Engaging the Boss (Heirs of Damon) Read online

  “No,” she interrupted, stiffening her shoulders. “I have plenty of money for my clothes. But London would be great. Thanks.”

  He peered at her like she was an odd specimen under the microscope. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just thought, since you’re doing this for me, it would be only fair—”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “But it would be weird if you bought my clothes. I can buy them myself. You pay me well, and I hardly spend anything here.”

  It was true. She worked all day, almost every day, so she spent almost nothing on recreation or a social life. The lab provided food and housing for its staff, since they were in such an isolated part of Iceland. Her generous salary had been accumulating in her bank account for the last three years, and she’d already paid off her student loans.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I’m not beautiful and glamorous,” she said, the words tumbling out before she could stop them. She couldn’t help imagining herself among the well-dressed, sophisticated guests at the wedding, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.

  Sarah wasn’t particularly shy, and she was confident about her intellect and the trajectory of her career. She knew she was better looking than she’d been as a child, but she was realistic about herself, and beautiful and glamorous she wasn’t.

  Normally, it didn’t matter. In the life she lived here, it didn’t matter if she wasn’t attractive. It simply wasn’t a relevant factor of her existence, since Jonathan was obviously never going to think about her as a woman. But it would be relevant at a fancy house party at Damon Manor.

  Jonathan stared at her. “What?”

  She felt herself flushing again but pressed on. “I mean, I’m sure you would prefer to have a beautiful and glamorous fake fiancée. So I hope you won’t mind that I’m not.”

  “Oh,” he blinked, as if he’d finally processed what she’d said. “What do I care about that? My uncle wouldn’t expect me to get engaged to someone like that. You’ll be fine.”

  “Oh. Good.” She went to her desk to get her purse and tried to convince herself she didn’t feel disappointed that he’d agreed she wasn’t beautiful or glamorous.

  It would have been crazy if he’d thought she was.

  ***

  Three hours later, Jonathan realized he’d made a huge mistake.

  He’d fixed the bad wheel on Sarah’s chair and then gone to run on the treadmill with his normal reading material—an alternating stack of scientific journals and comic books. Instead of taking mental notes and shaking his head over how half the work his colleagues produced was utter crap, his mind kept drifting over to the upcoming wedding and how it would work for Sarah to pose as his fiancée.

  He switched to a comic book, hoping it would better hold his attention.

  He’d never really been comfortable around women. Sex was good—since it didn’t require much talking and didn’t take much time away from work—but relationships had always stumped him. Women either bored him to tears or spent way too much time trying to get him to open up and share his feelings. He was happy to work with women as much as men—he worked better with Sarah than he ever had anyone else—as long as they didn’t try to transform the work into something more personal.

  He sped up on the treadmill, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, his feet pounding on the track as his mind drifted further from his reading.

  He’d learned early in life that work was the thing that could bring him fulfillment. His parents were always traveling, so they’d put him in an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. Whenever he achieved in school, they’d been pleased, so he focused all his effort on academic achievements. They’d died in a plane crash when he was almost eleven, and he’d briefly hoped his uncle could be a father-figure for him. His uncle had kept him in the school, however, per his parents’ wishes, he said.

  Jonathan had suspected his uncle simply didn’t want him.

  He spent most of his time in high school studying, and the same was true in college and grad school. When he proposed the purpose and direction of his lab, Cyrus Damon had been impressed and had decided to fund it, but evidently Jonathan hadn’t lived up to his uncle’s expectations in the rest of his life.

  Which wasn’t really surprising. He’d never been able to do anything good enough to be a real Damon.

  But maybe the fake fiancée plan would be enough to get him back into his uncle’s good graces and protect the lab. Without his uncle’s money, Jonathan would have to try to find another source of funding, and that would mean giving over control to someone else—who would likely to take the research in a direction influenced by money, market, or politics, which was exactly what Jonathan had been able to avoid thus far.

  He knew what he needed to work toward now. Restore his uncle’s good opinion. Sustain funding in the lab. Do the work that really mattered.

  He and Sarah had always worked well together. If they could treat this house party like a job, like a task to be done, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  He was just about to resign the topic to his satisfaction and focus on the adventures of a dark, conflicted superhero when he realized a problem he hadn’t even considered before.

  He stopped the treadmill, wiped the sweat off his face with a towel, and went down the hall of the staff housing building to Sarah’s apartment.

  Knocking on the door, he wondered how he could have been so stupid.

  It was a minute before she opened the door, and when she did, Jonathan stared at her in astonishment.

  Her thick red hair was tumbled messily around her shoulders instead of pulled back in the ponytail she normally wore. And, instead of jeans and a sweater, she wore a white tank top and loose, cotton pajama pants. She was barefoot, and her blue eyes were groggy and disoriented. She’d clearly just gotten out of bed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, obviously anxious. Her cheeks were flushed, and she crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, stunned by how pretty she looked. Pretty and curvy. She always dressed in heavy sweaters and a lab coat, so he’d had no idea she had a body that curved so deliciously. “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”

  She glanced at her wrist, although she wasn’t wearing a watch. Then she looked behind her shoulder at a clock that showed it was after one in the morning. Instead of complaining about his rudeness, she said, “It’s no problem. What’s going on?”

