm. “I hit on you.” He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe he’d been so lacking in discrimination. “What’s it to you if I encounter the occasional pushy intern?”

She stored away his admission that he’d pursued her, and the precious shred of dignity it afforded. “An engagement will protect you from the single women who could wreck your campaign by misreading something you say or do.”

“And all I have to do is change my education policy for the sake of your job,” he said calmly. He’d never sounded more dangerous.

Sabrina lifted her empty wineglass to her lips, a fragile barrier. “It’s not a change,” she said. “It’s a detail. You put special-needs education on the agenda, I’ll do the rest.”

“You’re overlooking one small fact,” he said. “Namely, you’re the last woman on earth I would marry.”

Ouch! Sabrina pressed a hand to her chest, stared at him. Desperation demanded she get over the insult. “Jake, your campaign is all about educational opportunities for everyone. You’re deeply committed to young people and their learning, I saw it on your Web site.”

“You visited my Web site?” Beneath his anger she discerned satisfaction that the last woman on earth that he would marry was interested enough to check him out online.

“By accident,” she said. “I was running a Google search for jerks.”

Before he could stop himself, Jake barked a laugh. Naturally, Sabrina pounced on the brief cessation of hostilities. “Supporting my school isn’t a big stretch, Jake.” She turned cajoling, the way she used to when they were dating. Using that voice, she’d talked him into drinking the vile blue cocktail she favored at the time. And skinny-dipping in the pool at the governor’s mansion.

Silly things. Games. Nothing like this.

“You’re insane,” he said.

Or was he? Because much as he tried to fight it, she was starting to make sense. It was difficult to campaign as a bachelor—there was always the risk that a kiss on the cheek, an inadvertent touch, would be taken the wrong way. Susan often said her job would be easier if he had a girlfriend.