As Mitchell and Arielle walked away from the garage area and turned the corner, his parents’ entire house came into view.
Arielle bobbled a little on her high-heeled sandals. “That’s a mansion. Or a castle.”
“When you say mansion, I think of The Breakers down in Rhode Island, where the Vanderbilts have summered since 1895. This is merely eighteen thousand square feet of French Normandy architecture. It was built only three years ago.”
As he stood in front of the house and looked at it, the three stories of hand-hewn dove gray granite and soaring turrets did seem more ostentatious than he’d remembered.
He allowed, “But it is somewhat large.”
She turned to him. “Are you rich? I don’t mean just rich-rich. I mean, like, old-money wealthy?”
Mitchell shrugged. “We’re comfortable.”
“Oh, crap. That’s what rich people say.”
The front door opened.
A blond ball of fire streaked toward them.
Mitchell spread his legs and braced himself for impact. “Hello, my hunny bunny child—”
The pale fireball streaked past him.
“Wait, what?” He turned.
Emily was hugging Arielle, and they were both bouncing and giggling.
Mitchell set his fists on his hips. “Well, hi, snookums. And what am I, chopped liver?”
Emily grinned at him. “Hi, sweetie chopped liver!”
Oh, that little git. She knew exactly what she’d said.
Mitchell huffed flamboyantly and stalked toward where his mother had walked out of the house. “Hi, Mom.”
She smiled as he ascended the steps.
His mother’s sense of style could best be described as beachy New England matriarch. Her blond hair was styled to her shoulders with just enough gray showing around her temples to make it look like she wasn’t trying to cover it, and her clothes generally ran to white, golden beige, and navy blue. That day, her slim-cut slacks were navy, her crisp shirt was white, and the scarf around her neck had all three colors plus a splash of Hermès orange because she must have been feeling wild.
She held out her arms for a hug. “Hello, Mitchell.”
He wrapped his mom up in a hug, but his brothers were already crowding out the double front doors.
His two younger brothers were around the same height as he was. Peregrine was blonder with blue eyes, while Rhys called himself “tall, dark, and handsome,” even though his hair was medium brown and his eyes, green-hazel.
Mitchell untangled himself from his mother, who trotted down the steps behind him while he shook hands with his brothers, though Rhys held out his arms for a back-slapping hug instead.
His plan had been to immediately introduce Arielle to his mother on the front step, but Emily was still squealing behind him while Arielle laughed. Formal introductions could wait a minute.
Mitchell said, “Peregrine, Rhys, thanks for coming.”
Peregrine grinned at him. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. This is Emily’s big social media influencer debut.”
Rhys said, “Yeah, this is exciting. It’s a damn good idea, setting up a special needs friend-matching app.”
Mitchell’s brothers had distracted him with their extravagant greeting, which was why the enormity of the event going on behind him didn’t register until it was already too late.
His mother’s voice floated in the summer air. “It’s lovely to finally meet you, Arielle. We’ve heard so much about you from Emily. Do come in so I can introduce you properly to Mitchell’s father.”
“It’s so nice to meet you in person, Iris,” Arielle said.
Oh, crap.
Mitchell turned back.
Behind him, Peregrine asked, “Did she just call our mother by her given name?”
Arielle was walking up to the house arm in arm with his mother, while Emily had wrapped her arm around Arielle’s waist.
No, no, no.
His mother said, “Emily has been telling us all about Arizona. Blisteringly hot, she said.”
Arielle was laughing. “Yeah, that’s pretty much all there is to say about it.”
“We have lunch set out in the music room. You’ll have to tell us how you met Mitchell. Emily was vague.”
“Oh, it’s a funny story,” Arielle said.
Heat dumped over Mitchell’s head, and he controlled the impulse to leap between Arielle and his mother. “Oh, yeah, it’s quite a story.”
They should’ve gotten their story straight in the car instead of him getting distracted and teasing her clit. Dammit, he was a blood-and-guts businessman, not a manwhore, but he was acting like one.
His mother asked, “And you’ve been traveling with him. You should tell us all about your adventures.”
Arielle was still grinning at her. “There are some crazy stories.”
