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His Convenient New York Bride
Andrea Bolter
A secret, a deal… …a New York wedding! Fashion designer Mimi’s been in love with her brother’s best friend, millionaire Jin Zhang for ever. So jumps at the chance when he offers Mimi a job and the chance to become his bride! Jin is used to guarding his heart, so what will happen to their fake marriage when Jin discovers Mimi’s secret?
A secret, a deal…
…a New York wedding!
Aspiring fashion designer Mimi’s been in love with her brother’s best friend, millionaire Jin Zhang, forever. When he needs her help to save his family’s fashion label, he offers Mimi everything she’s dreamed of—a job and the chance to become his bride! After his own heartbreak, Jin is used to guarding his heart closely, so what will happen to their marriage by design when Jin discovers Mimi’s secret?
ANDREA BOLTER has always been fascinated by matters of the heart. In fact, she’s the one her girlfriends turn to for advice with their love-lives. A city mouse, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. She loves travel, rock �n’ roll, sitting in cafés and watching romantic comedies she’s already seen a hundred times. Say hi at andreabolter.com (http://www.andreabolter.com).
Also by Andrea Bolter (#u79b9528b-6ad6-5ecd-ae98-b97cc42b2fbc)
Her New York Billionaire
Her Las Vegas Wedding
The Italian’s Runaway Princess
The Prince’s Cinderella
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).
His Convenient New York Bride
Andrea Bolter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-0-008-90317-6
HIS CONVENIENT NEW YORK BRIDE
В© 2019 Andrea Bolter
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
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Contents
Cover (#u8c6c52c7-450a-589a-84c2-d8c6710f25e7)
Back Cover Text (#ube6187f4-80ea-5885-9978-6a9d215349af)
About the Author (#ua27c7e87-27e1-5805-a180-95154b0cebfc)
Booklist (#uca1c8a9b-52d4-5a2b-bfd3-5175e3524f78)
Title Page (#uff0199dc-de16-5ff3-81b4-690eeca99760)
Copyright (#ucbd5b8ce-62b8-5e20-acf2-d1b81dd6915f)
Note to Readers
Dedication (#udecaa374-96ed-549e-b551-8210f091875f)
CHAPTER ONE (#uf467009d-27b5-528d-85fd-f500eb00a470)
CHAPTER TWO (#u8a54d1f4-a818-5e54-8f74-98bbe56c618f)
CHAPTER THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u79b9528b-6ad6-5ecd-ae98-b97cc42b2fbc)
“WOULD YOU HAVE expected any less from a bully like him?” Jin asked as he stirred milk into the mug of coffee in front of him. “I could have guessed he’d find a way to try to hurt my mom and I from his grave.”
“Tell me again what the will stipulates,” his friend Aaron asked, following suit by splashing milk into his own cup before the two friends left the kitchen to sit down on the sofa in the living room. As they had a thousand times before, they both put their long legs up on the coffee table and crossed them at the ankle. The only real difference was that their seventeen-year-old selves would have held game consoles instead of java.
“Wei Zhang bequeaths to his only child, Jin Zhang, full ownership of the LilyZ fashion corporation and all of its interests with the following condition,” Jin said, quoting the document his father’s attorney had read to him an hour earlier. He had a printed copy in his briefcase and one on his phone but this section was already committed to memory. “Jin Zhang must be entered into a legal and lawful marriage before ownership is transferred.”
Jin tried to mentally control the irritating vein that was throbbing at his temple. Death hadn’t stopped his father from continuing to create chaos.
“That’s just bizarre. Did your father really care if you remarried or not?”
“Oh, he cares…cared, plenty. After I left Helene, he knew I would never marry again, no matter what.”
“Understandable after what she did to you.”
“That’s why he had the stipulation written into his will. Because he knew it was something I would never do.”
“What happens if you don’t follow the condition?”
“The business gets dissolved.”
“You either get married or lose the fashion label? Who does something like that to his son?” Aaron shook his head in disgust.
“Wei, of course.” Jin’s temple continued to pulse as he tried to process the information he’d learned that afternoon. “Destroying the company was what he wanted to do. He mismanaged just about everything he could while he was alive. And then thought of a way to ensure LilyZ’s demise even after his death.”
After Jin had met with Wei’s attorney he’d come straight over to his best friend Aaron Stewart’s apartment, as he’d been doing for years. Not far from the Chinatown building that housed LilyZ’s studio and Jin’s living quarters, Aaron’s place was a sanctuary for him.
The two men sipped their coffee in silence, their brains turning over the information as dusk became night.
“Your father was so vindictive he wanted to take down the business his own father worked so hard to build into a respected name in fashion?”
“He hated me. And my mother.”
