THIRTY-DAY FIANCÉ Page 5

  "I don't wear perfume. After I shower, I put on—"

  "Oil." He said the word like a slow, velvet caress.

  "Yes. How did you know?"

  He shrugged. "Lucky guess," he said, and the front door opened.

  Soon after that, Olivia found herself separated from Nick. The hostess, Doris Tartington, along with the managing partner in Nick's law firm, Bob Turner, and a client, quickly surrounded him.

  Olivia was introduced and forgotten, which was fine with her. She tasted a few appetizers, sipped champagne, and admired the lavish decor of the host's home. Several of Nick's colleagues introduced themselves to her. Three asked for her phone number. When she told them she was currently living with Nick, they disappeared before she could also reveal that she would be moving out soon.

  After a while, she took Nick a glass of champagne and a small plate of appetizers.

  He looked surprised. "Thank you," he murmured, and held her gaze for a moment.

  "Nick, tell Mr. Crenshaw what you did with…"

  Nick reluctantly swung his gaze toward his managing partner and held up his hand. "Just a second, Bob." He turned back to Olivia, cupped his hand at the nape of her neck and brushed his lips against her forehead. "It won't be long," he said.

  Stunned by his touch and the brief caress, Olivia felt a rush of heat and just nodded. She wandered near the fireplace with a second glass of champagne and tried to gather her wits.

  "Lovely party, isn't it?" an older woman said. "You're here with Richmond's reigning hero?"

  Olivia hesitated, then nodded. "Yes to both. I'm Olivia," she said, extending her hand.

  "Pleased to meet you. I'm Daphne Roget and you said you're Olivia?"

  "Yes, Olivia Polnecek. Are you friends with the host?"

  The woman nodded. "I've known them a long time. And have you known Mr. Nolan very long?"

  Olivia chuckled. "About twenty years."

  Daphne's eyes widened. "Since you were children. How sweet. And how is the grown-up Nick different from the child?"

  Olivia thought of all the ways Nick was different and of the way she hoped he wasn't different. "He's taller," she finally said with a smile.

  "What kind of boy was he? Was he small for his age, or was he a big boy?"

  "I always looked up to him," Olivia murmured, smiling as she remembered how kind Nick had been to her. "Even as a kid, he was smart and brave. He let me look at his comic books and tried to teach me how to snap my fingers."

  "Did it surprise you that he grew up to be an ambulance chaser?" Daphne asked.

  Olivia stiffened, and for a fleeting moment resented the woman's curiosity. Glancing at the crowd still surrounding Nick, she shrugged. At the moment everyone seemed to be curious about Nick. "I would never associate the term 'ambulance chaser' with Nick. He fights hard for his clients, and his clients are usually victims."

  Daphne lifted her eyebrows. "You say that with such passion."

  "Nick is passionate about his work."

  "It sounds as if the two of you have a special relationship," Daphne said speculatively.

  Olivia sighed. She hoped Nick would want to leave soon. She didn't like all these questions. "He saved my life in the fire," she told the woman. "I'd have to say there's never been anyone in my life like him, and," she added wryly, "there's never been anyone like me in his life."

  * * *

  "That was hell," Nick said as he drove home. "I shouldn't need to repeat it for a while."

  "I would never have known you hated it," Olivia said. "From where I stood, you looked as if you were enjoying yourself."

  Irritated by how the memory of her scent had affected him the entire evening, he shook his head. Visions of her naked and welcoming had taunted him despite his professional conversation. Every now and then he'd heard her laughter and wished he'd been talking with her instead of the prospective client. "From where you stood, you were too busy getting hit on."

  "I was not," Olivia said. "When those guys asked for my phone number, as soon as I told them I was living with you, they may as well have vanished into thin air."

  Nick pulled into his driveway. "I knew that dress would be trouble. You should have worn a sack."

  "I would have chosen something looser, longer, and much less expensive, but your assistant insisted this was the perfect dress."

  Hearing the offended note in her voice, he cut the engine and turned to her. "The dress isn't the problem. You are."