Did Arielle not realize that she was getting the old-money New England version of the third degree? “Mom, the press conference is supposed to start pretty soon. I don’t think we have time for lunch.”
“Nonsense,” his mother told him. “We have two hours to sit and chat before the press conference.”
“Two hours from now? I thought it was scheduled for noon.”
His mother shrugged and made wide, overly innocent eyes at him as she escorted Arielle into the house. “Maybe you misheard.”
Emily nodded at them and hugged Arielle more tightly.
“I don’t think I misheard!” he called after them.
As the three ladies passed them and walked in, Peregrine said, “Wow.” And then, directed at Rhys, “I guess that’s to be expected from Mitchell, huh?”
Arielle glanced up at Peregrine as he said that, her smile gone and her eyebrows pinched with apprehension, but she didn’t say anything as their mother whisked her inside.
Mitchell rolled his eyes at his brother Peregrine, the middle son who refused to allow anyone to overlook him.
Rhys pushed Mitchell on the shoulder, an echo of decades of roughhousing. “Who’s the CSG?”
Mitchell might have to punch one of his brothers that afternoon. “What’s a CSG?”
Rhys laughed. “You’re getting old, Mitchell. CSG means ‘China Syndrome Girl.’” He looked into the foyer where the women had walked into the house. “Because that woman is hot enough to melt a hole through the center of the Earth.”
A growl began rumbling in Mitchell’s throat.
Peregrine was smirking at him. “Mom told you the presser was at noon, didn’t she? That’s why we’re here now, too. We just got suckered into a long afternoon family visit.”
Rhys nodded. “Suckered. We were suckered. Mom suckered us into quality family time again. The press releases say the Q&A is at two o’clock.”
Mitchell shook his head. “I should have known to check the official press release.”
He sat next to Arielle on a couch while they ate the lunch-sized salads they’d made from the salad bar that his mother’s staff had set out for them. Mitchell recognized the sliced beef as his mom’s pot roast recipe.
The music room was an open area in the house for private performances by professional musicians for small audiences who had donated heavily to his mother’s charities. Her recitals were more refined than sitting in an audience like cattle stuffed into a barn. The three-story ceiling made for excellent acoustics, while the soaring windows looked out on the forest and lake with its boathouse and long dock.
Lunch was comparatively uneventful, mainly because Arielle convincingly told an amusing and highly edited recount of how she and Mitchell had met. In the new version, Arielle and Mitchell had engaged in a chance meeting beforehand in the parking lot and exchanged phone numbers. So when the reporter got nosy, Mitchell had pulled her out of the crowd, and they’d been fast friends ever since.
Thankfully, there was no discussion of money changing hands or secret knocks on hotel room doors in the middle of the night.
Arielle assured everyone that she’d been helping him out by posing as his girlfriend ever since, and they were just friends because it was just business.
It was all just platonic, and Mitchell was a great guy.
He and Arielle smiled at each other, and Mitchell almost believed her.
Mitchell’s only quibble with her story was that his brothers would tease the shit out of him for being a sap who hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity to date such a smoking-hot woman.
But if that was the story Arielle wanted to tell, Mitchell was willing to back it up. For East Coast liberals, his parents were easily scandalized.
It was, actually, perfectly told.
Arielle ended with, “Being able to watch up close how Mitchell turned Match Play around, taking it from near-bankruptcy to excellent profitability within a few months, has been enlightening. I never thought about going into business like that or starting a company or anything, but Mitchell’s expertise in entrepreneurship has inspired me.”
Arielle reached over and squeezed his hand, and Mitchell smiled at her with one side of his mouth before he stole a glance at his mother, who was wearing her usual kind smile.
That sweet, approving expression meant Mitchell had no idea what she was actually thinking.
Mitchell’s father, who was eating his salad with a serving of broiled white fish that had been discreetly slipped to him by one of the kitchen staff but otherwise only had salad vegetables and nonfat dressing on his plate, seemed interested in what Arielle had to say but wasn’t asking any questions. Mitchell would check with him later and make sure he felt all right.
During the rest of lunch, Arielle did a marvelous job, reacting to his brothers’ barbs with elfin good humor but not rising to the bait.
When Mitchell got up to assemble seconds, he returned to find Emily had commandeered his seat on the couch. Arielle shrugged at him, so he took a chair across the room.