To Aaron, and to Aaron’s younger sister Mimi, Jin could say anything. The three had been hanging out together for more than thirteen years, had seen each other through a lot of life changes already. Aaron and Mimi’s mother dying. Their father dying a year later. Jin’s parents’ divorce. Jin’s divorce from Helene. Now his father, Wei, dying with this, his last act.
“Maybe you never saw it,” Jin continued.
“I don’t think I ever really knew him,” Aaron said. “I do remember the way his nose would wrinkle in a grimace though whenever your mother was mentioned after they split up.”
“Because she dared divorce an alcoholic, cheating, mean-spirited spouse.”
“He never wanted the business in the first place, did he?”
“No. He resented inheriting LilyZ from my grandfather Shun from the beginning. My grandfather worked eighteen hours a day for decades to create and sustain a legacy brand that would continue past his death but my father felt it interfered with his drinking and womanizing.”
“Then he should have been happy to leave it to you. You’ve been mostly running things, anyway.”
“I’m telling you, he despised me and wished for me to fail because of my relationship with my grandfather. Shun and I were the same. We loved LilyZ and took pride in it. My father was always the odd man out, because he never cared about anything but himself.”
“And it was clear you took your mother’s side in the divorce.”
“So for his final act, he did what he could to leave us penniless and humiliated.”
Jin could hardly compute all of this. For the past few years, he had taken unofficial control of LilyZ, their high-end, ready-to-wear fashion label. He’d had to. Wei hadn’t even shown up to the studio every day. And when he did stumble through, he was often rude to the staff or disruptive of operations. His only son had been forced to take charge.
In addition to the will, the attorney had also shown Jin his father’s many financial misrepresentations.
“On top of it, I’ve only just found out that our books are in shambles. My father withheld information and made one bad decision after the next. If the company were to be broken up, at this point every penny would go to creditors.”
“The will says you have to get married.” Aaron pondered the situation. “Are there any other specifications?”
Jin exhaled with a whoosh of exasperation. “I don’t take possession or have any power over the financials until I prove that I’m legally married. I must remain married for a one-year probationary period during which I’m officially CEO but not yet the company’s owner.”
“Wait, that means that you only have to be married for one year?”
“Theoretically. But he knew I would never get married again so he did this to set me up to fail.”
“What are our options?” Aaron wondered aloud.
Jin’s best friend was always thoughtful and contemplative. With his deep-set eyes and curly hair, Aaron looked like a philosopher whose likeness might be rendered in marble outside of a great library.
Aaron and Jin always worked through things together, considering each other’s problems their own. Even though two heads were better than one, Jin had his doubts that they were going to be able to solve the problem this time. Because not only was Jin never going to marry again, he wasn’t even going to enter into a serious relationship. Never ever. Not after what he had gotten in return for his devotion to Helene. Jin had been married to her for three years, and she had cheated on him the entire time. A selfish liar, she was. Just like his father. It was he and his mother who were left to pick up the pieces after their spouses took a wrecking ball to everything they’d held true.
Jin flexed his hands. After six months, those hands finally looked normal to him without the wedding band that had once sat on his finger. The ring that had symbolized fidelity and partnership and loyalty. What a joke that was.
The dead bolt turned on the front door with a clack and Jin’s eyes shot to it. With a crank on the handle, Aaron’s sister Mimi walked in. She dropped her bag on the side table, not noticing Jin and Aaron were there at first. Suited up for the late winter cold, Mimi removed her beanie hat, her auburn hair cascading past her shoulders in loose waves. Having been friends for so long Jin knew that Mimi’s radiant hair color didn’t come naturally, but that her curls were her own.
Yanking off one glove then the other, Mimi tossed them next to her bag. Her pale hands set free, she next unwound the gray scarf that was wrapped twice around her throat and had played nicely against the navy color of her coat. A small, and wholly inappropriate, twitch surprised Jin’s shoulder blades when the last of the scarf revealed some more of that creamy skin, this time her neck.
Buttons undone, she removed her coat and hung it on the stand by the door. She wore a terrific pink dress, with a belt of the same fabric that hugged her lavish curves. Mimi was the best dresser he knew and, being in the fashion business, that was saying something.
“Aaron?” she called out before turning around to find her brother and Jin sitting on the couch in the very same room. “Oh. Hey, bro.”
“Sis.”
“Hey, Jin, I didn’t know you were here. Have you guys eaten? I’m starved.”
“How did the interview go?” Aaron asked her.
“Lousy. Just like yesterday’s.”
Mimi was a junior fashion designer. Jin had always felt a little bit of personal pride that she had gone into the business herself, having spent many teenage years around LilyZ and learning about the industry. Aaron had chosen the world of stocks and bonds but with Mimi’s innate fashion sense, it was meant to be.
It irked Jin that she was having employment problems after she’d quit her job because working with her ex-boyfriend was unbearable. All she kept hearing was no, and she’d been forced to move in with her brother to cut expenses.
