Fake-Married to My Billionaire Boss

Chapter 6 : Sleepover

Good question.

What am I doing here? I didn't think about it too much when I instructed Santino to take me to her place. I suppose I just wanted to talk to her. Talking to Kate has always helped me get my head straight, allowed me to see through my anxieties and focus on whatever it was I needed to focus on. It did occur to me that I should have called ahead.

"I needed to talk to you." I turn my gaze to Marcus, who looked back at me with a guarded expression. "Am I interrupting?"

"No," she says. "Marcus just dropped me off." To my extreme irritation, she looks up at him and smiles. "Thanks. This weekend will be fine."

"Saturday?" Marcus says, smiling back.

She nods.

I walk toward them. "How was dinner?"

"It was good," Marcus says. He grins. "How was your date?"

Asshole.

***

Raul

"What do you mean you're sleeping over?" Kate says. Her expression tells me she's wondering if I'm drunk.

We're inside her house. I take off my coat and drape it on the coat rack before I settle on her dark green couch. Sighing, I rest my arms over the back of the couch. "You can put me up for one night, can't you, Kate?" I say.

Seeing her glance toward the hallway where I know the bedrooms are, I add, "Is your sister visiting?"

"No, she left yesterday." She takes off her coat. "Can I get you anything? Coffee?"

"No, I need to sleep soon."

She hesitates, then says, "Ice-cream?"

I smile. "What do you have?"

She smiles back and shrugs. "Let's have a look."

We check the freezer and find two pints of butterscotch and a half-full tub of vanilla.

"Are you sure you want that?" she says when I take the vanilla.

"Why?" I examine the label of the pint. "Is there something wrong with this?"

"No, it's ... never mind."

"Don't look at me like that. Real vanilla is delicious."

***

"You said you wanted to talk to me about something," Kate says after we get back on the couch.

She's still wearing her work clothes. I've taken off my suit jacket and tie and rolled up the sleeves of my dress shirt. It's fall, but you can't tell by the way Kate heats up the inside of her house.

"In a minute," I say around a mouthful of frozen creamy vanilla ice-cream. "I don't know why I've never done this before."

"Eat ice-cream?"

I grin, licking my lower lip. "Hang out here. With you."

She looks at me over the rim of her pint. "Raul, you see me every day."

"But not here. Not with ice-cream."

"Your Tia Carmen filed to have the board meeting this morning."

"Hmmm."

"Are you rethinking your brilliant plan?"

"I don't have a plan."

"That's what I mean."

"Maybe." I study my ice-cream. "You work all your life for a company—"

"You've been in EM five years," she interrupted.

"Fine. If you give five years of your life to a company and make a success of it, you'd think they'd throw you a party, not fire you."

"I'm sorry. Is that what's troubling you?"

"It's stupid, I know." I grin wryly. "One shouldn't bring emotions into business." It's why I lived my life the way I do. The corporate life has a way of stunting your emotions and I had to find a way to escape that. Sometimes I suspect Kate knows this, but I can't be sure.

"Why don't you just get married, Raul?"

"I'm still thinking about it."

"The board will be meeting in less than two days."

I'm silent, my thoughts wandering as I take another bite of ice-cream. I liked Isabella. Her background check came up clean and she fulfilled all the requirements for what I needed in a wife. Or rather, what Kate and I decided I needed for this fake marriage.

"I need to sleep on it."

Kate sighs impatiently. "If you're really considering it, maybe you shouldn't be going on dates. It will look very suspicious if you're out with a woman one night and then married to another in the next."

I frown at her. "Wouldn't it also look suspicious if I were married the day after I spent the night with you?"

"That's different. I'm ..." She pauses. "I'm just your assistant. And we're not spending the night together, you're staying in my guest room."

"They don't know that."

"Well, men have affairs with their assistants all the time. They still go off and marry other women. Trust me, no one will find it weird. Some people will find it distasteful, sure, but not strange."

"Relax. I was only with Isabella tonight." At Kate's raised eyebrow, I add, "If I decide to go through with this sham marriage, I'll be marrying her anyway. In which case, it's fine if someone saw us."

"Then why are you here?"

She knows me too well. It's very rarely that I take a woman out to dinner and not have her in my bed afterwards. "I'm saving myself for marriage," I reply with my best deadpan expression.

"You're ridiculous."

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