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His eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not running around the city bedding every woman I meet. As a matter of fact, I’m engaged.’
The words were out of his mouth before he’d even realised what he was about to say and a stunned, fascinated silence spread across the room, blanketing all other sound. The other men looked, if anything, more shocked than before. As if it was easier to believe he had come back from the dead than that he was engaged.
Ron Maidman recovered first. ‘Engaged! To whom?’
Trip blinked. Good question, he thought.
Marriage had always been one of those things he thought about in an abstract way. It felt inevitable, in that most people tried it once so he imagined he would too. But the path there was hazy and uncharted. And besides, he had no real understanding of what marriage meant. His parents were often held up as an example of a happy, devoted couple, but that was just the public facade. In private their relationship had been more two people coexisting than sharing lives.
He felt the tractor-beam force of the other men’s combined gaze and, setting his face back to blank, he reached for the name of the most stable, mature, focused woman he could think of. A name that would shut down his tormentors and give him back the upper hand.
‘To Lily. Lily Dempsey.’
Now the astonishment in the room rose to such almost comic levels that he would have laughed. Except he didn’t feel like laughing.
Lily Dempsey. With her Mona Lisa smile and cool, dismissive grey eyes.
She was the dictionary definition of stable, mature and focused. Pretty much an ‘anchor’ in human form.
Unfortunately, she also hated him.
To be fair, he wasn’t her biggest fan either. Not for any specific reason. They just always seemed to clash, although that only happened when she acknowledged his existence. Often she seemed to look straight through him. And that was such a unique and uniquely irritating experience that he had found himself deliberately crossing her path, only to regret it when she spoke to him in the cool, withering tone that made it clear she found his charms skin-deep.
Which made the fact that they had been secretly sleeping together in the two months before he had gone to Ecuador not just incomprehensible but a mystery that was unsolvable.
It was just sex, of course. He’d never planned on taking it any further than that one night, but then they had bumped into one another at another charity event and it had been just the same. And it had kept happening and suddenly it had been happening for a month, then another.
And he still didn’t understand why.
The phrase chalk and cheese could have been invented for them, but in bed they were like flames merging and curling around one another. His body tensed, groin hardening so that he had to blank his mind to the memory of her body wrapped around his.
‘You’re engaged to Lily Dempsey?’
He stared across the room at Mason’s frowning face.
No, he thought.
‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of months, but she wanted to keep it on the down-low because of her father.’
That at least was true. Lily had been insistent that they keep the relationship quiet, presumably because she didn’t want to cause any distracting noise around her father’s career as a senator, and Trip hadn’t cared one way or the other. There were very few people whose opinion mattered to him. Nor did he feel the need to explain himself to anyone.
Which was lucky, because he couldn’t rationalise his attraction to Lily. It didn’t make sense. They didn’t make sense.
Which was why he’d ended things. Except that wasn’t true either. The reason he’d ended it was because of those damned letters.
Reading through, he’d felt conned, duped, betrayed, and he’d wanted to smash things. In that moment, there had been just too much overlap between the passion and secrecy of his father’s affair and his heated, clandestine encounters with Lily, and he’d been angry and she’d been there and something had snapped inside him.
Ron got to his feet. ‘Congratulations, Trip. That’s wonderful news.’
He held out his hand, and Trip shook it mechanically.
‘I’m so pleased for you,’ Mason said quietly. ‘Lily is a wonderful woman, and I know how much your father enjoyed working with her.’
‘Congratulations.’ Conrad joined the other two smiling men to take Trip’s hand. ‘But what are you doing here?’ His smile stiffened. ‘She does know you’re back?’
No, not yet, he thought. Nor did she know they were engaged, but that wouldn’t be a problem.
Would it?
