I give a scratchy, surprised laugh. “Oh, honey, that’s not all. I don’t know if you’re ready for my government name.”
“Try me.” He crosses his arms over his chest in challenge, smirking. “I’m not sure much can beat Thomas Phillip Henry Arthur Maxwell-Brown.”
“Oh yeah? Try Estelle Margaux Wilhelmina Tyrrell Baldwin.”
He lets out a low, impressed whistle. “It sounds like we’re a match made in heaven. Have you considered taking my last name? Maybe triple hyphenating?”
I don’t want to smile, because the situation we’re in is nothing short of a nightmare, but his dry jokes have my lips involuntarily twitching upward. “I already have trouble fitting my name on forms, so I’ll pass.”
“That’s understandable.” He pauses, his tone a little less light when he speaks again. “We need to know everything about each other if this is going to be believable.”
I swallow hard, torn over whether we’re making a huge mistake. Will we actually fool people into thinking we’re a real couple? Maybe the general public will fall for it, but what about the people who know us? His family, my family, Figgy, my board of directors…Are we just asking to fail miserably?
“Guess we should start with the basics.” I bite my lip as it hits me just how little I know about this man. “I don’t evenknow how old you are. I’m choosing to believe you’re at least old enough to legally drink in this country.”
I’m once again falling back on humor to keep from shoving my head between my knees so I can stave off the mounting panic. He looks young, but notthatyoung. If I had to guess, I would say he’s probably my age. Factor in how his parents are pushing him to get married—something that typically doesn’t happen for men until they’re in their thirties, the bastards—and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised when he reveals he’s older than me.
Thomas laughs. “I just turned twenty-six.”
I swear the car shudders to a stop even though we’re smoothly moving through traffic. “Twenty-six?” I repeat, and it’s followed by an involuntarily low, keening groan that makes me glad there’s a divider between us and the driver. “OhGod. I’m older than you!”
He looks at me like that’s hard to believe. “Seriously? How old areyou?”
I should take his disbelief as a compliment, but I’m already preparing to undo my seat belt so I can bend over and ward off the spinning. “Twenty-eight! I’m a cougar!”
“Sweetheart, it’s two years,” he says, scoffing at my dramatics. “Calm down.”
“Calm down?Do you understand how frowned-upon it is for the woman to be the older party in a hetero relationship?”
Étienne pretended he didn’t hate that I was only nine months younger than him, as if the fact that we were literal peers and I wasn’t some fresh-faced ingenue was a problem in the crowds he ran in. It was obvious, though, especially since on my birthday and for the three months a year when we were the same age, he acted like saying the number we shared was blasphemy.
“My mother is six years older than my father,” Thomas reveals. “And as a grown man, I don’t give a fuck if a woman I’m attracted to is older than me.”
I blink, almost compelled to clutch my nonexistent pearls at his bluntness. He’s right that it shouldn’t matter, though. We’re both consenting adults, and the stigma shouldn’t exist, but it’s something I have to get over thanks to Étienne’s influence.
“Okay, fine,” I concede. “Let’s just…move on from that.” I take a breath as I figure out what to ask next. Most of this is going to be information that would come up organically over the course of dating someone, but this is about to be a crash course. “Speaking of parents, tell me about yours.”
“Hopefully they won’t ambush you like yours did to me,” he says wryly. “Iris, my mum, is an artist, which is just a nice way of saying she’s a rich woman with too much time on her hands. Phillip, my father, inherited our family’s hospitality company and is technically the one in charge, even though my eldest sister runs most of the day-to-day operations and my brother is the face they present to everyone.”
Before everything went to shit last night, he mentioned that he was the middle child of five. I’m going to have to learn about them soon enough, but first I want to know more about the family business.
“When you say your family runs a hospitality company,” I preface, “what exactly does that mean?”
“We’re in hotels.”
It’s a vague, to-the-point answer, and I wait for him to elaborate, but I get nothing else. “As in, your products are in hotels?” I prompt.
Thomas shifts in his seat. “No, as in, we…own hotels.”
“Youownhotels?”
“A chain of them,” he says quickly, looking back to mealmost apologetically. “A large luxury chain. A.P. Maxwell International, if you’ve heard of it.”
“Oh.” My breath catches as recognition hits. “I’ve definitely heard of it.” I was supposed to honeymoon in one of their opulent Maldives resorts. “So you’rerichrich.”
He fidgets a little more, and there it is, that parliament smile. “We’re comfortable, yes.”
That’s wealthy people talk forwe’re fucking swimming in it. “And to think I was the one worried about a prenup,” I muse. “You better hope I don’t come for half of everything you have in the divorce.”
