Page 28 of Royally Knocked Up
“I never saw that one.”
“You should. It’s pretty good. Maybe you and I could watch it sometime.”
Hailey grinned. “That sounds fun. One of these nights after work.”
No, you idiot! That’s a date! You’re talking about a date! How many times are you going to allow yourself to get into a romantic situation with this man? How many times can it possibly happen before you slip and allow things to go too far?
If they had met under any other circumstances, Hailey knew that she would have crossed the line with Enzo already. She fell asleep daydreaming about him, and she woke up thinking about him. Every time he stood too close to her, she felt so powerfully aware of his presence, as if her body was attuned to his. If this hadn’t been a professional relationship, it would have been immensely enjoyable to have so much chemistry with another person.
As it was, it scared the hell out of her. What if her control slipped? What if she did something she knew she shouldn’t do?
And then there was the fact that she was truly coming to care about Enzo. That had never happened while she was on a job before — certainly not to this extent — and that made it all but impossible to do a job that required her to lie to him.
His worries about what would happen now that his father was going to be king seemed to play on a loop in her head sometimes. He worried that he would lose control of his life. He had confided in her about that.
And here she was, spending every day trying to do the very thing he had confided his fears about. Trying to control him, to keep him away from the things he enjoyed. And lying to him to do it.
She wasn’t supposed to be friends with the subject of her work, and this was the reason why. She wasn’t supposed to feel this emotionally conflicted about what she had to do. She should be able to lie to him when it was necessary to do so without feelingas if she was betraying a friend, and it was going to make her worse at her job that she couldn’t do it.
The responsible thing to do would be to step back. To put a distance between the two of them. To end this friendship once and for all.
But Hailey didn’t know whether she could do that either. He simply meant too much to her now.
She pulled out her phone and checked the time. “We should make sure the red carpet is ready,” she said.
“I can’t believe you managed to get a red carpet for this,” Enzo said, beaming at her.
As always, his smile distracted her from all the complex feelings that plagued her. “Sure,” she said, laughing. “It’s not hard to get a red carpet.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s not some elusive thing, Enzo. It’s just a long strip of red velvet. I got it at a fabric store.”
Enzo laughed. “You know what,” he said, “that never even occurred to me. That a person could just go to the fabric store and get a red carpet. I guess, for some reason, I always assumed there was something formal going on there, like you had to have an official Hollywood red carpet or something.”
“Well, maybe you do if you’re hosting the Academy Awards,” Hailey grinned. “But this one will do perfectly well for our purposes. It’s just so that our guests can feel special when they walk in on it, and so that the whole thing will look fancy in pictures.”
“We should take a picture,” Enzo said suddenly.
Hailey raised her eyebrows. “Should we?”
“Don’t you think? It would be nice,” he said. “We should give ourselves something to remember this night by. We worked so hard to put it together. You did especially. You’re the one who managed to get Mae Terrington out here. I’ll never know how you did that. I actually don’t believe that even my father could have done it. You have magic powers.”
“No,” Hailey corrected him. “I have the phone number of Mae Terrington’s agent.” She had gotten it by reaching out to her handler back in Baltimore. Another PI in her agency had worked for one of Terrington’s agent’s clients a few years back. That had been a lucky break and Hailey knew it, but she hadn’t hesitated to take advantage.
“I guess there are benefits to working in the event planning industry,” Enzo said, drawing the wrong conclusion. “You’ve worked with that agent before, have you?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, you’ve got a point about me, I have to admit,” Enzo said. “I got this job because my father put me here, not because I have any qualifications, and I could never have done what you did here.”
“Oh, Enzo, don’t do that,” Hailey said. “You did a lot to prepare for this event. I mean, the whole thing was your idea, for God’s sake. I might’ve had the connections we needed, but you were the one who came up with it, and I hope you’re going to give yourself the credit you deserve for that.”
Enzo smiled. “You’re right,” he said, his ego winning out as it always did. Hailey would have found that irritating when they had first met, but now she saw that there was something charming about it.
Maybe there had always been something charming about it. Maybe she had been trying to resist being charmed.
If that was the case, she had failed extravagantly.