  “I wasn’t thinking before,” he explained, pulling himself together so she wouldn’t think he was a complete spaz. “I can’t let you pose as my fiancée.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair to Matt. I’m sure he won’t like this. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before.”

  “Matt?” she asked, pushing up one strap of her top that kept slipping down her shoulder.

  “Matt,” he repeated, trying not to look at the generous amount of cleavage revealed by the slipping of her tank top. Where the hell had that come from? “Your boyfriend? It wouldn’t be right for us to do this. I can think of something else.”

  She stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “I’m not dating Matt anymore.”

  “What?”

  “We broke up almost two years ago. How could you not know that?”

  Jonathan froze, trying to wrack his brain. Had he heard about the breakup and forgot about it? Surely not. He would have noticed if Sarah had moved from the “Taken” compartment in his mind.

  He’d always been comfortable with her, since she was smart, accommodating, and had the same priorities he did. She worked for him and was thus off-limits for deep friendship or dating, so he didn’t have to worry about dealing with anything personal. For the first few months, she’d tried to thank him all the time and made a big deal about trivial things, which he hadn’t liked at all. But, since then, she’d always been perfectly safe and comfortable.

  Until now, for some reason.

  “Did you tell me?” he a
sked.

  She shrugged, glancing down almost shyly, which struck him as uncharacteristic. And kind of pretty. “I don’t know. Maybe not. But I figured you’d know. Everyone knew.”

  It was true that no one had any privacy in the lab. In such a closed community, keeping a secret was almost impossible, but he usually just ignored the gossip, since it wasn’t of any interest to him.

  “So you don’t have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” she said, adjusting the wayward strap again and, in the process, hiding some of the cleavage. “It’s totally fine. It’s no big deal. Really.”

  “Okay. Good.” He stood for a moment, still feeling rather disoriented, like his precariously balanced world was starting to wobble.

  Unfortunately, in the process of staring, he noticed that he could see the outline of her nipples beneath the thin fabric of her top.

  He really didn’t need to see that.

  Her breasts were gorgeous, full and rounded, their shape easily visible beneath the clingy fabric. His body obviously liked the look of them, which was totally wrong.

  He’d tried to date when he first set up the lab here in Iceland, but there weren’t many women around that matched his intellect and interests and soon it was more trouble than it was worth. So he’d lived like a monk for the last three years. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but his urges were simply physical. There were ways to take care of those urges that didn’t interfere with work.

  But his body knew it was being deprived, and was clearly taking revenge by reacting quite wrongly to Sarah now.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, peering at him in concern.

  “Yeah. Sorry. That is, sorry I woke you up.”

  “So we’re still on for the trip?”

  “Yeah. If you’re not with Matt anymore, then I guess it’s fine.”

  “Great.” Her eyes scanned over him, as if she’d just noticed his condition. “Why are you all sweaty?”

  “I was on the treadmill,” he explained, gesturing with the comic book he still held, as if that would explain why his t-shirt was sticking wetly to his chest.

  She peered at the comic book, her lips turning up in a smile. “I didn’t know you ran on the treadmill. Is that what you always read?”

  He glanced down at it almost sheepishly. He’d managed for three years to keep his habits private, even from the person he worked most closely with. He hated to be slotted into the geek stereotype, although in some ways he supposed he fit. He raised his eyebrows almost haughtily. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Of course not.” Her lips quivered.

  “Since, if I’m not mistaken, you have the entire seven seasons of a television series about a girl who kills vampires prominently displayed back there, I don’t think you have any grounds to be snide about my reading material.” He gestured with his head toward the shelf against the far wall, pleased he had something to counter with.

  She flushed again and glanced back at them guiltily, although her lips were still trembling with humor. “I wouldn’t dream of being snide. I’ll let you get back to the treadmill. I’m going back to sleep now.”

  “Good. Great. Thanks.”

  He must sound like an absolute idiot, he realized, when she shut the door. For the first time since he’d known her, the thought of Sarah made him a little uncomfortable.

  And he thought of pretending to be engaged to her for a whole ten days with his family made him very uncomfortable.

  Chapter Two

  Sarah woke up in a strange room.

  She took a minute to orient herself to the crisp bedding and high end furnishings, until she remembered she was in the bedroom of the luxury London hotel she and Jonathan had checked into last night.

  Sarah’s parents were squarely middle-class, and she’d been raised staying only at mid-level chain hotels. This room was much nicer than anything she was accustomed to.

  She sat up in bed, feeling fuzzy and vaguely nervous.

  She and Jonathan had flown into London the evening before, arriving so late they hadn’t done anything but go to bed. He’d reserved a two-bedroom suite, explaining that he didn’t want anyone to wonder why an engaged couple was staying in separate rooms. Since he was a Damon, people might be paying attention.

