Her Little White Lie

Dante wanted even more to try and eradicate the pain in his chest that seemed to hit him so hard and strong whenever he looked at Paige holding Ana. A mother and her child. The love that passed between them. The truest love he’d known. The love he had lost.

He wanted to crush those feelings. Bury them beneath something stronger. Lust. Sex. Desire.

“Don’t ignore me, Paige,” he said. He swept her hair to the side and bent, pressing a kiss to the side of her neck. “Ever.”

She shivered beneath his touch. “I wasn’t.”

“You were trying to ignore this.” He traced the line of her neck with the tip of his tongue. “And you know we can’t.”

MAISEY YATES
was an avid Mills & Boon
^®
Modern™ Romance reader before she began to write them. She still can’t quite believe she’s lucky enough to get to create her very own sexy alpha heroes and feisty heroines. Seeing her name on one of those lovely covers is a dream come true.

Maisey lives with her handsome, wonderful, diaper-changing husband and three small children across the street from her extremely supportive parents and the home she grew up in, in the wilds of Southern Oregon, USA. She enjoys the contrast of living in a place where you might wake up to find a bear on your back porch and then heading into the home office to write stories that take place in exotic urban locales.

Recent titles by the same author:

AT HIS MAJESTY’S COMMAND
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A GAME OF VOWS

A ROYAL WORLD APART
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ONE NIGHT IN PARADISE
(One Night In …)

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linked duet

Did you know these are also available as eBooks?
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“E
XPLAIN
this, or pack up your things and get out.”

Paige Harper looked up from her seated position and into her boss’s dark, angry eyes. Having him here, in her office, was enough to leave her speechless. Breathless. He was handsome from far away and, up close, even enraged, he was arresting. It was hard to look away from him, but she managed. Then she looked down at the newspaper he’d thrown onto the surface of her desk and her heart sank into her stomach.

“Oh …” She picked up the paper. “Oh …”

“Speechless?”

“Oh …”

“I said explain, Ms. Harper. ‘Oh’ is not an explanation in any language that I am aware of.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest and Paige suddenly felt two inches tall.

“I …” She looked back down at the paper, open to the lifestyle section, the main headline reading Dante Romani to Tie the Knot with Employee. Underneath the headline were two pictures. One of Dante, looking forbidding and perfectly pressed in a custom-made suit. And one of her, on a ladder, in a window at Colson’s, hanging strips of tinsel from the ceiling in preparation for the holiday season.

“I …” She tried again as she scanned the article.

Her stomach tightened with horror. She couldn’t fathom how this had ended up in the paper. She’d done a fair amount of panicking over how she was going to fix the lie she’d told the social worker, but she’d thought she would have some time. She hadn’t expected this, not even in her wildest dreams.

But there it was, the lie of the century, shouting at her in black and white.

“That’s hardly more eloquent, or more informative.”

“I told a lie,” she said.

He looked around her office, and her eyes followed his, over the stacks of fabric samples, boxes with beads hanging out of them, aerosol cans of flocking and paint sitting in the corner and Christmas knickknacks spread over every surface.

He looked back at her, his lip curled upward. “On second thought, why don’t you skip packing and just walk out. I can have your things express delivered to you.”

“Wait … no …” Losing her job was unthinkable, as was getting caught in her lie. She needed her job. And she really didn’t need child services to find out she’d lied during her adoption interview. Well, what she really needed was a time machine so that she could go back and opt not to lie to Rebecca Addler, but that was probably a bit too complicated as solutions went.

She looked back down at the article.

Average woman. Yeah, that sounded like her life. Even in her lie, where she was engaged to the hottest billionaire in town, she came out of it as the average woman.

She swallowed and looked back up at her boss’s blazing expression. “This is horrible journalism. Sensationalist nonsense, really. All but an opinion piece, one might say. Fluff, even.”

Dante cut her off, his black eyes hard, flat. “What did you hope to accomplish with this? Was it fun gossip you didn’t think would spread around to this degree? Or was it something you wanted?”

She stood, her knees shaking. “No, I just …”

“You might not be newsworthy, Ms. Harper, but I am.”

“Hey!” The assessment burned, especially on the heels of the descriptor of her as “average.” Of course, she had to admit, looking at their pictures side by side, that
average
was a pretty kind descriptor.

“Did I offend you?”

“A little.”

“I guarantee it is not half so offensive as coming into work to discover you’re engaged to someone you have barely had four conversations with.”

“Actually, I’m sort of in the same boat you are. I didn’t expect for this to be in the paper. I didn’t … I didn’t expect for anyone to ever find out.”

