My mind kept picturing the same scenario over and over again. Filling me with dread. Me, landing in Spain with no one by my side. Alone. Stuck in the past. Smiled at with pity. Glanced at with sadness. Whispered about.

My blood dipped to my feet, reminding me of earlier, when I had almost fainted.

“What’s option A?” I whispered, exhausted from trying to get to a conclusion on my own. “You said we have two options. What’s the first one?”

Aaron’s expression assembled into one that was all business. “Option A is, you fly home alone. As much as I advise against it, it remains an option.” Hearing that from someone who wasn’t me sent a shiver crawling down my arms. “I have no doubt that you will be fine. But that doesn’t mean it’s your easiest route to … whatever you want to accomplish.”

“I don’t want to accomplish anything.”

“That’s something neither of us believes. But it’s okay. Either way, you do have a second option. And unlike with option A, if you decide to go with option B, you won’t be on your own. You’d be bringing backup.” He placed his palm against his broad chest. “Me. You know better than most that a challenging project needs the right kind of backing and support to succeed. So, you take me, and I’ll do exactly that. You don’t have to face anyone alone. You are giving them exactly what you promised to them.”

Something lurched against my ribs. And I almost had to rub a hand against my chest to appease it.

“By bringing me as your plus-one and boyfriend, which is a part of this whole thing you very conveniently omitted telling me about, you tackle the problem at the source—showing up alone and single. As easy as that.”

Aaron Blackford had impeccably delivered his pitch. Straight to the damn point.

“Easy? You are crazy if you think this is going to be easy,” I murmured. “If you can barely put up with me most of the time, imagine an army of Linas in all sizes and shapes. For three days straight.”

“I’m prepared.”

The question was, was I? Was I really prepared to take the leap and potentially risk history repeating itself?

But then Aaron spoke again, “I’ve never been scared to work for something, Catalina. Even when all odds are against me.”

The way those words hit me was close to making me gasp for air. As if that statement had carried extra weight and taken a swing at me.

I’m being stupid.

No. I was decidedly crazy if what was about to leave my lips was any indication of the level of how much I had lost my wits. But hell, it wasn’t like I hadn’t agreed to this before.

“Okay,” I pushed out. “You have been warned—twice. Now, I guess you are really stuck with this. We are stuck with this, you and I.”

“I wasn’t the one calling it off, Catalina.” He was right; I could give him as much. And then he said, “You were already stuck with me.”

I averted my eyes, not wanting to expose how that made me feel. “Whatever you say, Blackford. I just hope we don’t screw this up.”

“We won’t,” he declared firmly. “Or are you forgetting that when I put my mind to something, I never fail?”

I blinked, a little terrified of that last declaration. Oh hell, it would take a certain level of confidence, perhaps even madness, to pull this off anyway.

Ignoring how I could almost feel the relief lifting some of the weight off my shoulders, I finally let my gaze roam outside the car.

“This is not my street.” I did not recognize the area where we were parked. “Where are we?”

“Picking up dinner,” he said, pointing out the window at a food truck covered in a colorful pattern that intertwined luchador masks with floral motifs. “This place has the best fish tacos in the city.”

My stomach grumbled at the thought of fish tacos. Any tacos would obtain that reaction, frankly. But fish tacos? They were my guilty pleasure.

“Fish tacos?”

His dark eyebrows knit together. And I was so hungry that I could have kissed that frown. “You like them,” he stated rather than asked.

I did. “I actually love them.”

Aaron nodded as if he wanted to tell me, See? “You might have gushed over them to Héctor a couple hundred times,” Aaron commented casually. To which I blinked. A couple million times rather than a hundred. “How many will you take? My usual order is three.”

His usual order?

“Three sounds good,” I confirmed rather absently while my mind wandered away, picturing Aaron coming here as a regular. Ordering his three tacos. Sauce dripping off his otherwise spotless fingers. Perhaps some out of the corner of his otherwise unamused mouth.

Stop it, Lina, I scolded myself. Tacos are not sexy. They are messy and sticky.

“I’ll be right back,” he said as he unfastened his seat belt.

A couple of seconds too late, my fingers worked on my own seat belt with the purpose of me going with him.

“Don’t,” he ordered as he threw his door open. “Stay in the car. I’ll bring them.”

“You don’t have to mother me or buy me dinner, Aaron,” I complained, not wanting him to feel like he had to feed me or something. “You have done enough already.”

“I know I don’t have to,” he said, slipping out of the car. Leaning down, his head peeked inside. “I planned on coming here tonight either way. You just happened to be in the car,” he explained as if he knew I needed to hear it. He wasn’t wrong. “And you should eat something. It’ll be a few minutes.”

Giving up, I sighed. “Okay.” Fumbling with my fingers on my lap as he leaned away from the car, I called for him again. He stopped. “Make it four then,” I requested with a small voice. Farewell, stupid non-diet. “Please.”

Aaron looked at me in silence for a long moment. So long that I wondered if I shouldn’t have ordered an extra taco. When he finally spoke, he did so quietly, “Try not to fall asleep again, okay? I can’t promise there will be any food left when, or if, I ever manage to wake you up.”

My eyes narrowed. “You’d better not ever do that, Blackford,” I said under my breath a second after he smashed the car door closed and crossed the street to the Mexican food truck.

Not more than thirty minutes later, I held in my hands a warm takeout container that smelled absolutely amazing as I shut my apartment door behind me. Five tacos—Aaron had gotten me five and not four, like I had told him. With a side of rice with serrano peppers too. And he hadn’t let me pay for any of it.

“I got you,” he had said.

After that, he proceeded to save his number in my phone and asked me to send him my flight details the moment I got home. Then, he’d made me promise I’d eat and go to sleep. As if that wasn’t exactly what I had been dying to do.

So, without giving in to the panic that I’d surely wake up tomorrow in, I did exactly as he had said.

He. Aaron Blackford. My soon-to-be boss and even-sooner-to-be fake date to my sister’s wedding.

Because just like he had said, he really did get me.

Chapter Twelve

Hours left to board the flight to wedding-doom: twenty-four.

Level of anxiety: reaching emergency status.

Contingency plan: triple-chocolate brownie. A truckload of it.

If yesterday had told me anything, it was that I had been a total idiot, cutting on some of the things that made me feel happy. Or at the very least, a little less bad. I knew that stuffing my mouth with chocolate was a far stretch from sending my so-called diet down the drain. But whatever. I was a woman of extremes.

And that was exactly what had brought me to Madison Avenue. More specifically, to the only place in New York City that held the power to appease the raging beast that was my anxiety right now.

“Do you want your order to go, Lina?” Sally asked from the other side of the counter. “How is Rosie, by the way? Is she not joining you?”