  Olivia blinked. "Excuse me?"

  "You're too sexy," he told her bluntly.

  Olivia blinked again, then glared at him. "I am not."

  "Yes, you are. The way your hair falls over one eye is sexy. Your eyes are commonly referred to as bedroom eyes. Your mouth makes a man think about a lot more than kissing. And to quote the host of the party, your 'body could stop every clock in Richmond.'"

  "You're insane," she said.

  "Then all the men at that party were equally insane," he told her.

  She gave a put-upon, flustered sigh. "You're exaggerating."

  "I wish," he said with a rough laugh. "If you want to get through your first year of college without attracting attention from men, think potato sacks."

  Olivia rolled her eyes. "Maybe I will. Maybe I'll eat a cherry pie every day and shave my head."

  "Good luck," he said. "If you took a course in ugly and studied every night, you'd still flunk."

  "I don't want to be pretty," she told him. "I don't want to stop clocks or collect business cards from men I don't know. I want—"

  "Business cards?"

  She shrugged. "A couple of the men I met at the party gave me their cards."

  He groaned. "If you don't want to be pretty, then what do you want?"

  She looked achingly uncertain, heartbreakingly vulnerable. "I want to be smart."

  His gut twisted. "You are smart."

  "You don't understand because you have always been smart. Even as a kid, you were smart."

  Nick looked at Olivia again and remembered her quiet, overly submissive mother, her autocratic father, and her bully brother. He wasn't into the psych du jour, but he supposed she hadn't had the most affirming background. In his eyes, however, she was like a gemstone in a bowl of rocks.

  The air in the car was growing cool. He wanted to feel her close to him. It was crazy, but he wanted her to smile. "You know, intelligence is contagious."

  She gave him a sideways skeptical glance. "Oh, really?"

  He nodded. "Yes," he said, leaning closer. "It's like mononucleosis. Since I'm smart, if you kiss me, it will make you smarter."

  Her lips twitched as if she were holding back, then she ducked her head and laughed. The sound rippled through him like bubbly spring water. "That's the worst, the absolute worst reason I've ever heard to kiss someone."

  "You never know until you try," he said, sliding his hand behind her neck.

  She met his gaze with dark eyes full of amused disbelief. "Could you prove this in a court of law?"

  He gave a low chuckle. "You said I'm smart, so I should know."

  Not giving her another opportunity to object, he took her mouth. Her lips were lush and sensual, and she tasted of champagne. The scent of her fragrant oil wove its dark spell around him. He tasted her again and again until she was tasting him back. The problem with kissing Olivia was that it made him want more.

  He wanted her bare, against him. He wanted his still tender hands on her breasts, between her silky thighs making her wet and swollen. He wanted her restless hands on his bare skin, her seductive mouth on his body.

  Olivia pulled back and took a deep breath, her eyes dark with arousal. "I feel a lot of things," she whispered, "but I don't feel smarter."

  * * *

  After a restless night, Nick woke early on Sunday morning and decided to review some briefs while he drank his morning coffee. He suspected Olivia was still sleeping. At 7:00 a.m., the phone rang. He looked at it warily, then quickly answered it.

  "Con
gratulations!"

  Oh, no, Nick thought. One of those fake contest winner dupes on a Sunday morning. "I'm not interested," he cut in quickly.

  "Pardon? This is your neighbor, Anna Vincent." The councilwoman.

  Nick winced. "Oh. Hello, Mrs. Vincent."

  "I just read the paper about your engagement, and—"

  "My engagement," he yelled.

  "Yes. In Daphne Roget's column. It's such a romantic story and—"

  Although his blood pressure hit the roof, Nick's mind clicked into action. Daphne Roget wrote the local party column, and the woman was known to stretch and speculate. Nick thought her journalistic slant would be more appropriate for one of the Enquirer publications. Daphne had attended the party last night. In fact, he thought with a sinking sensation, hadn't he seen Daphne with Olivia?

  "I haven't read the story," he said to Anna. "Thank you for telling me about it. Have a good day," he intoned calmly.

