Page 24 of Surprise! I'm Engaged To My Boss
“At that stage in my life, I didn't know.”
“You don't count. You didn't know until last week.”
And I still didn't know, to be honest. But that was beside the point.
“The proposal was for me to pretend to be his fiancée for three months.”
“What?”
I took a deep breath, taking in the time to retell the story he had told me.
“Long story short: he got a girl pregnant, she died, and her parents kept the baby. He filed a lawsuit for custody of the child, and to do so he needs to improve his image.”
“The famous playboy Michael Turner? Who would give custody of a baby to that man? As far as I know, he's always partying, and he's always getting into trouble. So that's why he finally took over the family business recently? I thought it was because his brother had to take time off to take care of his sick wife.”
The Turner family was quite famous. And my friend Evelyn, unlike me, was constantly informed about celebrity gossip.
And from the little I knew — just from working at the Turners' architecture firm — that was a family that gave people plenty to gossip about...
“Yeah, it was,” I said. “And he’s been trying to take it easy on the partying, too. But someone filmed us going to his hotel room, drunk, and leaving separately the next morning. That’s why he wants me to pretend we’re engaged.”
“It wouldn't be that much of a pretense, since youreallydid get engaged, right? Oh, but I hope that with this he'll give you a better ring.”
“It's not funny, Evy. We didn't really get engaged; it was just a drunken hallucination.”
“Okay, sorry. But... don't you want to help him?”
“Are you crazy? He wants me to lie to a judge.”
“Yeah... really, that could get you in trouble if someone finds out the truth and turns you in. You did well not to accept it, girl.”
“I know I did. And he even tried to convince me to accept, with the idea that he would pay me half a million for it, and...”
“Wait!” she practically shouted, interrupting me. “He offered to pay half a million?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Half a million dollars?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn't accept?”
“No.”
“And besides not having accepted, you also resigned from your job?”
“I did...” I imagined that her anger would be even greater if I mentioned that before the dismissal I had still refused to be promoted. Maybe it would be better to hide such information.
“Have you lost your mind, Camila? How can someone turn down five hundred thousand dollars?”
And he had even made a counteroffer of a million.
But again, I thought it best to leave that information aside.
“Lying in court, remember?” I reminded her.
“For five hundred thousand I would even lie to the Vatican. Have you lost it to refuse something like that?”