Aaron was stable but Jin and Mimi were both going through an awful time, made worse by the fact that Jin had recently found out that the last affair Helene had had while they were married had been with LilyZ’s lead designer. Who he’d promptly fired.
It was piled up.
Mimi needed a job.
He had to find a new designer for LilyZ. And now, apparently, a wife.
The events for New York Fashion Week Spring were starting up and LilyZ was not presenting anything because, before he’d died, Wei had blocked Jin from finishing the collection on time. Jin would now need to soothe the ruffled feathers of retailers who counted on his inventory. He had to make excuses. Pretend like everything was under control.
Jin’s headache tightened. What an inconceivable mess!
“Order some food in,” Aaron told his sister when she reemerged from his bedroom. Having taken off the pink dress she’d designed and sewn herself, Mimi had slipped on comfy black leggings, thick white socks and a red pullover.
“That could be considered sexist, you know,” Mimi teased him, “making the woman take care of the meal.”
“When said woman is living in her brother’s apartment for free it could be called singing for your supper.”
“All right, you’ve got me there.”
She glanced over to Jin on the couch, who had changed positions while she was in the bedroom. No longer with his feet up on the coffee table, he sat in his black slacks with one long leg crossed ankle to knee in a posture Mimi found so decidedly masculine it gave her a flutter.
What was more, it occurred to her that Jin was sitting where she slept, as Aaron’s sofa opened to become the convertible bed she’d been unfolding every night. Jin had been over and sat on the sofa before, but for some reason the thought that it was her bed hadn’t dawned on her. She took a mental snapshot and filed it away in her brain. And then moved on, or tried to, from that picture.
“Jin, are you staying for dinner?”
“I want ramen. I need a huge steaming bowl of noodles.”
“Sounds good to me,” Aaron voted in. “From that place.”
“Yeah,” Jin agreed, “get the kind we liked that one time.”
“Okay.” Mimi knew exactly what they meant and placed the order online.
Afterward, Jin explained to her about the stipulation in his father’s will.
“Does your mom know?” Mimi asked. “I talked to her on the phone yesterday and she didn’t say anything.” The Zhangs and the Stewarts had a long history together and she knew Jin loved it that Mimi was close to his mom.
“No,” Jin stated firmly. “As his ex-wife she wasn’t included in the meeting with the attorney. I don’t want her to ever find out about it.”
“What is it that happens if you don’t get married? Do either of you want more coffee?”
Aaron shook his head no but Jin thrust out his large, square hand and Mimi moved toward him to grab the mug he held. While doing so, her fingertips brushed against his and she registered the signature heat that always emanated from his hands.
It was as if fiery little sparks that only she could see ignited every time his hands made contact with her skin. Which, during exchanges like this, or during a hug goodbye, or a hand up an unsteady surface, had happened about a million times in the thirteen years she’d known Jin.
Jin’s sparks were Mimi’s deepest secret.
As she went about making more coffee, Jin explained about the will.
Mimi looked from the coffeepot to the blank wall above it.
“It’s so unjust that your father is still in control,” Aaron piped in. “Even though you’ve been effectively helming the business for years.”
Mimi kept her eyes focused on the wall. Aaron was right. Jin had completely taken over everything regarding the clothing label as Wei’s drinking and carousing got worse. It infuriated Mimi to hear that Wei had invented this disruptive will instead of simply bequeathing the company to Jin as was his due.
And Jin marrying again? The mere thought of that was upsetting.
“You didn’t know anything about the finances?” Aaron asked.
“I didn’t have the information on how bad it was. We all know the last two collections didn’t fly. My father wasn’t on top of trends or fabrics or colors or much of anything, and still wouldn’t relinquish any final decisions to me. Even when he was only attending meetings via telecom he’d always shoot down my ideas.”
“You were captaining a sinking ship,” Mimi said.
“What did I go to business school for if he wouldn’t let me implement changes?”
“You wanted to grow and modernize.” Mimi acknowledged the thoughts he’d shared with her many times before. She knew he wanted to go from retailing in twenty stores worldwide up to fifty. “But you were too busy mopping up his messes.”
“My grandfather would be ashamed.”
Descended from a long line of clothing manufacturers, brave Shun Zhang had come to the United States from Hong Kong with little more than a dream to start a label here. With his own two hands, he’d built LilyZ into a multimillion-dollar company that had once had an impeccable reputation.
Jin’s voice rose to a volume Mimi knew conveyed just how upset he was. “My father hid the debts. He withdrew funds to supposedly pay bills but instead spent the money on himself and his latest arm candy. And instructed his accountant to keep it confidential, even from me.”