  Sarah would have preferred an entirely separate room—since it would be very easy for her to start thinking in dangerous directions here—but she didn’t want to risk exposing their charade, so she hadn’t complained.

  She had a headache, so instead of jumping right in the shower as she’d planned, she put on a soft hoodie over her tank top, pulled her messy hair into a quick ponytail, and went out to the main room of the suite to get a cup of coffee.

  Maybe Jonathan wouldn’t be up yet.

  He was up, sitting near the window, drinking coffee out of his travel mug, and working on his laptop. He’d thrown on some clothes but obviously hadn’t showered or shaved.

  “Morning,” she said brightly, trying to sound casual, despite the weird fluttery nerves she felt over seeing him so domestically first thing in the morning.

  “Hey. You’re up early.”

  “Not as early as you. Did you sleep at all?”

  He shrugged, still focusing on his laptop. “A couple of hours.”

  Sarah added a lot of cream to her coffee, since he’d made it as strong as usual. “What are you working on?” He didn’t usually spend much time on the computer, so she was curious.

  “Email. Nothing else to do outside the lab.”

  Sarah had learned early on not to send Jonathan email, since he would rarely answer it. She sipped her coffee, watching as he rubbed his chin and read something on his screen. He hated email, just like he hated shaving and eating lunch—tedious duties that distracted him from the work he really cared about.

  He glanced over, noticing her watching him. “Do you think you’ll be done with shopping by four this afternoon? My uncle wants us there by dinner. If not, I’ll just tell him no.”

  Sarah almost snorted. “Definitely. I’ve never shopped more than an hour in my life. If I make it to noon, it will be a remarkable feat.” As she talked, she walked over to him and checked his mug. It was almost empty, so she brought it over to the kitchenette to refill it.

  He looked away from his screen again with a smile that made her flush with pleasure, since he obviously appreciated that she was low-maintenance about shopping.

  He accepted the coffee she handed him automatically, barely registering that his mug had been filled. He appeared to be in a friendly mood, so she sat down on the sofa near his chair to drink her coffee. Her headache was already starting to go away.

  Jonathan was way too attractive this morning, his t-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders and strong arms, and the stubble and messy hair making him look rumpled and masculine.

  She’d never realized he worked out, but she now realized that was foolish. He wouldn’t be in such good shape otherwise. He must do it right before bed. When he’d knocked on her door in the middle of the night earlier this week, he’d been hot and sweaty and sexy.

  It was so strange, seeing him out of a lab coat—like he wasn’t fully dressed, even though he was completely covered.

  Another flutter of nerves made her ask, “Do you think we’ll have separate rooms at your uncle’s?”

  He looked up again, vaguely surprised. “Yeah. For sure. He never puts unmarried persons in the same room.”

  “Okay. I should have guessed, since you’d said he was so old-fashioned.” She hid her relief. Having her own room would be much better. The less she saw of Jonathan like this, the better.

  Imagining what he’d be like in bed was really not good for her state of mind.

  She noticed a newspaper lying on a side table, so she opened it up to read. A few minutes later, she glanced over at Jonathan and noticed he was watching her.

  She was glad she’d put on the hoodie, so she was completely covered. She was in her pajamas but wasn’t showing
any more skin than in her work clothes.

  She cringed as she thought back to the other night, when she had been too startled by the knock to think about covering up.

  Some women went around in tank tops all the time, but she’d never been skinny enough for that. She wasn’t fat—by no definition could she be considered fat—but she also wasn’t skinny, and she didn’t like to show off her body.

  She started to grow uncomfortable, so she got up to refill her coffee and then told Jonathan she was going to get dressed.

  He mumbled out an inarticulate response. He was focused on work again, so she wasn’t even sure he noticed she left the room.

  ***

  Sarah stared at herself in the mirror with a heavy feeling in her gut.

  She really didn’t like what she saw.

  “I guess it’s all right,” she said, turning slightly to see her ass in the three paneled mirror.

  The saleswoman, whose name was Karen, shook her head. “It’s not good. The black washes you out, and the A-line skirt makes you look hippy.”

  “I am hippy,” Sarah responded mournfully.

  She had no idea where the best place in London was to shop, so she’d gone to a well-known department store. The clothes were more expensive than she’d expected, there were way too many departments, and she wasn’t even sure what she’d need. She’d wandered around aimlessly for nearly an hour, feeling more and more anxious about how she would ever get decent clothes for this wedding. She was going to humiliate herself and Jonathan.

  Karen had found her close to tears over a rack of cocktail dresses and offered to help. Sarah had explained her predicament and was vastly relieved when Karen told her she was in the right place, since she’d definitely need a couple of cocktail dresses for dinners or drinks.

  “Can I pick out something for you?” Karen asked. “Would you mind?”

  “Sure,” Sarah said. “If you think something would be better than this. But I’ll need black, won’t I? I don’t want to stand out.”