His Convenient New York Bride. Andrea Bolter
you actually talked to my sister about this?”
“I wanted to discuss it with you first.”
Aaron snickered. “It would solve my housing problem. Although there must be a simpler way.”
“Consider that a bonus.”
“You’re sure this would be a good business move for her?”
“I’d be giving her an opportunity she could never get elsewhere at this point in her career.”
“We go back a long way,” Aaron said, tapping his bottle on the bar. “But I’ve got to say it out loud. I think she might be in…”
“She might be in what?” Jin tried to coax him into finishing.
“Are you sure you and she could pull this off without anything…you know…physical happening between you?”
A fair question. One Jin was ninety-nine percent sure he had the answer to. He was only human. Mimi was very beautiful. And they’d be saying good-night to each other under the same roof, night after night.
With everything that was at stake, though, Jin would never do anything that would risk harming her. “I could only do this with someone I trusted.”
“Right?”
“It would be all business. Wouldn’t change anything between us.”
“I’m not sure it’s that easy. But talk to her about it. I’ll support you both either way.” Jin tipped his bottle toward Aaron’s and they clinked. Although Aaron finished the toast with, “You might be my best friend. But she’s my blood. You do know that if you hurt her I would have to tear off every limb of your body piece by piece?”
Jin chuckled. “Understood.”
When they got to Aaron’s apartment, Mimi was in pajamas, hand stitching a pair of pants. She looked sweet and pretty in her baby-pink T-shirt and matching leggings. Aaron excused himself to take a shower.
“Mimi.” Jin inhaled deeply to muster up his courage as he moved toward her. He pointed to her sewing. “Would you mind putting that down for a second?”
She placed it beside her on the sofa and gave him her full attention. “What’s wrong, Jin?”
Even though she didn’t find it with Gunnar, he knew Mimi believed in love—she’d grown up surrounded by it—but what Jin was offering was something quite different.
Just talk to her about it, he coached himself. She can say no if she wants to. Do it. Now.
He dropped to one knee in front of her. Then reached in his pocket for his grandfather’s thimble. Picking up her hand, he placed the thimble on the top of her ring finger.
She shot him a baffled look.
“Mimi, would you marry me?”
“Would I what?” Mimi’s heart thundered against her chest. Jin was in front of her on bent knee, having just asked her to marry him!
Was this actually happening? She may have dreamed of this happening before, albeit in softer focus. But she definitely wasn’t asleep now. If it was a dream she’d be dressed better.
“You know I’ve been trying to figure out how to satisfy the condition of the will,” Jin began, still on one knee in front of her with a wrenching look of vulnerability on his strong face that was so unlike his usual sureness. “Which led me to think about motives for why people get married. That it isn’t always for love. How nobody but me would know if I got married to someone for a different reason.”
Mimi deflated.
This wasn’t the moment she’d been holding out hope for all these years. Just the opposite. He was making it clear that he wasn’t in love with her. Stating up front what she already knew to be true.
Which made perfect sense. Jin never had an inkling of what she held inside, so he wouldn’t know to be sensitive with his choice of words. It was his business that he was concerned about.
Rightly so.
“I see,” was all she could scratch out. Still, the hairs on her arms stood at attention.
She indulged a quick fantasy. Her Jin had finally come to claim her. To begin their life together, at last. Children. A home filled with joy. Like her parents had had. She’d show him the meaning of loyalty, and the wounds cut into him by his father and his ex-wife would heal. He’d learn to love again.
Reality check.
That wasn’t the proposal being offered.
“You know I’ll never marry again in earnest. So I got to wondering,” Jin continued as he rose up from one knee and gestured for Mimi to make room for him on the sofa.
Suddenly self-conscious about the skimpy jersey fabric of her pajamas she scooted across the cushions, as far as she could, as a matter of fact. She folded her arms across her chest in modesty. Jin had seen just about every inch of her body over the years, but not while he was proposing marriage.
“Wondering?”
The thimble was still fitted over the top of her finger as it pressed against her other arm.
“What if I married someone for practical purposes and then divorced a year later after I fulfilled the requirements of the will?”
“Uh-huh.” So that was his scheme. Disappointment rang through her.
“Then I thought about that from a realistic standpoint and realized it couldn’t be just anyone.”
Mimi’s breath sputtered at the acknowledgment that she wasn’t just anyone to him. There was a bit of satisfaction in that.
His eyes seemed to be pleading for her to connect the dots so that he didn’t have to lay it all out for her.
They might be friends but there was no way she was going to make this easy for him. Not after all she’d had to swallow for the past thirteen years. She’d hear out his proposition before issuing a resounding no. After all, she might as well stretch the moment out. It was the only time she’d ever hear those words coming out of his mouth.
What a thought. Fake married to Jin. To live as man and wife except for the love part.
A fate worse than death.
“I see.”
“We’re practically family already, Special Agent Mimi,” he said, referring to a silly taunt he and Aaron had used as teenagers when she would disclose to them school gossip they knew nothing of. “Would you consider this ultimate con to help me save LilyZ? If not for me, could you do it for Mamabai?”
She scrunched up her face at him. If he was trying to draw on the loyalty they had for each other, he was doing a pretty good job. It was just this morning that she and Aaron had been talking about finding a way to help Jin out of his predicament. But marriage! That was beyond a line she could cross in the name of duty or anything else.
“There must be another solution.”
An image passed across her brain. She was in an elaborate lace wedding gown with a long train, the type she wouldn’t wear in real life, walking down an aisle toward Jin in a tuxedo. She strode in rhythmic paces, each one taking her closer and closer to her beloved.
Wait. It wasn’t her in that mental picture. It was Helene. The woman Jin had actually married. In reality, on that fateful day Mimi was cast off to the side with two other women, the three of them in pewter-colored bridesmaids’ dresses. Later, when her brother, who had acted as best man, asked Mimi why she had dabbed streaming tears from her eyes during the ceremony, she’d told him it was because she was so happy for Jin.
It had been one of the hardest days of her