Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
I spend the next day Googling fake-dating contracts while I wait for an anti-acne potion to boil.
Despite considering myself a romance fan, this trope has completely sailed me by.
However, it turns out, Mr Hottie is right about this.
It seems no fake relationship can survive without the relevant paperwork set in place.
I scribble down some ideas and then I text Mr Hottie and invite him around for dinner to discuss the terms of the contract. He texts me back almost immediately and insists we’re going to have dinner at his place.
“Sorry,” I say. “But he’s my chaperone.”
“I don’t remember him being a particularly effective chaperone on Sunday afternoon.”
“We’ve had words. He’s going to do better,” I say, handing him the bottle.
He bends down to kiss my cheek and right on cue, McGruff growls.
“Wow,” Mr Hottie says, “impressive.”
“Yep,” I say, “and if you get handsy at all, he’s been instructed to bite.”
“Noted. Come on in. I’m making Pad Thai.”
He leads me inside his apartment. None of the original features of the flat remain.
It’s been completely modernised. It looks like something right out of a magazine.
The floor and walls glistening in polished tiles, marble work surfaces, dark woods, and sleek lines, everything smooth, neat, and aligned, and the few accessories like pictures and ornaments matching and coordinated.
It’s also blessedly cool.
“Do you have air conditioning?” I ask him.
“Of course I have air conditioning,” he answers.
“Then why did we spend Sunday afternoon in my flat and not yours?”
“I prefer your place,” he says with a shrug.
“Seriously?” I say, because he obviously hasn’t seen the mould in my bathroom, the broken central heating system (which nine times out of ten means the hot water is cold and the cold water is hot), or the broken floor boards.
“It’s homely.”
“But this place is …” I can’t actually find the words. It’s too perfect for words.
“Soulless,” he says, “at times.”
We reach the kitchen and the aromas have both mine and McGruff’s mouths watering.
“So he cooks as well as everything else,” I say, going to inspect the contents of the frying pan as he places my bottle of wine into a wine fridge and pulls out another, unscrewing the cork.
“I can cook a few dishes. I can’t bake for shit.” He pours me a large glass of red wine. “Talking of baking, I have to thank you.”
I lift my glass to my nose and inhale, the bouquet is expensive and full of body. “Me?”
“Yes, I took the rest of those brownies into the office today and now I’m everyone’s favourite person.”
“Is that good in banking?”
“Banking is part numbers, part relationships,” he says. “Technically bribery is illegal but I don’t think that rule extends to home-made brownies.”
“I think I may be a bad influence on you,” I say.
“Molly, you’re definitely a bad influence on me,” he says. I want to ask him what exactly that means, but then he says, “So you want to eat first or do the business first?”
“Excuse me?”
“The contract.”
“How do you usually do things in banking?”
“My step-dad always says, we break bread first, then we talk.”
“He sounds like a gangster.” I laugh.
“Yeah,” he says, combing his hand through his hair, then spinning around to the pan and dividing the contents between two bowls. When he’s done, he carries them over to a dining table already set up for two. “Take a seat,” he tells me, returning to collect the bottle of wine.
I do as I’m told, McGruff flopping down beside me.
“Does he want anything?” he asks me as he sits too.
“He ate,” I say.
The food, when I try it, is delicious.
“How are you not married?” I say.
“What?” he asks, almost choking on a baby sweetcorn.
“You’re a pretty good looking man, you earn enough to buy two Ferraris, and you’re also able to make food that tastes like this too.
Is there secretly something wrong with you?
Do you have hairy toes?” I narrow my eyes at him.
Then shrug, nonchalantly. “You can tell me if there is, I won’t tell anyone. ”
“I confess,” he says with a grin, “my toes are pretty hairy. I could be related to hobbits.”
“Disgusting,” I say, in mock outrage, although I don’t believe it. I bet his toes are as beautiful as the rest of him. “But seriously, how are you single?” I pause, my fork half way to my mouth. “You are single right?”
“Technically,” he says. My eyes widen in shock – of course he has a girlfriend – no one can be this lovely. Obviously he has to be a scumbag underneath it all. “I have this fake girlfriend.”
“Shithead,” I tell him, tempted to stab him with my fork.
“I guess I just never found ‘the one’,” he says, staring across at me in a way that has me swallowing down hard.
“Have you been looking?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, “isn’t everyone?”
“Hmmm,” I say, because most of the men I’ve dated seem more interested in sleeping around, and judging by the number of women coming and going from Mr Hottie’s flat, I thought he was interested in the same.