“Be that as it may, they have. And now I have. It would be best if you were to see yourself out. I do not wish to call security.” He turned and started to walk out of the room and she felt her heart slide the rest of the way down.

“Mr. Romani,” she said, “please, hear me out.” She was nearly pleading. No, who was she kidding? She
was
pleading. And she wasn’t ashamed. She would get down on her knees and beg if she had to, but she wasn’t going to let him ruin this.

“I tried. You had nothing of interest to say.”

“Because I don’t know where to start.”

“The beginning works for me.”

She took a deep breath. “Rebecca Addler frowns on single mothers. Not every social worker does, but this one … this one doesn’t like them. I mean, not that she doesn’t like them personally, but in general. And she asked me why Ana would be better off with me as opposed to a real, traditional family with a mother and a father and I just sort of told her that there would be a father because I was getting married and then your name slipped out because … well, because I work for you, so I see it a lot and it was the first name I thought of.”

He blinked twice, then shifted, his head tilted to the side. “That was not the beginning.”

Paige took another deep breath, trying to slow down her brain and find a better starting point. “I’m trying to adopt.”

He frowned. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, I have my daughter in the day care here.”

“I don’t go to the day care,” he said, his tone flat.

“Ana’s just a baby. She’s been with me almost from the moment she was born. I …” Thinking of Shyla still made her throat tighten, made her ache everywhere. Her beautiful, vivacious best friend. The only person who’d really enjoyed her eccentricity rather than simply bearing it. “Her mother is gone. And I’m taking care of her. Nothing was made official before Shyla … anyway she’s a ward now.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the state has the final say over her placement. It’s been fine for me to foster her, I’m approved for that. But … but not necessarily for adopting. I’ve been trying and I had a meeting with the worker handling the case two days ago. It was looking like they weren’t going to approve the adoption.
And yes, I lied. About us. And about … the engagement, but please believe it had nothing to do with you.”

A slight lie. It had a lot to do with the fact that he was much better looking than any man had a right to be. And she had to go in to work in the same building as he did, and chance walking by him in the halls. Being exposed to all that male beauty was a hazard.

So, yes, there were times she thought of him away from work. In fairness, he was the best-looking man she’d ever encountered in her entire life, and she was in a dating dry spell of epic proportions, which meant, pleasant time with images of Dante was about all she had going on in her love life.

And she saw the man all the time, and that made things worse.

As a result of the exposure, when pressed for the name of her fiancé by Rebecca Addler, the only man she’d been able to picture had been Dante. And so his name had sort of spilled out.

Another gaffe in a long line of them for her. When it came to “oops,” she was well above average.

So there, newspaper reporter
.

One of his dark eyebrows shot upward. “I’m flattered.”

She put her hand on her forehead. “There is no way for me to win trying to explain this,” she said. “It’s just awkward. But … but … I don’t really know what to do now. It wasn’t supposed to be in the paper, and now it is, and if it turns out we aren’t engaged they’ll know that I lied and then …”

“And then you’ll be a single mother who is also a liar. Two strikes, I would think.” His tone was so disengaged, so unfeeling.

She swallowed. “Well, exactly.”

He was right. Two strikes. If not a plain old strikeout. It wasn’t an acceptable risk. Not where Ana was concerned. Ana, the brightest spot in her life. Her helpless little girl, the baby she loved more than her own life. There was nothing and no one else she would even consider stooping to this
level of subterfuge for, nothing else that could possibly compel her to do what she was starting to think she had to do: propose to her boss.

The man who practically stole the air from her lungs when he walked into a room. The man who was so far out of her league, even thinking of a dinner date with him was laughable.

But this was bigger than that. Bigger than a little crush or her insecurity. Her fear of outright rejection.

“I … I think I need your help.”

There was no change in his expression. Dante Romani was impossible to read, but then, that wasn’t really new. He was the dark prince of the Colson empire, the adopted son of Don and Mary Colson. The media speculated that they’d adopted him because he’d shown profound brilliance at an early age. No one imagined it had been his personality that had won over the older couple.

She’d always thought those stories were sad and unfair. Now she wondered. Wondered if he was as heartless as he was portrayed to be. She really hoped he wasn’t, because she was going to need him to care at least a little bit in order to pull this off.

“I’m not in the position to give this kind of help,” he said, his tone dry.

“Why?” she asked, pushing herself into a standing position. “Why not? I … I don’t need you forever, I just need …”

“You need me to marry you. I think that’s a step too far into crazy town, don’t you?”