  He ran to the front porch for the paper and nearly plowed into Olivia, who stood at the foot of the steps, rubbing her eyes. "Is there a problem?" she asked in a sleep-husky morning voice that was entirely too sexy for a woman wearing a nightshirt with a pink bunny on the front.

  "Possibly," he said, opening the door and grabbing the paper. He flipped past all the sections he usually read to Daphne's column and began to swear under his breath. "I want a retraction."

  "What—" Olivia began.

  The phone rang. Nick crumpled the paper and closed his eyes. "Suing isn't enough," he muttered. "I want her evicted from the planet."

  "Hello?" Olivia said, and waited a second. "Wh-what?" she asked weakly.

  Nick opened his eyes and watched her. She looked as sick as he felt.

  "But we're not engaged," she said, then moved the receiver away from her ear as loud laughter rang out. She finally met Nick's gaze with wide eyes of distress. "It's the partner from your law firm." She held out the phone to Nick. "Bob."

  Nick took the phone and didn't get an opportunity to breathe before Bob was calling him a sly dog and congratulating him. Several times, he tried to interrupt, but Bob was on a roll.

  When Nick hung up, he squeezed the bridge of his nose. He wanted to punch something. "How long did you talk with Daphne Roget last night?"

  "About twenty minutes," Olivia said, lacing her fingers together nervously. "She kept asking questions about you. I thought she must be a harmless, lonely woman."

  "She is a society reporter with the instincts of a barracuda."

  Olivia winced. "I'm sorry."

  The phone rang again. Olivia started to pick it up, and Nick shook his head. "Let the answering machine get it. I need to know exactly what you told Daphne."

  While the phone continued to ring incessantly, Nick listened to Olivia's recounting of her conversation with the society reporter. Olivia had innocently walked right into Daphne's web and supplied her with all the comments the reporter could use to twist and spin to create a completely fictional story.

  "What is this bull about how I was always a smart, brave kid?" he asked, looking at the crumpled article.

  Olivia shrugged. "She asked what kind of boy you were, and I told her I had always looked up to you."

  As a kid, Nick had always been the runt. In the intervening years, all that had changed, but knowing Olivia had seen him differently even back then tugged at something inside him. He brushed it aside. "And what's this bull about you not having another man in your life like me?"

  Olivia winced. "Well, you did save my life. And no one else has ever done that."

  After that, Nick said very little, but his mind worked a mile a minute. Could he get a retraction or was the damage done? When Olivia finished the story, he checked his voice mail. With a sinking sensation in his gut, he listened to congratulatory messages from his assistant Helen, another partner in his firm, and a couple of his colleagues.

  He abhorred the violation of his prized privacy. He considered his options and hated every one of them. Pacing from his kitchen to his foyer, he alternately swore under his breath and shook his head as the phone continued to ring.

  Olivia bit her lip and stepped in front of him, the fragrant scent of her oil weaving its spell over him. Although she wore kneesocks and that oversize nightshirt, he couldn't help remembering how she had felt last night, how she had tasted. "This is my fault. Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to call Daphne Roget and—"

  "No!" Nick said, feeling his blood pressure go through the roof. "No. Do not talk to Daphne again. If she approaches you, ask her about her liver ailment."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I am, too," he said, resigning himself to an imperfect course of action. "Everyone in Richmond thinks we're engaged. It looks like we have no choice."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You and I will have to become engaged."

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  « ^ »

  "What?" Olivia asked when she found her voice. Her heart was racing a mile a minute. She felt terrible for causing this mess, but surely she had misheard Nick. Surely.

  "We have to get engaged," he said so calmly she could almost believe he was sane.

  She shook her head from side to side in short, jerky movements. "No. No, no, no."

  "It sucks, but it's the best solution," he told her. "Getting a retraction won't do any good now. My boss is practically turning cartwheels. It's not fun, but sometimes you have to do damage control."

  Sucks. Damage Control. Olivia's brain replayed the words over and over. This didn't sound like a declaration of love. "It 'sucks'?" she finally echoed.

