The world shimmered around Arielle. The crowd was a blurry mass of shifting light and color blocks, and their voices hammered on her ears like rocks rolling in a box.
His lips, his kiss, had blown through her body and soul like a hurricane, stripping every thought from her like scraping bark and leaves off a branch.
Nothing remained. Only his lips, his breath, and the tingling on her mouth where he’d kissed her existed.
His hard body pressed against her, and her very flesh yielded to his.
When she finally inhaled, her breath seemed harsh in her ears.
His voice spoke and sounded in the room, and people made noise.
Wait.
No.
Mitchell Saltonstall had kissed her after offering her fifteen grand for the opportunity, and she’d taken it because her parents needed the cash, not to mention that she could slip some of it to Joanne and the other Match Play staff who desperately needed cash by just adding some money to their health savings accounts. Arielle ran the accounts. She could deposit money from wherever she liked. They wouldn’t know that the money had come from her instead of Match Play.
Fifteen thousand dollars.
For a kiss.
For an incredible kiss that had rocked her world.
But just a kiss.
Mitchell Saltonstall bent and whispered in her ear, “Where can we go that’s private?”
A modicum of common sense arose in Arielle’s mind. “Um, the break room. This way.”
She grabbed Mitchell’s hand.
His warm, soft hand engulfed hers as she marched through the crowd, her other arm straight out in front of her to break their path as she led him through the Match Play employees gathered around the podium toward the break room.
Even the flesh of their palms pressed together sent a tingle up her arm.
When they reached the break room door, she twisted the knob, but he pushed the door open with his hand above her head. “Allow me.”
Once inside the break room, she slammed the door behind them and twisted the rods to close the horizontal window blinds on both sides of the door. “What the hell was that?”
Mitchell Saltonstall leaned on the table and ran one hand through his dark blond hair, turning the waves into loose curls. “I didn’t know what else to do. I had to save Match Play.” He shook his head like he was clearing it. “Okay, let’s start over. Hello, it’s nice to meet you.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Mitchell Saltonstall.”
She didn’t shake his hand. “I know exactly who you are, Mitch.
“Not Mitch.” He shook his head emphatically. “My name is Mitchell. Only old, decrepit, evil, senile assholes call themselves Mitch.”
“Okay, fine. And I’m Arielle Carter.”
Mitchell lowered his hand to the table and stared at the wood. She saw the exact moment her last name registered in his head when he looked at her, his green eyes wary. “Carter?”
“Yeah, Carter.”
“Like Franklin Carter?” His voice sounded more dejected than angry.
“Yeah. He’s my dad.”
“Crap, the optics on this are terrible,” Mitchell sighed, almost to himself, looking down again. When he looked up, his eyes narrowed. “Then why the hell were you eye-humping me out there?”
“I was doing no such thing, and you owe me fifteen grand.”
He waved his hand in the air, brushing it off. “Accounting will cut you a check tomorrow. The important question is, how much is it going to cost me to keep this up?”
“Keep what up? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I just told a roomful of reporters that you’re my hot-and-heavy girlfriend. Every single one of them can make or break Match Play because I didn’t invite low-level rags to this press conference. What will it take for you to pose as my girlfriend through the end of the year?”
The audacity. “I would not. I would never. I shouldn’t have even kissed you for the fifteen grand. It was dishonest.”
“I’m offering you a job. It doesn’t matter if it’s honest or dishonest. It’s just business.”
“Honesty matters! It isn’t just an important thing, it’s the only thing. If you can’t trust someone, you have absolutely nothing. When someone betrays you, you find out that everything is a lie, not just what they said that one time. If I can’t trust someone, I won’t do business with them or date them or hang out with them or even talk to them. I shouldn’t be talking to you right now after what you did to my dad.”
“We need to talk about this, Arielle.” He brushed at the open collar of his dress shirt. “Why is it so damn hot in here?”
“Because of these stupid vending machines. You should never put these huge machines blowing hot air in such a small room. No one comes in here anymore.”
He shrugged while he took off his suit jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. “Do you think the staff shouldn’t have any coffee at all?”
“I shouldn’t even be talking to you. You betrayed everything that’s important to my father. I’m leaving right now.”
When she began to turn, she heard him say, “Please don’t.”
His voice was so soft that she paused before she walked out. “Honesty is important.”
“Then let’s be honest with each other,” he said.
She turned back slightly, but one of her feet was still pointing toward the door because she was getting ready to leave at the slightest provocation.
Mitchell said, “I need you to pose as my girlfriend for press conferences and events for the rest of the year. I will pay you to do it, but it has to look real when we’re in public.”
