The Prince's Scandalous Baby Read Free Page B

think you’re succeeding at it.”
     
    She laughed, or rather, she giggled. She’d now completely lost the ability to laugh without giggling. “Well, no. But I’m not failing at that, either. I’m more into restoration. Well, my company is.”
     
    Juliette did love all the old buildings in the city, and she had read more than a few articles about the process of restoring them. At least this was something vaguely pointing in the direction of the truth. It was just bad luck that it happened to be close enough to Nico’s own profession that there was a chance of him finding her out for the fraud she was.
     
    She didn’t want to go further down the lie. She didn’t want to get into details. But every time she shrugged off his questions or just said something vague, he seemed to edge away. And every time she said anything more specific, he seemed to lean closer.
     
    So she kept going. She invented a business trip from corporate headquarters to check on the state of various renovation projects going on in the area. She even invented a boss who called her day and night and wouldn’t take no for an answer on up-to-the-second updates on everything from structural problems to efforts to match and complete original tiling.
     
    The further she went, the easier it got. He was good at asking questions, too, which helped. As did the arrival of drink number two.
     
    She was glad, now, that she’d read those articles on the internet, and had often stopped in the street to look at old buildings mid-remodel, and track their progress over weeks and months. She wasn’t as knowledgeable as she would be, of course, were she really in this position. But she could fake her way through believably enough, she thought. On the few occasions that he asked her questions that she thought might catch her out, she just shifted tactic and claimed that, really, she was more on the business side of things.
     
    Nico seemed to buy it, at any rate. He nodded along, and kept engaging. She liked his little asides. They even compared notes on what they thought of the baroque theater downtown that had just been redone to mixed reviews.
     
    “It definitely feels modern, now,” he said.
     
    An hour before, Juliette would have been more cautious, and tried not to disagree with him too much, lest she out herself. But now she was buzzing from the alcohol, and the attentions of this attractive man, and the sheer adrenaline of having gotten away with a deception like this, and she just let loose.
     
    “But that’s not really the point , is it? I mean, it’s not really the point for it not to feel modern. We’re modern! No one is going to just forget that. I think the way they’ve done it is brilliant. Everything old is still there. And you can tell what’s original, and what’s not. It makes it all feel so much more real , somehow.”
     
    She stopped the words coming out of his mouth and looked at him, embarrassed and a little bit worried that she had offended him by having such a different opinion. But he said next surprised her completely.
     
    “Do you want to go on somewhere?”

 
    THREE

The sun was setting, and there was just the slightest chill in the air outside. It must have rained when they were in the bar, because there was a slightly damp, fresh smell in the street. The heat and humidity had broken.
     
    It was perfect. So perfect, in fact, that Juliette stood for a moment by the door, just enjoying the night.
     
    Then she felt Nico’s hand brush up next to hers, and grasp it lightly. Gently, he began to pull her forward.
     
    “Where did you have in mind?” she asked, stumbling slightly at his lead.
     
    “Somewhere beautiful,” he said.
     
    They caught a cab, and Juliette was struck again by how tiny Italian cabs were. Or, at least, how small it felt with an attractive man beside her that she wanted to sit close to but was afraid to cling to too tightly.
     
    Speaking in Italian, Nico gave directions to the cabbie, who