“So you were blindly captaining that ship,” Mimi restated. She brought Jin his mug but this time set it down on the coffee table so as not to have physical contact with him again so soon. That was a little game she’d played with herself before. Unfortunately, the hitch of a smile he gave her in receipt of the coffee pinged right into her chest, defeating her strategy.
The upturn of his straight-set lips had the same effect on her as it had when she was fifteen and had first met Jin Zhang. Utter fascination. The same with the high cheekbones that defined the shape of his face. At seventeen, his cheeks were fuller than their sharp angles of adulthood now. The dense slashes of his eyebrows were the same. As were his luminous dark, dark brown eyes. They had held less stress in them then, although the toll of living with an alcoholic and unkind father had always been visible on him.
He regrouped in a more even-keeled voice. “I’m sure that I can turn the company around. I love LilyZ just as my grandfather did.”
Mimi knew that before his grandfather died, Shun had told a teenaged Jin that he didn’t trust his own son. That he’d known the responsibility for the label would rest on Jin’s broad shoulders when he came of age.
Which Jin had regarded as an honor rather than a burden.
Because that’s who he was.
Oh, Jin, with the one button undone on his crisp dress shirt—never more, just enough to call her attention to the length of his throat. Lean and six feet tall, he was effortlessly sophisticated in his tailored shirt and trousers. For a man in the fashion trade, his own look was always understated and polished.
Mimi was sorry for all his turmoil. He didn’t deserve it.
“Plus,” Jin continued, “I have to consider my mom.”
“Does Mamabai know anything about the state of the company?” Aaron asked, using the nickname that he and Mimi used for Jin’s mother, Bai, who had been like a surrogate mother to them both after their own mother had died. While Wei barely acknowledged their existence, Bai had always made sure they knew how much she cared about them.
Bai and their mother, Delia, had been close friends. Mimi couldn’t confirm it, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if on her mother’s deathbed the two women had had conversations about Bai providing support after the inevitable.
“She doesn’t know a thing,” Jin said. “Since her divorce settlement ran out I’ve been giving her money out of my own pocket from what I draw as salary.”
“If the label folds…” Mimi began.
“Not only will I have to worry about how to support her, it will be a public embarrassment to her on top of all the humiliation my father caused with his behavior.”
Mimi hated to think of Mamabai enduring any more pain. Even after the divorce, Wei had been indiscriminate with his carousing. Showing up all over New York, and within the industry, with other women.
Bai had had to see her son’s marriage fail as well, with Helene unfaithful just as Jin’s father had been.
When the food arrived, Jin, Aaron and Mimi used chopsticks to dig into their piping hot containers of Japanese soup. As they slurped and chewed, the conversation turned to her interview.
“It seems as if Gunnar has informed the entire industry that I’m talentless and worthless.”
“I never liked Gunnar,” Jin said. “You were way too good for him.”
Mimi chomped noodles so that her reaction wouldn’t be transparent on her face. Why did Jin always have to say things like that? Things that made a girl, day after day, year after year, question if impossible things might be possible.
Mimi had recently broken up with her boyfriend of two years, well-known designer Gunnar Nilsson. He had also been her boss and, incensed that she had been the one to call things off, he’d made the work environment terrible for her with his constant badgering and criticisms until she couldn’t bear the antagonism any longer.
Yet making Mimi’s life miserable wasn’t enough for Gunnar. He’d gone on to find out what other companies she was applying to work for and then bad-mouthed her to them before she even interviewed.
“I think Francois Boucher met with me as a courtesy to you,” Mimi told Jin. “He told me he was sorry but that because Gunnar wasn’t able to give me a good recommendation he had stronger candidates to consider.”
Jin had been calling in favors all over the New York fashion world to try to help Mimi get a new job. But, so far, Gunnar had undercut every attempt. Apparently he was as ruthless in life as Wei was from his grave, simply wanting to control and ruin things out of spite.
“Did you meet with Kiki and Pietro?”
“Yup. Same thing. No one I’ve met with knows Gunnar and I dated so they assume his negative review of me is based on my work.”
“Did you show them your portfolio? They weren’t impressed?”
Mimi slowed a minute, appreciating that Jin never failed to tell her how talented she was.
He had become something of a professional mentor to her. Letting her use his tools and equipment anytime she wanted. Giving her important feedback on her own designs. Helping her find opportunities to further her career. Cheering her on. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him eat, stopping to rub his temples, which she knew was a sign of his stress.
She could never repay Jin for all he’d given her. Yet every night for the past thirteen years she went to sleep longing for what he hadn’t.
“What are you actually going to do?” Aaron asked Jin two days later as they went one-on-one at the public basketball court near his apartment. “Is there a way to contest Wei’s will?”
Jin swooped around Aaron’s left side as he tried to steal the ball. Aaron pivoted away to keep his dribble going. “I spoke with my lawyer about it. I would have to establish that he wasn’t of sound mind when he wrote it and that’s almost impossible to do after the fact.”