“That’s so dishonest.”
“Just think of it as acting a role, like you’re in a movie. It isn’t unethical for actresses to act in a movie. It’s just a job.”
Now that they were just talking, it almost sounded like Mitchell had a slight British accent or something. There was a crispness to his words that he hadn’t displayed for the cameras.
She said, “I don’t like it. I’m not an actress. I’m just an HR admin who’s trying to make people’s lives better.”
“I get that, and this aligns with your core values. Posing as my girlfriend will help Match Play stay afloat and thus help some of those people out there keep their jobs. If Match Play goes under, everyone here will lose their jobs, health insurance, and benefits. You wouldn’t want that.”
That was a good point, even though she hated it.
And him. She hated him.
Arielle said, “I don’t even know if I can do it. I’m sure as heck not an actress. I never played anything more important than a sheep in my church’s Nativity play because I can’t act.”
“I’m just asking that you do your best, and I’ll pay you for your time. But we need to make it look real, like when I offered you fifteen grand and you kissed me out there.”
“So you’d be paying me to kiss you.”
He flipped his hand in the air. “If you want to think about it like that, fine. Whatever.”
“That’s prostitution.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is. That’s illegal. And I won’t.”
“I just need to know a number for your opening offer.” His voice was flatter, like he was getting a little angry but wouldn’t raise his voice.
“I am not that kind of a girl!”
“We already established that you are. Now we’re just haggling over price.”
Arielle spun and grabbed the doorknob to leave.
Footsteps clattered behind her on the tile floor, and he slapped his hand on the door above her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m an asshole sometimes, and it just popped out. You’re a nice girl. I get that. If it feels better to you, I’ll make a donation of whatever you want to the charity of your choice, either in your name or anonymously, instead of paying you directly. That means that you’re not what I insinuated before. And I’m sorry about that. I was wrong, and it was wrong of me to say it.”
The mention of a donation instead of a paycheck unlocked Arielle’s brain, and other possibilities presented themselves. “How about you pay my father instead?”
“I can’t put another person on the payroll. As a matter of fact, I have pink slips in my pocket right now.” He gestured toward his suit jacket hanging on the back of one of the chairs. “One of them has your name on it.”
“What? I run HR.”
“No, Molly Carter is the director of the human resources department.”
“My aunt has so much anxiety that she can’t even talk to people. She fills out the forms. I deal with the people.”
“One of you has to go. As a matter of fact, half the employees are being given notice today.”
“Yeah, you would. You’ve been trying to wring money out of this company ever since you bought it.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“You practically swindled my father, who sank all of his retirement savings into Match Play, and then you’ve been nickel-and-diming the staff ever since. People have to bring their own pens from home, and staff morale is at an all-time low because everybody assumes they’re going to be fired at some point. They’re frantically doing their jobs and yet completely despondent. They’re all looking for other jobs. You’ll lose everybody who works here, and then Match Play won’t even exist. You can’t run this company without people. Training new people costs more money than retaining the staff we have.”
“I’m really sorry about how they feel, but I can’t help that. It’s just business.”
“It’s not just business. It’s family, too. The people who work here are a family. We look out for each other. And now you’ve come in and destroyed it.” Dang, it felt good to say these things to Mitchell Saltonstall’s stupid face. “And you took a perfectly respectable tee-times program and turned it into a dating app.” She spat the last few words.
Mitchell scowled and walked back to the other side of the table. “Match Play wasn’t making it as a tee-times app. You were burning money. Match Play would’ve been utterly bankrupt in two months if I hadn't stepped in. At least your father got some of his money back. He was even borrowing against his future Social Security payments. If I hadn’t bought it, he would’ve been left with absolutely nothing and deeply in debt by the time he had the nerve to shut it down.”
“He invested all of his retirement savings into Match Play. He’s tutoring spoiled high school students at a learning center and trying to find a teaching job to go back to work next year. He should be retired. I will never work for you. I’m only still here to help the other people through the transition. I plan to quit as soon as I can. And I can never forgive you for how you swindled my father.”
Mitchell lifted the side of his lip in disgust. “I didn’t swindle him. I made the best deal I could because that’s what I had to do.”
“You didn’t have to snatch Match Play out from under him.”
His eyes were snapping with green rage-fueled fire. “Let me lay my cards on the table so that you can see how important this is. I had to buy Match Play because my stupid friends and I made a bet with some other jerk, a bet that we could buy a golf-related business and turn it around better than the other guys. We bet way too much damn money on it. I mean, way too much. And now the other guys at our company and I are scrambling, trying to win this stupid bet when we should be looking after our own businesses. And quite honestly, they’re all looking to me to win it. I’m the guy who makes the best deals. I’m the guy who turns firms around. We're going under if I don’t win it for our team. We’ll lose our business, Last Chance Inc., and all the associated businesses we’ve bought over the years, which have a hell of a lot more employees than Match Play. I have to make this work. And now that I stupidly told those reporters that you’re my girlfriend, I need you to make it work.”
