He’s calling my mother?
He smiled and made a little chuckle. “Nice to hear your voice, too.”
Whoa. Since when were these two all chummy?
He went on, “Great. I’m great. Even better now that I’m looking at your beautiful daughter.”
I narrowed my eyes, but at the same time couldn’t help letting a tiny smile sneak past my lips. Max was always so full of surprises and such a shameless charmer.
He listened for a moment. “I know what you mean. She really does look lovelier than ever.”
“Hey! That’s enough,” I protested. “Tell my mom to stop talking about me.”
Max gave me his back and strolled over to the window. Yes, I took notice of his broad shoulders and the taper of his muscles that gave his body that perfectly masculine Y-shape.
“Yes, I heard that,” he said to my mom. “And I’m very pleased you enjoyed your day at Lily’s store.” He glanced over his shoulder and flashed a smirk my way. “Especially because I have a very big favor to ask.” He listened.
Oh no… Mom, don’t you dare!
“Thank you, Gladys,” he said, “because a family emergency has come up, and I need Lily here in Chicago for a few days.” A long pause. “Well, I will let her tell you all about it, but I just wanted to be absolutely certain that you’re all right with holding down the Lily Pad while I’m away.” Pause. “Great. You are truly the best mother anyone could ever ask for.” Pause. “I miss you, too.”
“What the fu…?” my voice faded as Max ended the call, slipped his cell into his jeans, and cocked his brows. “What the hell was that, Max?” I scowled.
He shrugged. “What?”
“‘I miss you’?” I repeated his words like an accusation.
Max looked down at his feet and gave his scruffy chin a scratch, making those little bristly sounds. I loved that sound. It was uniquely masculine and sorta turned me on.
“Your mother and I—well, and your father, too—have remained in touch these past six months.”
I blinked while his words sank in. Once they did, I was not happy. “You mean to tell me that my parents have been helping you keep tabs on me?”
Max gave me a hard look. “You truly believe they would do that?”
I crossed my arms. “You tell me.” They’d kept their relationship with him a secret, after all.
“We only spoke a few times. I think they were checking on me—you know your mother is an excessive worrier.”
“Hey! Don’t bad-mouth my mother.” It was true, however. My mother’s and father’s constant worrying had once prompted me to blaze my trail a little further from home. It wasn’t that I didn’t love them, but space was good.
Now, after everything that happened, I didn’t mind their worrying so much, and I sometimes wondered if Max’s mother had something to do with that. I’d only met Mommy Dearest the one time, but it was enough to help me understand why Max was who he was and be grateful for my own mom. To Max’s credit, he wasn’t nearly as messed up as he should be. His mother was as cruel as she was bonkers. She’d even had us stalked by a photographer, who took pictures of Max and I having sex at night in front of his beach house in Hawaii. Long story short, she thought if the world knew he’d been dating a very, very ugly woman, it would deflate the rumors that he had a disorder and save his company. Her company. Maybe it would’ve worked, but her actions had only helped me believe he’d been using me.
God, if I ever see that woman again, I’m going to punch her down there. Right in the clit. Or maybe I’d break her nose so it would be crooked forever and drive her mad.
“I’m not bad-mouthing Gladys,” Max said, bringing me out of a very wonderful daydream of me straddling his mother and beating the crap out of her face. “I think her worrying is sweet. I would’ve given anything for a mother and father like you have. They’re good people and they care.”
“Oh, fuck you!”
Max’s head jerked back in shock.
“That’s right!” I said. “Stop being so perfect and saying all the right things. It’s annoying and making me feel all squishy.”
Max stepped forward. “You mean you love me?”
I huffed. “That’s not the issue.”
He pinched my chin. “Then what’s the problem, Lily?”
Ugh! He already knew the answer. “Can we not go into this right now?”
He tweaked my nose. “Whatever you say, Lily Pad.” He stepped around me and opened the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To the airport.”
“Max, no.”
“Your mother just told me she had the best day of her life running your store and ‘talking with so many interesting people.’ I need someone to fill my shoes here, and I can’t think of anyone more qualified than you.”
I gnashed my teeth together.
“It’s my sister, Lily. I have to go. So don’t force me to pull the guilt card,” he added.
Dammit! He just did! I knew how worried he had to be about his sister, and being the perfectionist that he was, he probably wanted to go to Argentina to be by her side as much as he did to oversee that everything possible was being done for her. Perfectly.
Dammit, he’s so awesome. I wanted to kick him and his perfect everything.
“No guilt card required,” I said. “I’ll stay. If it was my brother, I’d be freaking the hell out.”
Max stepped forward, threaded his fingers through the back of my hair, and beamed down at me with those beautiful hazel eyes. “I love you, Lily.” He kissed me and this time his lips were soft and tender, exactly like I might expect and want at this very moment when he was pushing me outside of my comfort zone.
“Stop it.” I pulled back. “Stop being so damned perfect all the time. It’s irritating.”
Max winked, pecked my lips, and turned for the door. “Callahan will take you to my house. The keys to your Porsche are hanging on the wall in the kitchen pantry.”
