Part-Time Lover (Part-Time Lover #1)(31)

“I love the dictionary. Do you have a dictionary I can curl up with? Wait! I have an idea. Maybe you can marry a dictionary, and then you’ll be even smarter, and you won’t do something right fucking stupid, like sign your shares over to your dictionary wife.”

I clap his back and peel myself away from his zealous embrace. “I promise not to sign any shares to the dictionary.”

“It’ll all be better in the morning?” His eyelids float closed. “You’ll fix this for me, won’t you? I was so stupid. I was so bloody stupid.” His voice starts to fade. “Make it all go away.”

I don’t know if he means the pain or the problem, but either way, my heart aches terribly for him. I’ve no clue what I can actually do, but I know I will try. “I’ll do everything I can.”

“Love you,” he murmurs.

“Love you too.”

As I click the door closed, I breathe a sigh of relief. At least he’s in bed, and that’s where he needs to be right now.

As for me, I’m not sure where I’m supposed to be. My plan for the night capsized a few hours ago—though of course, I don’t fault my brother, he’s the one going through hell—then the plan sunk to the bottom of the ocean when he word-vomited the ludicrous notion that Elise ought to marry me. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elise has only stuck around for the night so she could tell me she has no time in her life for these kinds of shenanigans.

She’s not the remarrying kind.

Nor am I.

One failed marriage is enough for me, thank you very much.

When I turn into the living room, I find Elise has curled up on the couch, her shoes on the hardwood floor, her legs tucked under her, and she’s flipping through a travel magazine. The bouquet of flowers Erik bought her is in a vase on the table, and I like that she tracked down a vase on her own and didn’t let the flowers wilt.

She drops the magazine on the table and gives a sympathetic smile.

I smile back, and for the first time with her, I’m honestly not sure where we stand. From the start, we’ve been carefully circumscribed, with lines neatly drawn. But my brother’s outlandish suggestion has knocked me outside those lines, and I’ve no clue how Elise feels about Erik’s wild idea or if she even feels anything about it at all.

“I can’t thank you enough for being there tonight. You were incredibly helpful.”

She frowns. “I feel terrible for what happened to him. It’s awful.”

I sigh. “Yeah, me too, and it is awful. But I didn’t want to ruin your night, even though Erik really did appreciate you being there.”

“You didn’t ruin anything,” she says softly, and this is the new side to Elise I saw tonight. She has a caretaker in her, and I couldn’t have predicted that.

“And I appreciate that you were with us. I needed it too.”

She gestures to the black-and-white photographs framed on my wall, then to the couch, a table, and the few books and magazines that rest on it. “I see your home is quite fitting for you. It looks as if everything has been imported directly from Scandinavian Design.”

I laugh and sit next to her on the couch, glad her sense of humor is still intact. “I’m not sure if you know this, but being a dual citizen of Denmark and the UK, I’m legally required to buy all of my furniture from that store or from IKEA.”

“A treaty, is it?” she asks, and perhaps I do know where we stand. Where we’ve always been—firing off words and wit, trying to impress the other.

I nod solemnly. “Jointly agreed upon by all of the Scandinavian countries. We can only furnish our pads with our most famous exports.”

She points to the glass door that opens onto a view overlooking the arrondissement. “I kind of like that your place isn’t terribly Parisian, yet you have that stunning window and what looks like a balcony.”

“I can’t complain about the view.”

She doesn’t respond. Instead, she looks at her watch, and slides her feet into her shoes.

Now that—that I understand. That means she’s not taking my brother’s request seriously at all. I breathe a little easier, since that means we won’t have to have a difficult conversation, but I breathe a little harder too, since it means I’ll have to find another way to sort out the mess he’s made of the business.

But it would have been such a perfect solution. Erik keeps the company. Elise and I have three months of fun and sex, and I get to spend more than just Friday nights in her glorious company.

No.

I need to stop thoughts like those. All they’ll bring is complication to what is a nice and easy, linear situation. And that’s the way we like it.

“I should probably go now that you’ve got him back home. Unless you want to talk . . .” Her tone is gentle, inviting, and I meet her gaze. Her brown eyes are earnest, stripped of teasing.

“I didn’t intend to drag you into any of this, Elise,” I say, reaching for her hand. And then, because I don’t actually want her to go, I tug her close so she falls next to me on the couch.

“You didn’t drag me into anything. I volunteered to be a part of all of tonight. And I don’t regret it.”

I tuck a strand of her dark hair over her ear, my heart thumping a bit harder. “You don’t regret the madness you’ve been sucked into?”