Lie With Me Page 2

  I didn’t feel like much of a hero. I felt utterly exhausted and drained. More than anything, I felt like I’d just been in a fistfight. I slumped down on the curb and put my head against my knees, thoroughly depleted of energy. Now I had to meet with our client alone, and there was nothing that I wanted to do less. Meeting with Lucas Stevenson in my current rumpled state was not ideal, and I was already horribly late. I figured taking a moment to collect myself while sitting on the curb was allowable. I wondered if I could slip inside and make it into the bathroom to touch up my makeup first. It had been hours since I looked in a mirror, but I had a feeling my hair was doing bad things atop my head. It had been in a sleek bun, but that was hours ago.

  My phone beeped in my purse, and I checked it wearily. There were a number of things waiting on my attention. Fourteen new emails, dozens of texts, and interestingly, the app belonging to our client. The app that we were here to acquire. It chirped that it had a notification for me.

  Curious, I pressed a button and the minimalistic interface of Notable Match popped up. I’d installed it on my phone during the flight from New York, but hadn’t had a chance to really mess around with it yet. The new notification had come in about the time we arrived at the bar, but I was just now seeing it.

  You have a new match, the app informed me in cartoonish text. Lucas Stevenson is within two hundred feet of you. A man’s face, square jawed, hazel-eyed and devastatingly handsome, blinked on my screen. The man in the photo looked a lot more like a model than a tech guru. That’s Lucas Stevenson? I doubted it. He probably used a fake photo. A small heart icon spun, grew and exploded into dozens of smaller hearts.

  His app had matched us as a couple? I was still staring at my phone while sitting on a curb, dumbfounded, when someone cleared their throat behind me. I twisted around, looking up and into the face of Lucas Stevenson. He looked just like his picture. I closed the app as quickly as I could, but I could tell he’d already seen it.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked with a smile.

  2

  Rae

  “So, is Cliff going to be ok?” Lucas asked me a few minutes later. We’d snagged a table out on the patio of the Lone Star Lounge, and I’d been explaining why our meeting was an hour late.

  “I think so,” I told him, sipping at the beer he’d recommended. It was a Hefeweizen from a local brewery—Live Oak. I liked it. I liked it even more with the orange slice he’d insisted I add. “I apologize. This isn’t at all how our initial client meetings usually go. I can’t even show you the PowerPoint, since my coworkers took the rental and all my stuff to the hospital.”

  I could already tell that this meeting wasn’t going to get more normal, either. He wasn’t a normal client. About the only similarity between Lucas and our average client were the thick rimmed glasses he wore. He was young, at least thirty years younger than usual—possibly only a handful of years older than me. He was also wearing a Metallica t-shirt and beaten up jeans rather than a suit. Lucas was well built, too, broad shouldered and with defined muscles visible beneath his clothes. Most of our clients were potbellied, middle aged CEO’s. Honestly, I had to do my best not to stare. The man was gorgeous.

  “Well I would hope not,” he laughed, drawing me back from ogling him. It was a good-natured, pleasant laugh that made the corners of my mouth turn up. “I’m glad your boss is gonna’ be ok. I’ll take a rain check on the PowerPoint.” His sandy brown hair was tousled in a way that was either totally unintentionally sexy or carefully coiffed to look unintentionally sexy. Either way, I wanted to touch him. It. I wanted to touch it.

  Get it together, I told myself firmly. You’re in a business meeting, not on a date.

  “So,” Lucas continued, “tell me about yourself, Rae.”

  I blinked at him. Me? No. That couldn’t be what he meant. He meant the firm.

  I launched into the canned answer: “The Azure Group was established in 1996 at the beginning of the tech boom. Our portfolio is excess of sixty billion dollars and we specialize in acquiring the best in emerging software. We’ve got a full service—”

  “Management and consultancy team, as well as an in-house evaluation and due diligence operation,” Lucas interrupted with a smirk. He knew my pitch as well as I did. “I read all about the Azure Group before accepting this meeting,” he admitted. Clearly, he had a photographic memory, too. The consensus in the office was that he was a genius, and I had a feeling that I was about to find out if it was true. “Of course, I’m familiar with your firm. I was asking about you, Rae.”