So Arielle had Mitchell Saltonstall backed into a corner.
Interesting.
“Look, I get it,” he said. “You blame me for your father’s business failing, even though it was falling apart long before I came on the scene. You despise me for making a good business deal that you think was at your father's expense. You don’t have to change your mind about any of that. You just have to act like we’re in absolute love whilst in public. It’s just business.”
His mouth was set in a grim line as he said it, and he was looking down at the floor, not meeting her eyes. That English accent she’d detected had become more pronounced when he’d been upset.
“Maybe we can come to an arrangement,” Arielle said.
Mitchell sighed and dragged a chair away from the table before he collapsed in it. He clasped his hands in front of him and looked up at where she stood. “I’m listening.”
“Hire my father to run Match Play, and pay him enough to where he can retire in a year.”
Mitchell shook his head. “That can’t be done. I just told you I have to cut payroll to the bone. It’s the value of the company that matters at the end of the year, not even how much we make. Payroll is subtracted from the net worth. Every damn nickel matters at this point. If I brought on a high-salary executive, it would ruin Match Play’s return on investment.” He flipped his fingers in the air in dismissal. “Besides, the bet stipulates that I have to run the company personally. I can’t farm it out.”
“Then how would you hire me to pose as your girlfriend?”
“Different job. Your salary would be through Last Chance, or I’ll pay you personally out of my own funds.”
“Then you can do the same thing for my father.”
“I can’t because he’s already associated with the business deal. You’re just an employee here, which means you’re no one. But if I paid him off the books, it would look like I was trying to hide how much I’d really paid him to buy Match Play and thereby change the ROI. In the wager contract, the other guy stipulated that a team of forensic accountants had to look over our records to certify the percentage change in return on investment.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “I can’t believe you signed a contract for a bet.”
Mitchell shook his head wearily. “It was New Year’s Eve, and we’d all had too much to drink. And The Shark wrote an airtight contract that we can’t get out of.”
Oh, wow. “What kind of evil parents named their kid The Shark?”
“His name is Gabriel Fish. We knew him in high school at the boarding school we all grew up at. ‘The Shark’ is a nickname, but he earned it.”
“That should be one of those rules for life. Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never make a bet with a guy named The Shark, and never eat anything bigger than your own head.”
Mitchell smirked and nodded. “I wish somebody had told me that before New Year’s Eve.”
Arielle sat down on the other side of the table, clasping her hands in front of her like Mitchell was. “How about you give my dad stock in Match Play, then? That way, it wouldn’t count as a salary against the company’s ROI, and how much the stock is worth will depend on the company’s value.”
Mitchell raised his eyebrows and nodded. “I have to own the whole company through the end of the year. But, instead of direct stock, we could issue options.”
“I don’t really understand the difference.”
“You don’t need to. It’s essentially like stock, except the options won’t vest until January second of next year. Vesting means they become activated. That way, he’ll be holding them, but the options won’t count against the company’s finances until they are vested. The options’ worth is tied to the increase in the company’s value.”
Arielle nodded. “That seems fair.”
“And the options will only vest as long as you keep up your end of the bargain through January first.”
“But you can’t fire anyone for another month.”
“Jesus, the payroll in this company is ridiculous. Your dad hired way too many employees, and he was paying every one of them far more than market salary.”
“No one. A month. And then only twenty-five percent of the staff per month after that.”
“All right, but this is the last reprieve. I can’t keep carrying all that dead weight.”
“And just so you know, if you lay me off, HR will collapse. You won’t be able to fire anybody else because no one would be able to take people off the payroll and do the exit paperwork.”
Besides, she needed to stick around to keep an eye on things. She didn’t trust Mitchell Saltonstall one dang bit.
“Okay,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “Fine. Done.”
“And I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“Agreed. But we must have displays of affection in public. Serious displays that look real. Kissing, holding hands, groping, long looks, all that crap. If you can’t make it look real at any point, the whole deal is off.”
Nervousness foamed in her stomach. “Okay.”
“You’ll have to attend events with me every weekend, and they’ll probably take most of the weekend. We’ll be signing people up for Match Play at golf expos and conferences, plus doing publicity.”
“Okay, but in private, we’re all business. Nothing more sexual than an ardent handshake after we close the contract.”
