Page 31 of Shopping for a CEO's Fiancee
“I want you to spend more time at my place. With me.” A single drop of sweat chooses that moment to dangle from the end of one curled-up piece of my hair onto my cheekbone, making me feel like I’m crying.
I’m not.
“Are you asking me to—” Amanda can’t say the words, so she just narrows her eyes and waits me out.
“To bring some of your stuff over. Keep it in my apartment. For convenience.”
“Convenience.”
“Right.”
“How much stuff?”
“As much as you want.”
“For a man whose entire company functions as a result of his painstaking clarity, you really suck at this conversation, Andrew.”
“If I asked you to move in with me, would that help clarify?”
“You’re asking me to move in with you?”
I guess I am.
I shrug.
“We were practically married. I’d marry you if I thought you’d bite.”
“I was closer to being married to Chuckles than you, Andrew. Or should I say, Ayndrough.” She’s using a light tone, but I can tell she’s covering for deep feelings that I’ve stirred up.
Mine are churning, too.
“If it’s too much, just start with an outfit. A toothbrush. Some makeup.”
“I get my own drawer?”
“And a hook. I’ll install a single hook in the closet for you.”
“So generous!”
“Hey, you can have the entire closet if you want. I don’t want to scare you off.” I know not to say it, but I can’t help myself.
“You’re not scaring me. You’re just...this is fast.” She’s skeptical.
“Fast?”
“We never really dated.”
“Of course we dated! We went to Consuela’s, and...” I snap off in mid sentence. We also went to... My mind goes blank.
“See? You can’t even—”
“Fenway Park!” I snap my fingers. “We went to a game.”
“And that day turned out so well.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. That was a terrible day. Trapped between business associates and Amanda’s obvious distress as she unraveled from something I didn’t understand, I failed her. Fear (fine, I admit it) of going outside and following made me a prisoner of my own failure.
“I found you at home.”
“You did.”
“And as I recall, we did just fine after that.”
“Until you dumped me.”
“I didn’t—” The truth hits me, like a foul ball gone funky.
“You did.” The finality of her words feels like a shattered baseball bat.
“I did.” I accept the truth of how much I hurt her that day. I know it hurt, because it pierced me to do it. When you trap yourself inside a double bind in your own mind, an irrational emotion can lock you up forever, because it’s self-justifying. All the reasons you’re wrong are overridden by this perfectly reasonable, absolutely rational set of rules that make sense.
Only in a closed system.
When you turn your heart into a fortress, you can defend it against anything.
Including love.
“And I was wrong,” I choke out. “I’ve lived a life so closed off from any hint of openness. You felt expansive, like I would be carried off in the wind, floating out of control, carried by the whims of Mother Nature, exposed. That’s how loving you feels, Amanda. Like every part of me can’t quite catch its breath because I’m dissolving, becoming part of everything else.”
She reaches for my hand. I thread my fingers in hers. Our eyes meet.
“I’m going to screw this up,” I confess.
“Say it anyway.”
I nod.
“It’s barely been a week.”
“It feels like a month.”
“Like eternity.”
“We’re not competing for a Hyperbole Prize here, Andrew.”
“No. The stakes are higher.”
“Much higher.”
“Stratospherically higher.”
She punches me.
“Is your only objection that we haven’t dated long enough?” I press. Because if that’s it—really, truly the only problem here—then there is no real conflict. No true doubts. If Amanda’s hesitation comes from a sense of disbelief that I can feel great certainty in the face of being together for a short time frame, then this is a done deal.
I am the master of persuasion.
I need to apply my boardroom skills to the bedroom.
Convincing her that I am sincere and sure will be a pleasure.
“I don’t know.”
Shit.
I don’t know is the cockblocker of all negotiations.
“You don’t know whether we’ve dated long enough, or you don’t know whether your only objection is that we haven’t dated long enough?”
She blinks, her face changing expressions, trying a few on for size, her inner state written all over her face. I love that she’s comfortable enough to drop her masks more and more with me. Meanwhile, my inner state is a war zone, complete with bombers on an air raid and artillery exploding all over the place as I try to keep my emotions in check and figure out the lay of the land here.
“I can’t wrap my head around the fact that you pushed me away less than a month ago and now you’re certain you want to spend the rest of your life with me.”
Oh.
That.
“Clarity.”
“You’ve achieved emotional clarity like that?” She snaps her fingers.
“Yes.”
“And you expect me to be so clear, too.”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
“I’m not fooling around here, Amanda. You have nothing to worry about. This is it. You’re the person I want to be with forever. All I need now is your buy-in, and we’re good to go.”
“Buy-in?”
“Your agreement.”
She peers at me with such incredible concentration that I feel something loosen, an internal aha! that tells me I’m finally getting traction.
This is a done deal.
“You make it sound like a detail in a business negotiation.”
“Marriage is a merger.”
The incredulous look she gives me makes my confidence falter. “Whatever happened to the guy who quoted Dickinson on our first date?”
I point to myself. “Same guy.”
“And now you’re describing the biggest emotional commitment of my life as a buy-in?”
“When you know, you know.”
“Maybe I don’t know.”
Blood pounds through my body like a clock, measuring time by my pulse, each second profound and painful, achingly slow and ponderous. I don’t know chimes over and over.
“You don’t have to know,” is all I can croak out. I’m dying. This is how it feels to have blood pump through a heart that is collapsing, cell by cell. Slow motion makes it all so much worse.
And then our eyes meet.
“I propose a traditional courting,” she says, as if a light bulb just went on inside her head.
“A what?” Don’t mind me. I’m just pretending to be alive.
“Court me.”
“Court you? Is that a new sex thing?”
“No, Andrew. It’s a very old-fashioned love thing.”
“Courting? Like something from a Jane Austen novel? You want me to turn into some Regency-era duke with rules and calling cards?”
“And breves. If you’re going to go to the trouble to get calling cards, make sure your liveryman brings me breves, too.”
“I highly doubt the Darcy and Bennet families drank breves during calling hours.”
She arches one eyebrow. “Your knowledge of Austen and Dickinson is so hot.” She fans herself.
“You and the breves. They’re like tiramisu to most women.”
She gives me a coy smile.
Oh, no.
She’s serious.
“Amanda. I don’t have time to play games. Either we’re dating, or we’re not.” Either you love me, or you don’t.
“And if I said ‘not’?”
My entire body turns into a bundle of frozen meat filled with icebergs in my blood. The Titanic crashes on one of them.
“Is that what you want? To not date? To not—” I can’t say it. Not be together.
“No.”
“No, you don’t want to date, or no, you—”
“I want to be with you.”
I breathe again.
“But with courting,” she adds brightly, giving me an amused grin, eyes flashing.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I need clarity, too. You already have it. I don’t. Figure it out, Mr. CEO.” She gives me that damn finger-shoot Declan uses when he’s being extra sarcastic. “You’re a sharp guy.”
And with that, she walks out of my office, the view of her sashaying ass turning the ice in my blood up to a boil.
Courting? Courting?
“How do you court someone you’ve already been almost-married to?” I mutter to myself.
“I guess we’ll find out,” she calls back through the door.
Bzzzz.
“Mr. McCormick? An official from the FCC is on your line? He says you’re ten minutes late for a conference call?” Gina’s voice startles me back to reality.
“Gina. I want you to research courting and have a report for me in my inbox by EOB.”
“Courting?”
“Yes.”
“Is that a new sport?”
“No. An old one.”
“Courting?” I hear the tap of keys. “Do you mean courting, as in wooing a woman for marriage?”