  My lips parted in surprise. “I’m part of the evaluation team. I help investigate new prospective portfolio companies, like yours.”

  Lucas smirked at me and arched an eyebrow. “And?”

  I fought the urge to shift uncomfortably in my seat. Why did this feel like a date? “And I work with a technical and financial subject matter team to determine whether we should make an offer to acquire those companies.”

  If Lucas already knew all about the Azure Group, he probably already knew all about the team that had been sent to meet with him. Actually, I was certain that he did. I wrote him an email myself explaining about each of us, although Cliff had been the one to attach his name and send it. He loved to take credit for another’s work. He called it ‘delegating’.

  “What about you, Rae? I want to know about you.” His hazel eyes were an incredible color, green on the inside near the pupil, and golden brown on the outside. I couldn’t help staring deeply into them.

  “Me?” I was feeling very out of my depth. I thought I was ready to conduct one of these meetings by myself. I’d seen Cliff do it dozens of times. But none of those meetings had been anything like this. I took another nervous sip of my beer. “Ok. What do you want to know?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Um, I’m from Flushings.” Then I remembered we were in Texas, and that Lucas probably didn’t know what that was. “It’s a neighborhood in Queens. I’ve lived in New York my whole life. How about you?” It seemed only fair to turn the tables on him. After all, he was asking me personal questions.

  He smiled. “I’m from the west coast. I was born in LA and moved to Texas for school and just… stayed. I like it here. So how’d you get into the private equity business?”

  That was easy enough. “I went to NYU and double majored in business and economics. I worked at a hedge fund for a year after college and the pay was good, but I hated every second of it. So, when a former classmate of mine told me about an opening at Azure Group, I jumped. I’ve been portfolio building ever since. I finished my JD this spring and am waiting to find out if I passed the NY bar exam.”

  “Do you like working for Azure Group?

  What sort of a question was that? That wasn’t what this meeting was about. And how could I answer it honestly while still being professional? I tried. “I enjoy puzzles. Deciding whether to acquire a company and pricing our offer fairly and appropriately requires a lot of the same skills that I enjoy.”

  “That’s not an answer. If I say that I like water, and then say that sharks also like water, that doesn’t mean I also like sharks.” His tone was challenging. My heart fluttered. I loved a good challenge.

  “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc,” I answered. I took logic in college too. In Latin, the fallacy translated to ‘with this, therefore because of this’. It was also known as the correlation-causation fallacy.

  His incredible hazel eyes widened, as did his smile. He was clever. Probably much cleverer than me. “So, you don’t like it?” His question was teasing.

  “Assuming that conclusion would be a logical fallacy too,” I told him, still feeling like I was being evaluated.

  “That’s a fair point. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.” Lucas grinned. I’d clearly just won a point. The Latin translated to ‘after this, therefore because of this’ and it was also called the questionable cause fallacy. “Do you like your job, Rae?”

  What I really enjoyed most about my jo
b, and what was still incredibly rare, were conversations like this one. Times when I was able to match wits against someone who was my equal, or better. I lived for negotiations and the chance to be challenged. But I didn’t say that to Lucas. It would reveal too much.

  “I like a lot of things about my job,” I told Lucas, deciding to be halfway honest. He was quick to display his intellectual ability, but he was a genius. I could hardly blame him for acting like one. “I like learning about companies and distilling what makes them profitable. I like making the argument for or against their acquisition. And then, once I’ve learned everything I can, I like moving on to the next one. Obviously, there are some things that I dislike about my job, too. But on the whole, I can’t complain.”

  That answer didn’t seem to satisfy him. “Why do I get the feeling you’re only telling me the positives?”