“What…” Before I could protest or ask what Porsche, Max was halfway to the elevator on the other side of the floor. Still, I couldn’t help trying to assert myself and take back a little control. “I have a rental car! And I’m staying at Danny’s!” I yelled.
Not expecting a response, I heard Max yell back, “Sure. Enjoy her lumpy cum-stained couch! Be my guest!”
Ewww… Surely her couch wasn’t cum-stained. My mind quickly went to work. Danny and Calvin were serious hump-hounds. Anywhere, anytime, and in bulk quantity. They were like the Costco of sex.
My stomach lurched as I imagined laying my body on their sofa, a place where they’d surely fucked a few times each day.
Gross. “Fine! You win!”
Three weeks went by after Max left me at the helm of Lily’s Lovely Lies, and I did, indeed, take the helm. From day one, I found myself stepping into a role I was born to do. The overjoyed buyers and executives rolled in on a daily basis, wanting a piece of the LLL pie once we launched. “It’s what our customers have been waiting for.” “LLL is the next big thing in our industry.” “We want exclusive rights to your next season of products.” What I realized was that while Max had disassociated himself from the public face of the company, he’d made it clear to the fashion community that he would be very active behind the scenes. So while Max might have initially lost face with some of his customers when the shit hit the Cole Cosmetics fan, he had not lost his reputation as the King Midas of makeup when it came to building winning marketing strategies. Everyone on the business side still saw him as a boy wonder.
As for me, the three weeks apart had helped me to appreciate what he’d meant when he’d said I would be the face of the company. He’d meant it literally. I carried my own sort of “brand” with consumers, mainly as the ugly woman who’d captured the heart of the most sought after bachelor on the planet. To the outside world, my name and face symbolized something I’d not seen before: that beauty is in the heart of its owner.
So corny. I got that.
But for the first time in my life, I was really beginning to love being me. Not so much because of external factors, but because I got to see myself through the eyes of others. It sounded strange, I knew. But sitting down with buyers, investors, and media, they all wanted to hear my story and how I’d been inspired to change an industry. If they were women, they told me how much it meant to see someone like me reach for their dream. If they were men, they had daughters, a wife, a sister or mother who told him about how my story meant something to them. The irony was that people seemed to relate to me more when my face was harder to look at, but they still wanted to know if surgery changed my life. Of course, the answer was “not really.” I was still me and the change I was after would only come with a lot of hard work.
“But that’s why this company’s mission is so important,” I said in meeting after meeting, discussing LLL’s product lineup for next year. “In five, six, ten years, we’ll have had the opportunity to influence a new generation of girls. The goal is to get their mothers, grandmothers, aunts or older sisters addicted to our products and our message.”
“But the other companies can outspend you, and they’re not going to change a strategy that’s worked for centuries.” Meaning, they’d built their businesses on making women feel lesser.
“Every journey starts with one step,” I’d say. “And if we do well and we can show that our business model is successful, others will follow.”
“Then you’ll lose your competitive advantage if everyone tries to copy your marketing strategy.”
“A world full of companies selling self-love rather than self-hate to half of the world’s population? Sign me the hell up.”
So the more I talked to potential customers—buyers for major retails stores, Internet retailers, specialty boutiques, and hotel chains with high-end spas—the more I realized that I had not been the only person on the planet feeling imperfect and tired of it.
And Max had been right. This was my dream. This was the reason I’d suffered all those years with a face that made people cringe. It was why I’d been given a big beautiful brain and the drive of a pit bull. And it was why I’d met Max.
Did this realization signify easy sailing? Or that things between him and me were settled romantically? I didn’t know. But I knew our relationship was so much more than romance or sexual attraction. And now, after having time to breathe and think, I knew that what we could accomplish together was fucking amazing.
And I loved him for that. I loved him for not giving up.
Just past midnight, as I sat back in Max’s king-sized bed, typing away on my laptop, my cell phone buzzed on the nightstand. I looked, and it was Patricio.
Strange. He’d not called, emailed, texted—nothing—since I’d left him that voice message weeks ago. It still stung to think about how easily he’d left me behind, but it had proved I’d made the right choice.
My hand hesitated before finally tapping the glass to accept the call. “Hello?”
“Lily, I must talk to you.” His voice was frantic and scratchy, like he’d been crying.
“Patricio, what happened?”
“I must talk with you—in person.”
“Why haven’t you called me?” And why so desperate to see me out of the blue like this? Did he not understand that I had cared about him? It was not the same crazy chaotically passionate relationship I had with Max, but I’d genuinely felt something for this guy. Then he’d called me a slut, walked out of my store, and never said another word.
I did call him and leave a message to tell him we were over-over.
“This is why I must see you. I need to explain what has happened, Lily.”
I sighed and wiped my left hand over my face. I supposed, after everything, I owed him that much. “I’m in Chicago right now.”
“Chicago?”
“It’s a long story, but I’m helping Max with his…with our…with a business project. His sister is ill.”
Max called every few days with updates. It had not been going well. His sister had refused to see him for the first week and her husband spoke no English, so Max’s attempts to reason with him did no good.