“You’d have some witnesses.”
“Being an infidel and a drunk doesn’t mean you can’t make decisions. My lawyer said I didn’t stand a chance.”
“So, what then?”
“I’m wracking my brain trying to figure it out.”
Aaron took a shot from midcourt and missed, Jin grabbing the ball on the rebound. He swerved left and right to avoid his friend’s vigorous attempts to get it back.
“Consider this for a minute,” Aaron said with a lunge. “Is there any way you could work something out with Helene to make it seem on paper like you were back together?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Jin dodged Aaron’s attempt to steal the ball.
“Desperate measures.”
Helene was out of his life forever. He’d never speak to her again. Let alone involve her in something as important as his inheritance of LilyZ. To think, there was a time when he thought he’d always be with her.
When he’d first met Helene Carlson, she was working for an advertising agency with several clients in fashion. She introduced Jin to a New York party world he had never been a part of, preferring to keep his nose down and his mind on work and graduate school. Ironically, the same qualities she said she had liked about him.
With her swinging blond ponytail that was always in motion, Helene was fun and Jin got temporarily swept into her orbit of nightclubs and red carpets. Until the late-night revelries got to be all the same, and not worth the tired mornings. By then they were already married. Busy with the constant job of cleaning up the disasters his father had created, Jin couldn’t keep up with his wife’s social life. However, Helene wasn’t done with that lifestyle, and continued to stay out until all hours most nights of the week.
Word trickled back to Jin that Helene wasn’t spending her time away from him alone. When confronted, she claimed innocence but when photos of Helene with other men appeared on fashion gossip sites, Jin had had to face the truth. That time, she hadn’t denied the accusations. He’d ended their marriage certain he’d never trust anyone ever again.
Jin had had two people in his life show him how easy it was to betray marriage vows. His father and his wife. And both had managed to put a cherry on top. Wei with his will and Helene by having an affair with LilyZ’s lead designer, Javier Ferrer.
Aaron hustled Jin’s attempt at a basket. The ball tipped the rim but didn’t go through the net. Aaron was able to retrieve it on the bounce and regain possession.
It was a fair question Aaron had asked, but Jin couldn’t bear the idea of even calling Helene again, so that was out.
What did make sense was the idea of marrying someone in name only. He knew he’d never marry again for love and he also knew he wouldn’t lose LilyZ. Something had to give.
What would in name only actually look like? Some sort of marriage arranged for mutual benefit.
Jin took a shot at the basket and made it. “He shoots. He scores.”
It wasn’t that weird. People got married left and right for all sorts of reasons.
Aaron overtook the ball and dribbled away from him. “Show-off.”
Jin stole it from him and did a quick-footed spin away.
If Jin was really going to consider this, he could call his cousin Ling in Hong Kong. He and his uncle Fu owned the manufacturing end of LilyZ. Perhaps they employed a young woman who might want to have a career in the States.
In the distance, Jin saw Mimi among the throngs climbing up the steps from the subway station by the basketball court. Aaron must have texted her that they were here.
He had no trouble picking out her face in the crowd with the alabaster skin and plump lips that he’d seen develop from those of an awkward teenager into a full-blooded woman. She and Aaron both had the same light brown eyes as their mother. Mimi’s hair was tousled and tumbled down her shoulders. She spotted him and lifted her fingers to give him a gentle wave.
Once he saw Mimi coming toward them, he realized he’d never be able to go through with an in name only situation with a stranger. It had just been hypothetical thinking. Because if he was ever to do something like that he’d be sharing his life, his mother’s life, and the life of LilyZ. He surely wasn’t going to do that with someone he didn’t know.
Perhaps that’s why, as soon as he’d conjured the idea, he wanted to be sure Mimi never knew about it. It was too preposterous, too dishonest. Despite what he’d gone through with his father and with Helene, he wouldn’t destroy the sanctity of real love for people who still believed in it. People like Mimi. She’d missed the mark completely with that idiot Gunnar. But he knew that she and Aaron thought in terms of the happiness their parents had shared before death took them too young. Mimi and Aaron hadn’t grown up like Jin had, witnessing how little the marriage contract meant to some people.
“Hey, you guys,” Mimi called out as she approached the court. Her hips swung side to side in that va-va-voom way as she walked, her sloping curves sashaying. Jin liked that she always wore fitted outfits and never hid her hills and valleys under sloppy clothes.
“Hey, Mimi.”
“Sis.” Aaron got control of the ball while Jin focused his eyes on Mimi. Was there something different about her lately, or something he hadn’t noticed before?
He wished that she was more successful in love than he had been. She was the total package. Men should be lined up around the block.
“Are you done, do you want to walk home together?” Mimi asked as she reached the chain-link fence separating the court from the New York sidewalk.