  I smirked. “Because you’re a client, of course.”

  “And if I wasn’t?”

  I didn’t know what he was getting at, but if he had reservations about the company, I could maybe do something about that.

  “If you weren’t a client, I’d tell you that Azure Group is a gigantic faceless corporation that has more yearly profit than some countries have GDP. Employees like me are cogs in wheels within wheels. Our lives don’t matter to the machine. It can be hard to work for a big bureaucracy sometimes, especially if you’re like me.” I shrugged.

  “What do you mean, like you?”

  I shook my head. This was getting too personal. How could I tell him I was dissatisfied with my job but too afraid to ever complain? That wasn’t professional.

  He was looking at me carefully, as if weighing two alternatives. We sat in silence for a moment.

  “I have a proposition for you, Rae.”

  “Isn’t that my line? And a bit premature?” I arched an eyebrow at him for a change. We were nowhere near the negotiation phase of this process. There were weeks of investigation and due diligence that needed to happen first. I wasn’t authorized to make an offer, and I definitely wasn’t authorized to accept one.

  “It’s a proposition for you, Rae. Personally. Not for the Azure Group. I find myself far less interested in them than I am in you.”

  My lips parted in surprise. This conversation was wildly out of control. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder where it would go. This was fun. “What’s your proposition?”

  “Are you single?” His hazel eyes were bright.

  I blinked at him. “What… um, I mean yes, I am. Single, that is.” I felt another hot blush on my cheeks.

  He likes me? He must like me!

  “I want you to pretend to be my girlfriend.”

  Oh.

  3

  Rae

  “Excuse me?” I must have misheard him. I set down my beer and stared at it slack-jawed, worried that I’d somehow gotten myself incredibly drunk from just a half pint of beer. What was in this glass?

  “I want you to pretend to be my girlfriend,” Lucas repeated. His gaze was direct, and when I met his eyes, I felt a blush heating my cheeks. I hardly ever blushed. Now, it felt like my body was betraying me. His smile widened when he saw it.

  “Why?”

  He was no longer looking directly at me. Instead, he was staring at the table between us. “It’s a complicated thing to explain.” All of a sudden, he sounded a million miles away, although he was as confident as ever. “The why is unimportant.”

  “Not to me. I have faith in your rhetorical skills. Why don’t you try to explain?” My voice was dry. If he was going to make such a wildly inappropriate request, he had better be willing to explain it. Private equity deal or no, I don’t let business associates treat me like a piece of ass. I’m not in that kind of business.

  Lucas took a very long time to reply. “I’ve got a hunch about you Rae. I might be wrong, and if I am, I apologize, but I think you’re an ambitious, talented, intelligent person who is frustrated by where you are right now in your career. I think I know a way for you to get the edge you want, and it involves pretending to be my girlfriend.”

  He could see all that about me from just from our conversation?

  “That wasn’t the question I asked,” I stuttered.

  Lucas smiled at me, just a quick flash of white teeth that faded a second later. It was a totally humorless smile. “Right again.” His voice was unexpectedly sad. Wherever he’d gone emotionally, it was dark there. The light had gone out of his hazel eyes.

  “I should get up and walk out of here right now.” I said it as much to myself as to him. But it was true. He’d just overstepped the boundary of a professional relationship in a fairly mammoth way.

  “Why haven’t you?” He seemed genuinely interested. He took a sip of his drink afterward and regarded me over the rim.

  You want him, my traitorous libido suggested, and you’re excited that he just made you an indecent proposal. I ignored it.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe it’s curiosity? It might be pity.”

  Lucas grimaced and looked like he wanted to spit out his mouthful of beer. He swallowed hard before answering. “Don’t stay here and listen to me out of pity. Anything but that. Stay here out of curiosity, or ambition, or even anger. But not pity. I don’t want your pity.”