“You’re not looking for the one?” he says.
“I guess I’ve sort of given up on looking for the one.”
“You’re pretty young to give up. How old are you? Twenty-five, twenty-six?”
I grin at him. “Twenty-eight.”
“Young.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Shit, ancient. No wonder your toes are hairy. Next it’ll be your ears and then your nose.”
“Why have you given up on finding the one, Molly?”
“You mean apart from the fact all men are shitheads?”
“Yes.”
I poke at my food. “My last few relationships were pretty awful. I was a fool.” I pick up my glass of wine and take a long gulp. It isn’t something I like talking about.
“If they didn’t treat you right, Molly, they were the fools.”
Why does he always say the right thing?
I change the subject and he tells me about his day and I tell him about the technicalities of brewing potions.
“You obviously love your work,” he comments when I’ve finished explaining the different types of potions.
“I do?” I say with a laugh. My work has felt like a constant battle to find and keep customers, to spread the work without getting caught, and with finding new and different potions to keep my customers engaged. It’s 99% running an illicit business, 1% potion making.
“Yeah, your whole face lights up when you talk about it.”
“Well, I do love the potion-making part of my job.” I swirl the wine around in my glass as I think about this, “If truth be told, I’m even sort of relishing the challenge of creating this counter-potion.”
“What do you love about it?” he asks, pushing his empty bowl to one side.
“I like experimenting with different recipes, tweaking them ever so slightly and producing different results. Believe it or not (and unfortunately for you) it’s taken me two years to perfect my love potion. And as a result I have plenty of very happy customers.”
“Is there a way you could do it … less illegally?”
“Maybe I like the illegality of it, Mr Shaw.”
“Do you?”
“No,” I answer truthfully, “I’m in a constant state of panic.
Especially because my own sister is one of the leading Magical Enforcement Officers!
I’m lying to my whole family the entire time – they think I bake for a living.
But without my Witching Diploma from the academy there is no way I can practise potion brewing legally. ”
“So why don’t you get your diploma?”
I snort with amusement, but Horatio isn’t laughing, he’s deadly serious.
“I got kicked out, remember?”
“And you can’t go back? You can’t get your diploma somewhere else?”
“I …” I never really thought about it.
I chew on the last mouthful of my dinner and push my bowl to one side as well.
“Anyway, we should get to the important business of the evening: contract negotiations.” I open my note book as Mr Hottie pours me another glass of wine. “Where do you want to begin?”
“You really made notes,” he says, a smile hovering on his lips.
“I deduced you were probably an experienced and ruthless negotiator and I needed to be prepared otherwise you’d eat me for breakfast.”
“Gladly,” he says with a wink.
I jab my pen in his direction. “That will have to stop.”
“What will?”
“The dirty talk.”
“Did I say anything dirty?” he says slyly as he sips on his wine. “I thought that was you.”
“Number one,” I say, writing in my book. “No dirty talk, double entendres, or innuendos.”
“Why are we banning these?”
“Because they get me a little … flustered,” I say, fidgeting on my seat and unable to meet his gaze. “And we need to refrain from touching each other this weekend.”
“We’re meant to be dating, we’re going to have to touch each other if you want to be convincing.”
“Not really, Prim and Norman have been dating for years and they hardly ever engage in public displays of affection.”
“Years,” he stresses, “how long have we been dating for exactly?”
“Huh?”
“What did you tell your parents? How long did you say we’d been dating? How did you say we met? I’ll need to know the details otherwise this facade will fall apart.”
“Good point,” I fold over my page and start a fresh one, “what’s our cover story going to be? I only told them the relationship was fairly new.”
“Okay, so new enough that you hadn’t told them, but long enough that I’d agree to go away with your family?”
“Yes.”
“Three months?”
“Seems reasonable.”
“And it started,” he continues, “when I finally plucked up the courage to ask you out on a date.”
“They wouldn’t believe that. You would never ask me out on a date.”
“I wouldn’t?”
I shake my head. “I’m not your type.”
“Do I have a type?”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, you have a type and I am not it.”
“Molly, you are definitely my type,” he growls.
“Firstly, that’s just the love potion talking.” I wag my pen at him. “Secondly, you’re breaking rule number one.”
“I didn’t say anything dirty!”
“It was the way you said it.”
“You could have asked me out,” he suggests.
I snort a second time. “I’d never ask a man like you out.” He’s totally out of my league and the rejection and subsequent embarrassment would be crippling.
“Right,” he says, stiffly.