Jin and Aaron moved to the bench where they had their bags. Each located their water bottle and took in big gulps. Then found their towels and wiped the sweat dripping down their faces. Jin mopped up his hair as well and when he pulled the towel off noticed the side-eyed way Mimi had watched the whole maneuver.
“I’ll walk part of the way with you but I’ve got a cocktail reception thing tonight at Boutique Charli.” New York Fashion Week Spring was upon them, when the international fashion industry converged on the city. Buyers, media, VIPs, celebrities and invited members of the public gathered for event after event that showcased the latest creations.
The major design houses mounted elaborate runway shows and extravagant parties. Exclusive ready-to-wear labels like LilyZ tended toward private showings. Boutique Charli was an influential shop in Chelsea and Jin had to make everyone he encountered believe it was business as usual for LilyZ. That while they didn’t have a collection to show this season, which he could blame on Wei’s death, they were still on track.
To redeem the lies he’d be telling, Jin needed a new designer. Immediately. Of course, it couldn’t be just anyone. He’d interviewed five people in the past two days and none of them were right.
Even though shooting hoops with Aaron had helped clear his mind, his to-do list came flooding back into the stress points of his temples.
After he bid farewell to Mimi and Aaron, he went home to shower and dress. When he arrived at the Boutique Charli party he was distracted, and it wasn’t as easy schmoozing with the crowd as he’d hoped. He accepted the cocktail a waiter offered and struggled with the chitchat he needed to do.
A runway model trotted toward him. He couldn’t remember her name. With a kiss on each cheek she almost choked him with her flowery perfume.
“Hi Ji-in.” She somehow made his name stretch out to two syllables. “You remember me from the De La Costa show.”
He didn’t, but smiled politely. Looking ready to swallow him whole like a snake would, she had no reason to know that women were off-limits in Jin’s life. That he’d never put himself out there and chance getting burned again.
A typical rail-thin, six-foot-tall fashionista, the model wore a blouse made of peach-colored rayon. Styled after a man’s shirt, it had buttons down the front. On one side the shoulder was cut out completely, revealing the wearer’s bony clavicle and her bare arm down to the elbow. The other side of the blouse was a regular cut with silver trinkets shaped like bunnies sewn down the line of the sleeve. Jin knew that rabbits were part of Milan label Fortnight’s theme this year so guessed it was theirs.
Fashion was so subjective. That blouse could look ridiculous to one person and be the height of couture to the next. When Shun Zhang started LilyZ, he’d never had aspirations to see his clothes on the catwalks of Paris or in wild editorial spreads of fashion magazines. His intention was to create expertly made clothes that a woman could wear for decades so Jin’s grandfather chose the finest fabrics and used time-consuming craftsmanship.
Shun had an innate sense of how to foreshadow or interpret a trend but work it subtly into his collections, so that his clothes never went out of style when the fashion winds blew in a different direction. Customers responded and LilyZ became a multimillion-dollar enterprise.
To uphold those traditions, Jin needed a designer. While he himself occasionally generated ideas that ultimately became finished pieces, he was not a designer and couldn’t develop a sketch into a pattern and then into a sample and finally to perfection. What he needed was somebody talented and trustworthy to come into his troubled company and turn it around. Somebody like… Mimi!
Looking at the model’s rabbit trinket shirt, Jin thought of that smashing pink dress Mimi was in the other day. She had a real knack for sensing what would look good on someone. It wasn’t just that she was a woman with hips and an ample bosom, a shape that was still outside the norm for the industry. No, what Mimi had was real artistry in merging a classic look with a mood, creating something that made a statement with delicacy and grace.
If only everything was happening a few years from now. If Mimi had more experience, he could hire her as his designer. She was part of the family already and, as a unit, they could take LilyZ as far as it could go. He could count on her.
But a company of LilyZ’s standing couldn’t name a junior designer to lead. He, and she, would be the town’s laughingstock.
Unless? An idea popped into Jin’s mind.
It was too crazy.
But what if it wasn’t?
CHAPTER TWO (#u79b9528b-6ad6-5ecd-ae98-b97cc42b2fbc)
“CAN I TAKE a shower, please?” Mimi poked her head into her brother’s bedroom. It was inconvenient that she had to go past his bed in order to get to the bathroom but that was the price paid for camping out on his sofa bed while she was unemployed.
“Gaaaaah…” was Aaron’s half-awake reply as he rolled over and pulled the blankets over his head. “Get. A. Job.”
“Working on it, bro.”
As she showered and dressed, she knew she was at the point of overstaying her welcome. Aaron’s place was, plain and simple, a compact New York apartment meant only for one person or a couple at most. Minimalist and sleek with black furniture, it was perfectly detailed for the up-and-coming lords of Wall Street such as her brother.
