The Wife Arrangement by Wylder Penny

Author:Wylder, Penny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

“How was your day?” Jasper meets me in the lobby with a bouquet of flowers and a huge, shit-eating grin on his face. But his expression dips a little when I don’t return it.

“Not bad,” I say, accepting the flowers with a forced smile. I lean up to kiss his cheek.

“Uh uh.” He leans away. “Not buying it. What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” My cheeks turn bright red, not for the first time throughout this long, long day of pretending I didn’t overhear all the stuff the other girls were saying while we worked through a huge stack of overdue invoices down in accounting, inputting them into the computer, making up spreadsheets… “I just got put into accounting for my first rotation. It’s fine, just…”

“A lot of busywork?” Jasper nods, knowingly, to my surprise. “Been there. My dad started me in accounting for the first two years I worked here. Wouldn’t let me advance into any of the fun stuff until I got a grasp on how the financial side of the business worked.” He smiles a little wryly.

“Well. Two years? I certainly can’t complain about two weeks then.” I laugh. But my worried expression remains, and after a beat, he rests a hand on the small of my back and shoots a glance over my head toward the receptionist’s desk on the far end of the lobby.

Caroline is not so subtly glaring daggers at us over her computer screen.

“Did anything else happen?” he asks. “Did Caroline try and mess with your head? She’s done that before, to another girl I had a fling with down in engineering…”

“How many girls here have you had flings with?” I roll my eyes and elbow his side. “Sounds like you should be getting the flak around here, not me.”

“You’re getting flak?” A worried crease appears between his brows.

“No, I mean… That’s not…” I shake my head. “It’s fine.” The last thing I want to do is stir up more trouble, or get anyone a bad name with higher-up management just because they’re spreading perfectly true gossip about me.

“What’s going on? Talk to me, Dee.”

“It’s just hard, you know?” I draw my left hand out of my pocket for what feels like the first time in hours and let the ring catch the overhead lights as we stride through the lobby, out toward Jasper’s car. “I feel like I just painted a target on my back. Everyone knows who I am now, and not for anything I’ve done, but just because I’m Jasper’s Quint’s out-of-nowhere fiancée.”

He laughs for a second. “That sounds like the bad title of a romance novel.” Then he sobers, after a glance at my face. “No, I understand. I have to admit, I didn’t really think about this side of things when we made our, ah…” He waits until we clear the doors and reach the empty parking lot, and are halfway to his car before he speaks again. “This arrangement.” He opens the door for me like usual, and I smile up at him as I climb into the passenger side seat.

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