Page 45 of Lease to Love

She thought for a second.

I watched her think, the focused internal quiet she got when she was about to say something she'd already decided on… Then she straightened her spine.

"A year."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Rent," she clarified. "The store and the apartment. A full year, rent-free, starting from whenever your little initiative gets its vote."

I opened my mouth, but she cut me off.

"Fix your face."

I closed it.

"According to your nice but extremely chatty property manager, you own half this block, you have properties in four states and two countries, and a year of my rent isn’t even going to show up anywhere on your quarterly report."

Erik.

I'm changing the damn locks.

"The least you can do," Summer continued, "if you're demanding I force myself to be civil enough to you to be convincing, is cover my overhead while I'm doing it."

She wasn't wrong.

The financial math was simple.

The strategic math was simple.

There was a third kind of math—the kind that lived in the back of my head and had been thinking about freckles and warm skin and the sound she'd made when I'd called her Sunshine—and that was the only math currently giving me any trouble.

It wasn't getting a seat at this table.

"Fine." I held her gaze. "A year."

She squinted at me immediately. "That was too fast."

"You negotiated well."

"You don't agree with anything fast.” Her eyes narrowed. “What's the actual play?"

"There's no play. I agreed."

"Roman—"

"There's no play, Summer."

I held her gaze.

"No complications when it ends. You're convincing, I'm present, we both get what we need. And nobody knows how this started.”

She considered this with the narrow-eyed focus I'd come to recognize as her real thinking face—the one behind the sunshine and behind the scowl.

"Deal."

She held out her hand.

I meant to shake it.