  "Sure it does," he said. "I don't want to be engaged to you any more than you want to be engaged to me. That's probably the only saving grace in the situation."

  He didn't want her. Her stomach twisted, but she told herself that was good because she didn't need his brand of madness. "Your flattery is overwhelming," she chided, "but I don't think this is a good solution."

  "Given the options, it's best," he said, and it sounded so much like a decree she almost didn't question it.

  She closed her eyes to his overwhelming confidence for a moment and reached inside herself. "I don't have time to be engaged. I need to stay focused on my classes."

  "Then we're even. I don't have time to be engaged either."

  Olivia groaned and opened her eyes. "Then why are we doing this?"

  "Damage control. Sometimes you have to give the people what they want," he said, "before you take it away."

  Olivia blinked. "What do you mean?"

  He waved his hand. "It's temporary. We're engaged for a few weeks, then say it's not working and break it off. That will give you about a month to find a place you want to live."

  A stampede of objections ran through her head. "But we would have to go to some social functions, wouldn't we?"

  "A few," he conceded. "But everyone knows I'm a hermit, so it shouldn't be too many."

  She would have to pretend to be in love with him in public. She would have to act as if she thought he was the most incredible man in the world. He would have to look at her as though he adored her. Her heart pounded against her rib cage at the same time her mind protested. Her sense of survival made a loud clanging noise. She licked her lips. "I don't think this is a good idea."

  "Have you got a better one?" he asked in a direct, penetrating way that gave her some inkling of his court persona.

  Olivia searched her mind futilely for any idea.

  "I didn't want to pull this card," he told her, but there was a ruthless edge to his voice. "You owe me."

  Her breath stopped in her throat. "For saving my life."

  "No," he said with a frown. "For defending you and your Barbie dolls from your brother and getting a broken nose."

  * * *

  She slid the piece of paper next to his plate the following morning as Nick finished his breakfast of a bagel and coffee. Adjusting the backpack on her shoulder, she watched him from the corner of her eye.


  He shoved his law brief aside and looked at the paper. "'Ground rules'?" he read out loud, then looked at her. "Is this a contract?"

  Shaking her head, Olivia grabbed a bagel and popped it in the toaster. She hadn't slept well last night, and it had nothing to do with her classes and everything to do with Nick. "Nothing that complicated. Just a few ground rules so you and I have our expectations straight."

  "'The engagement will last thirty days with an amicable parting,'" Nick continued to read. "Sounds like a contract to me. A primitive one, but…"

  His attitude irritated her. "I didn't use legalese. Do you still understand plain English?"

  He studied her for a moment, then his lips twitched ever so slightly. "I'll give it a try," he muttered.

  "'The engagement shall not interfere with Olivia's studies.' Okay," he said. "I'll buy that. What's this?" he murmured. "'If Olivia's mother finds out about the engagement, Nick has to explain the whole story to her.' Why?"

  Olivia felt every muscle in her neck tense. The bagel popped up from the toaster and she gingerly grabbed it and put it on a paper towel. "Because I told her I wouldn't ever get engaged again unless I was really going to get married."

  "Engaged again? How many times have you been engaged?"

  "Just twice," Olivia reluctantly told him. "Both disasters," she said, thinking that was putting a nice spin on it. She took a bite of the bagel.

  "Disasters," he murmured. "In what way?"

  She swallowed the dry bite and reached for some juice. "Do you really need to know?"

  "I'm going to be your fiancé for the next thirty days, so I need to know."

  "Well, the first one lasted almost a year. I tried to end it several times, but Brad was so nice and I felt sorry for him. He was the youngest son of a wealthy businessman and his father had ignored him most of his life."

  "Brad?" Nick prompted, sipping his coffee.

  "Worthingham," she said, and watched Nick choke.

  "These are the Worthinghams that own most of Maryland and Delaware?"

  Olivia nodded. "Yep. My parents have never forgiven me for not marrying him. They said he was major meal-ticket material. But it just wouldn't have been right. I didn't love him the way I needed to love him. He was nice, but he didn't have any goals. I needed to admire him," she said. "And I didn't."