“Agreed.”
Arielle nodded. “And just to be absolutely clear, this isn’t a real relationship, and it isn’t a sex deal. I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“Agreed,” he said.
“While we travel, I will always have my own, separate hotel room. I’m not even sharing a two-bedroom suite with you.”
“Yeah, fine.”
“And—and you have to pay for all my expenses. The airplane tickets to wherever you are, and the hotel, and meals, and—and snacks.”
He tilted his head. “Of course. It has to look like we’re dating.”
“And you have to be honest with me. If it’s just business, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be completely honest with me about everything.”
Mitchell looked up at the corners of the ceiling, contemplating it. “As long as it doesn’t influence other businesses that Last Chance owns or the limitations of the bet, I agree.”
“And you have to be faithful to me the whole time. No cheating with other women. Or men. Or whoever.” Oh, that just popped out. Weird.
His sandy eyebrows pinched together, and he looked a little haggard. “So I won’t be getting any from you, and I can’t get it anywhere else either?”
“If you got caught by the press, I would have to break up with you. Publicly. Horribly. I won’t be with a cheater. I won’t even pretend that I am. Besides, what would it do to Match Play if people thought your app was full of cheaters?”
He muttered, “The women would stay away in droves, that’s for sure.”
“So, no cheating.”
“So stipulated. I can go without for eight months.” He didn’t sound sure about that, but then he looked up at her. “You either.”
“What?”
“No cheating. No other men, or as you said, whomever.”
She stared straight at him, glaring right at his deep green eyes. “I would never cheat on someone I was with, even if the relationship is pretend.”
“Good. And now, it’s time to negotiate the price. Since the fee will be paid in options, we’ll go for a negotiated average assuming the business does as I anticipate, and then anything above that will accrue as options do.”
With gritted teeth, Arielle named an obscene amount of money, twenty years of her current salary.
This was for her parents, not for her. She wasn’t being greedy.
Mitchell nodded. “Done.”
Damn, she should have asked for more.
“I demand absolute confidentiality,” Mitchell told her. “You can tell no one that this relationship is not genuine. No one at all. Not your coworkers, not your parents, and certainly no one from the press. You don’t have to advertise it, but you must never tell anyone that there is a financial agreement between us or that it is in any way for the cameras. You can be cagey, but you cannot say it’s a fake relationship. The non-disclosure agreement will be part of the contract. If you break the NDA, the deal is also off. You’ll be on the first plane home, and those options will be worthless. Is that clear?”
She would have to lie to her friends and parents. This felt more and more dishonest. It felt like a betrayal of her father to work with Mitchell Saltonstall, but her parents needed that money.
Arielle nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“We’ll start Friday,” Mitchell said, standing and plucking his jacket from the chair beside him. Friday was only two days away. “I’ll have my attorneys draw up a contract and NDA stating all this for you to sign. A courier will contact you to sign the documents by hand, and I need them signed tomorrow. Make arrangements to sign them. I’ll also have my people contact your father and issue the options. He will have them in his trading account by the end of the business day after you sign. I assume he has a trading account, or we can set one up for him. But if you waffle on anything, the deal’s off. Plan to leave work by noon on Fridays, and you might not be back until Monday morning. I get your whole weekends and whenever else I need you.”
“Fine,” she said.
“This Friday, however, you’ll need to be at the airport in the morning.” He looked down her body to her chest and then back to her eyes, and Arielle swore that she could feel his gaze through her red dress and on her skin. “We need to work on you a bit, just so you look like someone I’d date.”
“I’m not getting plastic surgery.” He probably dated women with big ol’ store-boughts, though she already had plenty in that area.
“No procedures,” he said, waving off her comment. “If for no other reason than we do not have time for recovery. You’ll make your debut at a trade show, bright and early the next morning.” He frowned and fluttered his hand at her, the quick flick of his fingers encompassing her best dating dress, makeup, hair, personal style, and eternal soul. “I’m sure a spa can figure out what to do with you.”
While Arielle felt like standing up and yelling at him, her dad needed the money. Plus, a manicure would be nice. She hadn’t had one since she’d graduated from high school. Arielle didn’t waste money on silly things. She could paint her own fingernails. “Okay.”
“There will be pressers like this one, photoshoots, and trade shows and conferences where we will be signing up new members. You’ll need to be awake and on the whole time.”
“I understand.”
Mitchell Saltonstall extended his hand over the table for her to shake.
Arielle gingerly clasped his fingers, and his warm flesh against her palm felt like a kiss.
He dropped the handshake. “Good doing business with you, Ms. Carter. I’ll see you Friday.”