Aaron had offered to lend her money to get her own place when she broke up with Gunnar and moved out from the apartment she shared with him. But a junior designer didn’t command a very big salary and she didn’t know how she’d pay her brother back. She knew he’d absorb the cost if he had to, but she also knew that he was saving money to buy an apartment rather than continuing to lease, and she didn’t want to derail his plans.
After showering, she made breakfast.
“You interviewing again today?” Aaron asked when he emerged clean and suited up for his workday.
“Yep.”
“Maybe you’ll get this one.”
“We’ll see if Gunnar has managed to ace me out of yet another job.” Mimi shrugged as she portioned out the eggs she’d just scrambled, handing one plate to Aaron.
He went to sit down at the table but there was nowhere to put his dish. The surface was piled high with everything from Mimi’s sketch pads to her electronics to her sewing machine. She rushed over to make room, stacking things on one of the chairs and the sofa bed. “Sorry.”
The coffee table had been moved aside in order to open the sofa bed, which was not yet folded up for the day. Mimi’s clothes and shoes and whatnot were also spilling out of two suitcases in the middle of the floor. There were fabric swatches and sewing tools everywhere, and even a pair of slippers on the end table. In short, Mimi’s life lay in front of them.
“Honestly, Mimi, I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. You know, Jin asked me again if you’d want to stay with him. He’s got the huge flat all to himself now and there’s plenty of room.”
“No, I, no…” Mimi tripped over her words.
It was true that the whole third floor of Jin’s Chinatown building was living space. The showroom was at street level and the second floor was the studio. Shun had bought the building when he’d started to make some money with LilyZ and it had never been occupied by anyone other than the Zhang family ever since.
When Bai finally couldn’t stand Wei’s disrespectful ways one minute longer and divorced him, she moved to the Upper East Side to be near her sister. No one knew where Wei had stayed before he died. Jin had lived in the Chinatown flat by himself until Helene moved in, and was now alone there again.
However, Mimi staying with Jin would be intolerable. How could she ever tell him or her brother that just the proximity she typically had with Jin was, and always had been, enough of a struggle? Seeing him several times a week, sharing meals, hovering together over a garment, confiding their joys and sorrows.
Feeling his sparks.
It was all already too much.
If Jin was behind her in a room, even if she didn’t see him she’d know he was there. She could recognize the sound of his breathing. Knew what size shirt he wore. His favorite movie. Song. Flavor of ice cream.
But while they’d shared cottages in the woods and summer beach shacks, moving into his flat would be another matter entirely. Going to sleep under the same roof, waking up to each other day after day, night after night.
That would be skidding too close to thoughts that were only allowed out in the wee hours.
Aaron and Mimi finally sat down at the cleared table with their breakfast. Changing the subject, she reminisced, “Remember how Dad used to snip fresh chives onto eggs?”
“I like that you always put cheese in them. But yeah, he’d bring the little potted plant from the windowsill over to the table.”
The siblings had grown up in a happy home full of warmth. Delia and Benjamin Stewart walked arm in arm together down the street just as they did through everything in their lives.
Until the death do us part bit came too soon.
“Mom and Dad had something very special.” Which is what Mimi longed for. That kind of union, a friendship and a romance all mixed into one.
“Unlike Wei with Bai.”
“It must have been so hard for Shun, to have an alcoholic son he didn’t know how to help.”
The siblings forked up their eggs.
Shun had only recently died when Aaron first met Jin. The two teenaged boys played together on the high school basketball team. Their moms got to know each other while cheering on their sons during games.
Mimi was two years younger, fifteen at the time, and not that involved in her brother’s life. When she’d come home from her after-school babysitting job, her pulse would pound to see dark, handsome Jin sitting at their kitchen table eating her mother’s food.
Little did she know at the time that the Stewarts’ apartment had become a refuge for Jin, a place to escape the negativity of the Zhang home. Nor did young Mimi understand how to interpret the intense stares Jin always gave her. Over the years, she’d come to learn that the look in his teenaged expressive eyes was pain and emotional fatigue.
Aaron put his fork down. “I wish there was a way we could help Jin.”
“That’s what I keep thinking.”
“Can I show you something?” Jin asked Mimi while she was sitting at a sewing machine in his studio a little later. “Just a couple of new things I was playing around with.”
“Sure, just let me finish up this seam,” Mimi said as she turned her head toward him and then back to the dress she was doing in muslin as a prototype. She’d come in after her interview to use one of Jin’s industrial machines, as she had been doing for years.
He kept a few machines near his office in the back, along with a cutting table, tools and shelves with fabric set aside for special projects. Now with his grandfather and father gone, nobody but Jin used the office.