From a distance, Mitchell could see that Arielle was good with Emily. She treated his sister well and gently, and she kept bringing Emily back into the conversation, giving her opportunities to voice her opinion or add something to the mix.
With that, an unusual event occurred. His mother’s shoulders lowered, and she leaned to the side in her chair, resting her elbow on one of the arms as she casually ate her salad. Of course, she kept up with the conversation, but Mitchell could almost hear his mother’s sigh as she relaxed.
Like most mothers of special needs children, ever since Emily had been born twenty-two years before, Iris Saltonstall had been in a state of hyper-alertness, always on the lookout for better therapy programs or an educational opportunity, and always ready to defend her child from a hostile world the instant the need arose.
His mother was Emily’s champion and defender, and she rarely took off her armor.
After lunch, they had a few moments before reporters started arriving for the press conference, and Mitchell found a moment to drag Arielle into a side room for a private chat. “Are you doing okay? My family isn’t freaking you out too much, are they?”
“No, not at all,” she said with an easy smile. “They’re just like I imagined.”
“Well, I’m glad that you—wait. What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know. Your mom will murder anyone who tries to mess with your sister and bury their body in the woods behind the pond, and you and your brothers enjoy being jerks to each other.”
She wasn’t wrong. “As long as you’re okay with it.”
“I’m not shocked.” She looked around the room where they were standing. Leather-bound volumes in glass-fronted bookcases covered the walls. “Is this the library from Beauty and the Beast?”
“My father collects rare books. This library is where he keeps his collection. The glass is treated to protect the books from the sunlight. His reading room is on the next floor because he doesn’t want his friends to know that he reads cozy mysteries.”
Arielle laughed. “Why should he be ashamed about what he likes to read?”
“Some of his friends are highbrow and enjoy criticizing anything they can sink their claws into.”
“They sound like jerks. I like cozy mysteries and romance novels, too. Anyone who makes fun of you for what you read isn’t worth your time.”
Mitchell smiled at her. “You should talk to my mother about romance novels. She thoroughly enjoys them. I’m sure she’ll have recommendations for you.”
Arielle bit her lip before she said, “I don’t know, Mitchell. I like to read the spicy ones.”
That seemed like the perfect opening, so Mitchell backed her up against a wood-paneled wall behind the door and slipped his hand under her skirt to palm her bare ass. “How spicy?”
She grinned at him.
The softness of her flesh in his palms was driving him crazy. “Did you not wear panties so that I would have my way with you somewhere in my parents’ home? Because it’s working.”
She rested her arms around his neck. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He bent and kissed her, reaching with his hand under her to play with her clit. She gasped against his lips, and Mitchell began to pulse one fingertip inside her.
The door opened, slamming Mitchell in the shoulder.
He whipped his hand out from under her skirt and shoved Arielle behind him as if he could hide her by standing in front of her.
Emily’s voice rang out, “Mom says it’s time to go,” but she didn’t step around the door.
The door closed.
Mitchell swore under his breath.
Arielle pinched his ass and then strutted out from behind him. “Almost got caught, Mitchell. You’d better be more careful.”
With just a shimmy of her shoulders that made her dress fall perfectly, Arielle strode out of the library as if she had been perusing the books.
It took Mitchell a minute longer of thinking about spreadsheets to get his dick to deflate, and then he followed her and the rest of the family outside to where a podium had been set up.
Fifty or so reporters stood with their cell phone cameras and fuzzy microphones.
The Saltonstalls assembled in a phalanx behind the podium, and Mitchell stepped up to stand beside Arielle.
His mother ducked around Arielle and stood beside him. She lowered her head so the reporters wouldn’t see her lips moving and whispered, “Are you sure it’s just business between you and Arielle?”
Mitchell lowered his head the same way. “Absolutely.”
“Then why are you wearing her lipstick?” she asked.
Mitchell wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his suit jacket. Scarlet faintly smeared the blue summer-weight wool.
When the time came, Mitchell gave his little speech about the new version of Match Play specially designed for people with special needs, meant to safely foster friendships and relationships through golf.
Emily took the podium and recited a few sentences about how happy she was to be the ambassador for the special needs app. As always, his mom had made sure Emily was absolutely prepared.