  I smirked. “Well that’s just too bad. If there’s something in this for me, you’re going to need to get to the point. Because if I can’t pity you for seriously suggesting something as ridiculous as me—a perfect stranger—pretending to be your girlfriend, I’m running out of curiosity very quickly. You don’t get to say something like that and then not explain it.”

  My anger seemed to encourage him, or at least snap him out of his funk. “Fair enough,” he said. “Then let me try to explain. I’ve got a situation of my own that would benefit from me having the appearance of a serious girlfriend. You’ve got a situation of your own that would benefit from cinching this deal on your own. I’m willing to trade my app, or rather, the agreement that I will sell the app to the Azure Group at a favorable price, in exchange for your companionship. We will both end up getting what we want.”

  “I’m not a call girl. I don’t sell my companionship. Not ever.” This was non-negotiable. I squared my shoulders and stared down my nose at him.

  His eyes got huge. “I wasn’t suggesting that. I swear.” Then he smirked at me with an easy confidence. “You’re a very attractive woman Rae, but look at me. I’ve never needed to purchase that sort of female companionship. I’m not about to start now.”

  He was extraordinarily handsome, ridiculously smart, and phenomenally successful. And he clearly knew it. I decided to accept his answer. If he made half an effort, he could probably get any woman in this bar to go home with him tonight. Including me.

  “Alright, then what were you suggesting?” My next question was softer and less angry.

  “That I will guarantee to you that I’ll sell Notable Match at ten percent below whatever we determine is fair market value in exchange for you pretending to be my girlfriend.”

  “I’m not going to sleep with you.” It needed repeating. It just did.

  “I know. Again, I swear I wasn’t asking that.” He spread his hands wide. I believed him. I nodded.

  “Why do you want me to do this? Why me?”

  Lucas’s smile was smoldering, and his words were slow. “You’re my type. People will believe that we’re a real couple. People I need to convince.”

  I felt hot and squirmed in my seat. I was his type? What did that mean? Curiosity was driving me crazy. Thankfully, he decided to explain.

  “Notable Match put us together, and I’ve got faith in my creation. Besides, you look and behave very much like the type of woman I date.”

  That almost made it worse. “You exclusively date tall, twenty-seven-year-old strawberry blondes from New York who work in high-powered corporate jobs and like to argue?”

  He smirked again. “Something like that, yeah.”

  “And you want
me to pretend to date you.”

  “Yes.” Behind his glasses, his gaze was incredibly direct. “That’s what I want.”

  “I can think of only two reasons you would do something like this, and neither of them are particularly flattering.” In my mind, he was either trying to win back the love of his life, or too ashamed to admit he was gay and needed a beard.

  “As long as it won’t get in the way of our arrangement, I won’t hold your opinion of me against you.” His response was dry. Was he always so sarcastic?

  I chewed on my lip for a second. “If you’re gay or something, you should just tell people. I won’t knowingly help you live a lie.” Lucas’ eyes went wide, and I continued in a rush. Was I onto something? “My brother’s trans, and he’s my best friend. If he knew I did something that tacitly supported the idea that people should have to hide who they are and who they love, he’d be furious with me. And I’d be furious with myself. There are plenty of valid reasons that some people can’t or won’t come out, but I don’t have to help contribute to the lies.” I felt a bit embarrassed when I fell silent. I felt very strongly about this, and it showed.

  Lucas was quiet for a second. “It’s not that. Really. I’m sure you probably don’t trust me, but I hope you can give me the benefit of the doubt and believe that I wouldn’t ask you to violate any deeply held principals. Especially ones I share. I’m not hiding anything about my sexuality, that isn’t what this is about.” We exchanged a long look. Eventually, I nodded.

  “Ok. Then the only answer is that you’re majorly hung up on an ex-girlfriend. Are you trying to win someone back through jealousy?” I asked it rudely, and it was a guess, but it was really the only possible solution that a man like Lucas do something so ridiculous.