One Winter's Sunrise: Gift-Wrapped in Her Wedding Dress

‘Agreed,’ she said. It would be difficult to go through with this without confiding in a friend but it had to be that way. No one must know how deeply attracted she was to him. She didn’t want anyone’s pity when she and Dominic went their separate ways.

‘Otherwise, the fallout from people discovering they’d been deceived could be considerable,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

She held up her middle finger. ‘Condition Number Two—a plausible story. We need to explain why we got engaged so quickly. So start thinking...’

‘Couldn’t we just have fallen for each other straight away?’

Andie was taken aback. She hadn’t expected anything that romantic from Dominic Hunt. ‘You mean like “love at first sight”?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Would that be believable?’

He shook his head in mock indignation. ‘Again you continue to insult me...’

‘I didn’t mean...’ She’d certainly felt something for him at first sight. Sitting next to him on this sofa, she was feeling it all over again. But it wasn’t love—she knew only too well what it was like to love. To love and to lose the man she loved in such a cruel way. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure she wanted to love again. It hurt too much to lose that love.

‘I don’t like the lying aspect of this any more than you do,’ he said. He removed his arm from the back of the sofa so he could lean closer to her, both hands resting on his knees. ‘Why not stick to the truth as much as possible? You came to organise my party. I was instantly smitten, wooed you and won you.’

‘And I was a complete walkover,’ she said dryly.

‘So we change it—you made me work very hard to win you.’

‘In two weeks—and you away for one of them?’ she said. ‘Good in principle. But we might have to fudge the timeline a little.’

‘It can happen,’ he said. ‘Love at first sight, I mean. My parents...apparently they fell for each other on day one and were married within mere months of meeting. Or so my aunt told me.’

His eyes darkened and she remembered he’d only been eleven years old when left an orphan. If she’d lost her parents at that age, her world would have collapsed around her—as no doubt his had. But he was obviously trying to revive a happy memory of his parents.

‘How lovely—a real-life romance. Did they meet in Australia or England?’

‘London. They were both schoolteachers; my mother was living in England. She came to his school as a temporary mathematics teacher; he taught chemistry.’

Andie decided not to risk a feeble joke about their meeting being explosive. Not when the parents’ love story had ended in tragedy. ‘No wonder you’re clever then, with such smart parents.’

‘Yes,’ he said, making the word sound like an end-of-story punctuation mark. She knew only too well what it was like not to want to pursue a conversation about a lost loved one.

‘So we have a precedent for love at first sight in your family,’ she said. ‘I... I fell for Anthony straight away too. So for both of us an...an instant attraction—if not love—could be feasible.’ Instant and ongoing for her—but he was not to know that.

That Dominic had talked about his parents surprised her. For her, thinking about Anthony—as always—brought a tug of pain to her heart but this time also a reminder of the insincerity of this venture with Dominic. She knew what real commitment should feel like. But for Timothy to get that vital treatment she was prepared to compromise on her principles.

‘Love at first sight it is,’ he said.

‘Attraction at first sight,’ she corrected him.

‘Surely it would had to have led to love for us to get engaged,’ he said.

‘True,’ she conceded. He tossed around concepts of love and commitment as if they were concepts with which to barter, not deep, abiding emotions between two people who cared enough about each other to pledge a lifetime together. Till death us do part. She could never think of that part of a marriage ceremony without breaking down. She shouldn’t be thinking of it now.

‘Next condition?’ he said.

She skipped her ring finger, which she had trouble keeping upright, and went straight for her pinkie. ‘Condition Number Three: no dating other people—for the duration of the engagement, that is.’

‘I’m on board with that one,’ he said without hesitation.

‘Me too,’ she said. She hadn’t even thought about any man but Dominic since the moment she’d met him, so that was not likely to be a hardship.

He sat here next to her in jeans and T-shirt like a regular thirty-two-year-old guy—not a secretive billionaire who had involved her in a scheme to deceive family and friends to help him make even more money. If he were just your everyday handsome hunk she would make her interest in him known. But her attraction went beyond his good looks and muscles to the complex man she sensed below his confident exterior. She had seen only intriguing hints of those hidden depths—she wanted to discover more.

Andie’s thumb went up next. ‘Resolution Number Four: I dump you, not the other way around. When this comes to an end, that is.’

‘Agreed—and I’ll be a gentleman about it. But I ask you not to sell your story. I don’t want to wake up one morning to the headline “My Six Weeks with Scrooge”.’

He could actually joke about being a Scrooge—Dominic had come a long way.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I promise not to say “I Hopped Out of the Billionaire’s Bed” either. Seriously, I would never talk to the media. You can be reassured of that.’

‘No tacky headlines, just a simple civilised break-up to be handled by you,’ he said.

They both fell silent for a moment. Did he feel stricken by the same melancholy she did at the thought of the imagined break-up of a fake engagement? And she couldn’t help thinking she’d like a chance to hop into his bed before she hopped out of it.

‘On to Condition Number Five,’ she said, holding up all five fingers as she could not make her ring finger stand on its own. ‘We have to get to know each other. So we don’t get caught out on stuff we would be expected to know about each other if we were truly...committing to a life together.’

How different this fake relationship would be to a real relationship—getting to know each other over shared experiences, shared laughter, shared tears, long lazy mornings in bed...

Dominic sank down further into the sofa, his broad shoulders hunched inward. ‘Yup.’ It was more a grunt than a word.

‘You don’t sound keen to converse?’

‘What sort of things?’ he said with obvious reluctance. Not for the first time, she had a sense of secrets deeply held.

‘For one thing, I need to know more about your marriage and how it ended.’ And more about his time on the streets. And about that broken nose and scarred knuckles. And why he had let people believe he was a Scrooge when he so obviously wasn’t. Strictly speaking, she probably didn’t need to know all that about him for a fake engagement. Fact was, she wanted to know it.

‘I guess I can talk to you about my marriage,’ he said, still not sounding convinced. ‘But there are things about my life that I would rather remain private.’

What things? ‘Just so long as I’m not made a fool of at some stage down the track by not knowing something a real fiancée would have known.’

‘Fine,’ he grunted in a response that didn’t give her much confidence. She ached to know more about him. And yet there was that shadow she sensed. She wouldn’t push for simple curiosity’s sake.

‘As far as I’m concerned, my life’s pretty much an open book,’ she said, in an effort to encourage him to open up about his life—or past, to be more specific. ‘Just ask what you need to know about me and I’ll do my best to answer honestly.’

Was any person’s life truly an open book? Like anyone else, she had doubts and anxieties and dumb things she’d done that she’d regretted, but nothing lurked that she thought could hinder an engagement. No one would criticise her for finding love again after five years. In truth, she knew they would be glad for her. So would Anthony.

She remembered one day, lying together on the beach. ‘I would die if I lost you,’ she’d said to Anthony.

‘Don’t say that,’ he’d said. ‘If anything happened to me, I’d want you to find another guy. But why are we talking like this? We’re both going to live until we’re a hundred.’

‘Why not schedule in a question-and-answer session?’ Dominic said.