The reporters began asking questions.
The reporter with the long blond hair from Golf Today for Women stood and grinned at them. “So, Arielle, you met his parents.”
Arielle glanced at Mitchell before she leaned over to say into the microphone, “Mitchell’s family is great. The Saltonstalls have always been gracious to me.”
That was disturbing. Both of the reporters who seemed to be following them around, Elli Gelashvili and Monica Matthews, had traveled to Connecticut and seemed to be buying into the narrative of their relationship a little too much.
Mitchell didn’t like where this was heading.
On the drive back to his house, Mitchell put the top up on the convertible so they could talk out of the howling freeway wind.
Arielle asked him, “What did your brother mean by ‘Wow’ and ‘I guess that’s to be expected from Mitchell?’”
Mitchell shrugged. “Peregrine’s an asshole. He thinks I’m hyper-competitive and always have to win.”
“Weird. Huh,” she said.
“Yeah, and he probably thinks that I’m trapping someone like you just to show up both of them, not that either of them is married or anything.”
“Someone like me?” she asked.
Mitchell spun the steering wheel, following the winding country road that led through the old-growth forest. “Because you’re drop-dead beautiful. I mean, you’re bombshell gorgeous. And then they figured out that you’re nice, too. Emily called you a beautiful soul, because game recognizes game, I guess. My mom thinks you’re the best woman I’ve ever brought home, and I quote, ‘by far.’ So they see the same things in you that I do. You were great with Emily today, by the way. My mother relaxed while you were scaffolding Emily into the conversation, and she doesn’t do that often. It takes somebody who is kind and generous with their time to handle someone with special needs like Em. A lot of people get frustrated and dismissive way too quickly. So, yeah, that’s why he said it, because Peregrine’s an asshole.”
That evening, they ordered delivery from Mitchell’s favorite Italian place, and they watched TV while they ate and drank a bottle of red wine from his wine cellar.
Arielle’s conversational barbs seemed less frequent that night, just a few comments about late-stage capitalism and how Match Play’s employees deserved better, or at least they deserved a break room.
When she knocked on his door that night, he drew her inside his bedroom and made love to her until dawn, and then they slept in each other’s arms, exhausted, until she had to get up because her flight home left at noon.
The press conference for the special-needs edition of the Match Play app worked. They got a tremendous amount of publicity, more than Mitchell had expected or even hoped for.
One of the reporters for America’s Good Morning, the country’s top-rated morning news show, called him, and he did an extended interview with them on Monday at his parents’ house.
They even interviewed Emily.
The problem happened when Emily gushed about how much she loved Mitchell’s girlfriend, Arielle Carter.
Emily told the reporter, “Arielle’s father had owned Match Play and then Mitchell bought it, and it’s just like a meet-cute in a rom-com movie! I just know they’re going to get married and be together forever because love always wins.”
That innocent, optimistic quote got a lot of airtime.
Mitchell hadn’t meant for that connection to get out. It spiked the coverage of their relationship with a splash of lascivious intrigue he hadn’t wanted.
Emily’s interview was on news programs that showed well beyond the Golf Channel or golf magazines.
Which meant a lot of people saw it.
Evidently, even people who shouldn’t have, because Arielle showed up in Hartford the following weekend with a grim set to her jaw and anger burning in her eyes. She yanked her hand away when Mitchell tried to touch her.
And worse, their scheduled event that weekend wasn’t just a golf trade show or a conference where they could stay on opposite corners of the Match Play tent and avoid speaking to each other.
No, Mitchell’s business partner Jericho Parr was holding an official gala opening for his golf-related business venture to win that damn bet, and Mitchell and Arielle were expected to attend and socialize.
Jericho had gleefully texted Mitchell that he had a real surprise for them at the end of the gala opening ceremony.
Mitchell suspected a proposal of matrimony was in the works, and he was going to have to watch one of his best friends become blithering-idiot happy while Mitchell stood next to the woman his heart desired, and she hated him.
But they had to go.
Heck, they might even be able to pick up a few new Match Play memberships when the single golfers saw how happy Jericho and Tiffany were.
But not if they saw how desperately miserable Mitchell was.