The Corporate Marriage Campaign

“What brings you back to town, Darcy?” he asked. “Dave isn’t sick or something, is he?”

“He’s fine, Joe.”

“Well, I haven’t seen him around much. And last I heard you were hanging out in San Francisco with Pete Willis.”

Darcy kept her voice even, but it took an effort. “That’s old news, I’m afraid.”

“You and Pete called it quits? Well, let me buy you a beer and you can bring me up-to-date. Must be a year since I’ve seen you.”

Behind him, Trey said levelly, “She’s drinking iced tea, and she’s with me tonight.”

Joe cocked his chin forward. “I don’t see any ownership tag hanging around her neck. No ring on her finger.”

“Check again tomorrow and you might be surprised,” Trey said. He stepped between them.

“Later, Joe,” Darcy called. She took her iced tea and considered dumping it over Trey’s head. Which was surely an odd reaction, considering that she was relieved to have Joe’s interrogation short-circuited. Still, just because Joe asked questions didn’t mean she intended to answer them, and it wasn’t up to Trey to decide who she talked to. “You want to tell me what that was all about—besides disgustingly primitive primate behavior?”

“He was hassling you.”

“He was asking how I was.”

“Who’s Pete Willis?”

“Oh, is that what’s bothering you? He’s the man I worked with in San Francisco. Nobody you need to be worried about.”

“He’s not going to be coming around wanting to hire you back?”

“Not in this lifetime.” Her voice was steady. “Let’s get our business taken care of before Joe has another beer and decides to find out whether you can whip him.”

Trey seemed only mildly interested. “Who are you worried about coming out the worse for wear—him or me?”

“Neither. I don’t want Dave to have to come bail everybody out of jail, because I’ll end up doing the paperwork. Tell me about the ad campaign.”

Trey leaned back against the vinyl seat. “Since we’d already started with Caroline and Corbin, the ad department is having to revamp the entire shooting schedule.”

“Corbin. What a name.”

“It fits him. The idea is to minimize setup time for each photo by working through the store in a logical way, not necessarily in the same order the ads will appear. We’ll do the engagement ring tomorrow, of course, because that’s the first ad which will run and they need the art right away. But then we may do household linens and lawn furniture, because they’re in the same section of the store. You know how the departments are laid out in sort of a rough circle.”

“Actually,” Darcy said, “no, I don’t. I haven’t been in a Kentwells store in years.”

Trey blinked in surprise. “Oh, of course. All our stores are in Chicago, and you’ve been out west.”

She said, very slowly, “Yes.” It was true, as far as it went. And there was no point in alienating him by telling the whole truth—that she’d always preferred to do her shopping with Kentwells’s competition. You wouldn’t volunteer that information if you were interviewing for a job, she reminded herself. This isn’t much different.

“We’ll have to start early in the morning,” he warned. “There’s still a lot of prep work to be done because we’re starting from scratch with you.”

Starting from scratch… “You’d better smile when you say that, partner. I’m not exactly in the frame of mind to play Cinderella.”

Trey sighed. “I do keep putting my foot in my mouth, don’t I? I just meant that the clothes which were chosen for Caroline won’t work for you, and the hairstyle and makeup you need will be much different, too.”

A woman in a white jacket deposited a pizza on the table between them and went away without a word. Trey looked at it in puzzlement. “Did we order this?”

“Sort of. It’s my standing order—I just wave at Jessie in the kitchen whenever I come in.” She took a paper plate from the stack on the table and slid a steaming wedge onto it. “Try it, it’s the best hand-thrown pizza in town. Since you brought up Caroline, I had a question. She does understand this is all made up, right?”

“Of course.”

“Because she seems to be a bit of a dreamer. She’s not serious about the engagement party, is she?”

“Of course she is. The best way to make it convincing is for everyone around us to act as if it’s real. Caroline throwing a party, Dave giving a toast to the happy couple—it all adds a touch of reality.” He helped himself to a slice of pizza. “Now—let’s get down to business. Tell me everything I could possibly need to know about my wife-to-be.”

CHAPTER THREE

NO SOONER had his request popped out than Trey regretted it—or at least he regretted the way he had phrased it. Asking a woman to tell him all about herself—what had he been thinking?

He’d never met one yet who wouldn’t take that as a blanket invitation to share an entire evening’s worth of self-analysis. By the time Darcy finished her Freud act, he’d probably known what she’d had for breakfast on her first day of school, and all about the lasting wounds it had left on her psyche.

Why hadn’t he settled for asking simple, straightforward questions that would elicit the facts he needed without including hours worth of padding—explanations that would make it practically impossible to keep his eyes open?

“Age twenty-seven,” Darcy said crisply. “Born and raised in the west suburbs of Chicago, parents died eight years ago in a car accident. I finished my degree, worked at a PR firm downtown, then spent some time in San Francisco, and came back here. Anything else?” She tore another slice of pizza from the pie and took a big bite, obviously finished talking for the moment.

Trey was too stunned at the machine-gun approach to comment.

She obviously took his continued silence for a lack of further questions, because she swallowed and said, “If I’d realized that’s all you wanted to know, I’d have given you one of my job applications this morning and saved you the trouble of asking. Are you all right?”

“I was just thinking that if I’d asked Caroline how she felt, I’d still be sitting here listening in a couple of hours. Ask you for a rundown of your life and you’re finished in fifteen seconds.”

Darcy shrugged. “Mine hasn’t been a terribly exciting life.”

“Normally for a female that’s no bar to talking about it at length,” Trey said dryly.

“Oh, so that must be why you’re not interested in actually getting married—because women are boring and self-centered and don’t know when to shut up.”

He knew better than to think there was a safe answer to that. “I’ve known a few talkative types,” he admitted. “But the fact is I’m not established well enough to even think about marriage just now.” She’d never believe that he was telling the truth, but at least it might distract her.

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Right. A hundred-year-old department store chain isn’t stable enough to support a wife…And I trusted you to set me up in business? I knew I needed my head examined.”

“You made an agreement,” Trey pointed out.

“And I’ll hold you to your end of the bargain. In the meantime, however, I suppose there are some things we should work out before we go public with this act.”

“Like what?”

“Like when we supposedly met. How long we’ve supposedly been dating. When we’re supposedly getting married.”

“Maybe we could agree to leave the supposedly out of this and act as if it’s real.”

She shrugged. “If you like. I thought perhaps you’d feel more comfortable if I was continually reminding myself that it wasn’t real. But you’re the boss. Which reminds me—you said the photo crew had already started working with Caroline and Corbin as the models. How are you going to explain the sudden change?”