Of course, Max, being a resourceful guy, got a translator and found out what he could about the situation from the doctors. Apparently, his sister had preeclampsia and kidney failure. They were trying to keep her stable long enough so the baby could be delivered prematurely and survive. Max then started looking into doctors and treatments and finally convinced the husband to talk to Max’s sister on Max’s behalf. That had only been a few days ago, and Max sounded like hell. “I can’t leave, Lily. She’s either going to die or that baby will.” I’d had no choice but to stay on and assure him I was taking care of things. So here I was, three weeks later. Luckily, Max was very organized with his business, so it hadn’t been difficult for me to step in—reviewing data for site locations for the first five stores he planned to open, discussing consumer feedback and tweaking the product lineup, meeting with the contract manufacturer to review volume projections. And then there was the hiring. The headhunter had people swarming her with applications from some of the best and biggest cosmetics companies in the world.
“I see,” said Patricio. “You are back with Maxwell, then?”
“No. I mean…” I whooshed out a breath. “It’s not like that.” I had issues to work out in my own life, which was what I was doing.
“I had wanted to speak in person, but fine. I will put all of di cards on di table,” Patricio said with that accent of his, a bit thicker than usual. He was definitely upset.
“Okay?”
“My mother and father are here in town. So are my sister, brother and their spouses along with my nephews and nieces.”
“Uh. Good for you?”
“Lily, they are all here to see you. And me, too, but mostly you.”
“Why me?”
“Because I haven’t told them that we are not getting married.”
Uh-oh. I saw where this was heading. “Then you’re going to have to tell them.” I had big issues to deal with right now, and his family drama didn’t concern me.
“Lily, my mother is seventy-five years old and has a bad heart.”
Then why the hell was she flying halfway around the world? “So you’re asking me to…?”
“Pretend to be my fiancée—just for a night. Two tops.”
“I’m not going to lie to your family, Patricio.” What a stupid idea.
“It will break her heart to have come all the way here to meet you only to find out that I’ve been lying to her—she wants nothing more in this world than to see me married before she dies. That and to go to Disneyland.”
Ugh. I rubbed my face. I didn’t want anything to happen to his mother, but I couldn’t drop everything, fly to L.A., pretend to be engaged to him, and explain to Max why I was doing this favor for his arch nemesis.
“I can’t, Patricio. I really can’t. And I don’t think it’s fair asking me this when you haven’t even called.”
“What was there to say? You cheated on me. And you’re pregnant with his child.”
“Whoa. I left you a message. I’m not pregnant.”
“I lost my phone weeks ago and had to get a new one. But this does not change that you cheated on me.”
“I did not cheat on you.”
“You did not sleep with Max?”
Errr… “Well, not at that point.”
“Lily! So you are sleeping with him now?”
Oh crap. Why were we having this conversation? “You and I are not together anymore, and the only thing you need to know is that I didn’t screw around on you.”
If anyone had been unfaithful, it was Patricio.
He let out a long sigh. “I miss you, Lily. I really miss you. And I am sorry for the way I yelled at you when we were together last, but you must understand that you broke my heart. So now I ask you for this favor, Lily. I don’t want to risk making my mother upset.”
Crap. I felt my heartstrin
gs tugging toward giving in.
“You are one of the few people I’ve ever met who I trust, Lily,” he added.
He didn’t trust me that much—he’d thought I’d cheated on him with Max.
“Please, Lily. I am begging you. If you ever cared about me, you will do this one last thing.”
Dammit. What was with men and the guilt card? “I’ll think about it, but sooner or later, you’ll have to tell her the truth.”
“When the time is right, I will. But she came all the way from Italy with the whole family to surprise me, and I’ve never seen her do anything like this. She’s so excited to meet you. And Mickey Mouse, of course.”
God, I really didn’t know what to do. On one hand, it felt kind of crappy that he hadn’t called so we could end things like they deserved. On the other hand, he’d never received my messages and I did still care about him as a friend.
“I can do brunch on Sunday, but that’s it.” I could fly in tomorrow night, Friday, after work, spend Saturday in Santa Barbara to check on the store and my mom, and then drive back to L.A. for brunch and head to the airport afterwards. I could definitely use a quick stop at my apartment for some clothes somewhere in all that. I’d borrowed a few outfits from Danny—we’d had dinner a couple times at her place since I’d arrived—and the rest of the clothes I’d worn were quick outfits I’d purchased during my lunch hour at a few boutiques down the block from work. I would’ve taken a trip over to the outlet stores or Miracle Mile for better work clothes, but as it was, my personal budget was tight. No, I was not making a salary at LLL because Max and I hadn’t had time to formally talk about all that.
“Brunch is perfect. Thank you, Lily. I thank you.”
My stomach turned into a mess of knots, and I suddenly felt like throwing up. Strange. Now that I’d thought about it, I’d been feeling great up until now.
Patricio’s back and so is your acid reflux. A definite sign.
“I’ll text you Sunday so you know what time I’ll be there,” I said.
“Good night, Lily. Rest well.”
“Same to you, Patricio.”