Employees busied about in front creating virtual models on the computers, fulfilling back orders and doing alterations for the customers who had bought pieces from the showroom downstairs. While the major manufacturing was handled by his uncle Fu in Hong Kong, there was always plenty of activity at Jin’s building.
He pulled out some drawings he’d done.
“I was toying with this,” he explained as she got up from the machine to join him. Pointing to details on the sketch he explained, “Wouldn’t this be kind of a practical look? Comfortable separates but with fine tailoring so that a woman can wear them anywhere? Business casual. With this maybe,” he said as he pulled over some fabric swatches.
He handed Mimi a twill he was considering. Their fingers brushed in the process. The Jin sizzles that were as familiar to her as her own heartbeat crackled up her spine.
A smirk she fought to hide reminded her of Aaron’s suggestion of her moving in with Jin. Living with this man, who occupied her dreams day and night, was out of the question.
Although, really, she’d have nothing to worry about because in all the years she’d known him, he’d never done anything to encourage her secret feelings. There was no reason to think he ever would. The big brotherly hugs, chaste kisses on the cheek and the professional cheering on was the way they were with each other. For so long now it was set in stone.
She rubbed the fabric between her fingers. “This would be wrinkly by the end of the day. Can you go with something stiffer?”
“Will you work it through with me? I can’t meet my retailers with nothing to show.”
“And you have no designer.”
“I haven’t found anyone suitable to hire.”
“You’re thinking of doing your own collection?”
Jin slowly nodded as he looked over his drawings.
“Was I wrong to fire Javier so hastily? Right before Fashion Week?”
“Once you found out about him and Helene, how could you be expected to work with him every day?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Mimi lifted one sketch off Jin’s desk and inspected it carefully. Then she reviewed another. She trailed her finger along the drawing of a blazer jacket, commenting, “You could run a curved seam here, and here, and give it a little flare at the hem.”
Maybe this was how she might help Jin. Offer what assistance she could in pulling together some pieces without a designer.
“I like that,” he said, understanding her concept.
“Kind of a nineteen-seventies vibe.”
“Hmm. You’re good.”
“I know! If I could ever get a job.”
“How did it go today?”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
Mimi had always wanted to be a fashion designer, even before she met the Zhangs. Whereas others loved music or books, she loved clothes. The artistry of fashion. The details. The variety. The act of personal expression that had to be combined with an almost science-like approach to construction. She’d taught herself to sew as a young girl and sitting in front of the hum of a machine was her happy place. For birthdays or holidays, she’d ask for gifts of fabric and supplies. Her parents encouraged her to chase her ambition so she’d gone to design school.
Now here she was, unemployed.
“Gunnar Nilsson is not going to bring me down.” Mimi grabbed a pencil from the holder on Jin’s desk and was quickly drawing a revised idea for his casual suits. “Didn’t your grandfather do a collection like this way back when? I feel like I’ve seen some photos.”
“Yeah, it was a big hit in the eighties. With exaggerated shoulders and peg-leg pants but the same theory. I’ve heard that half of New York produced imitations after that.”
“It will be a tribute to him, then.”
Mimi continued making adjustments to the sketch. “See, I’m saying do a subtle pouf at the shoulder. A little all-business and a little rock star.”
“That is fabulous, Miss Stewart.”
Jin moved toward her for a hug that included three friendly pats on the back, like someone might give their long-lost uncle. Never did he give her the kind of embraces that Mimi fantasized about. “You’re a pal.”
A pal to Jin, she was. Always would be.
She pointed to her sketches. “Can I apply for the designer job?” she kidded. Was she really kidding, though?
“Good night, Cynthia,” Jin called out to the last employee to leave the studio. He leaned back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head. Closing his eyes for a moment, he listened to the unusual din of nothingness. With equipment running, and people collaborating and coming in and out, the LilyZ headquarters was never a quiet place.
As his staff walked or took buses, subways and trains back to their homes for the night, Jin experienced urban solitude. Something he might have enjoyed after the chaos of his marriage. Right now, though, he had too much on his mind to relax.
His eyes sprang open again.
The drawings he and Mimi had been working on earlier were scattered at the side of the desk while Wei’s will sat front and center. Jin read the words legal and lawfulmarriage a couple of times, as if he’d find something different in the words than he had before. A new solution.
He was still musing on that marrying in name only concept. He’d ruled out any strangers because he couldn’t take any chances with LilyZ. Whoever he chose, that was if he chose, would have to be someone he already knew well.
The prospect seemed impossible.
Jin glanced over to Mimi’s drawings. She was really so bright and intuitive. Like today when she’d made such fabulous improvements on what he was imagining, the two of them talking in the shorthand of two people who had known each other for a very long time.
Known each other for a very long time.
Mimi had asked him straight out if he could hire her as his designer. The weird thought that had been nagging at him for days surfaced again. His brain focused on it, on seeing it all the way through.
What if? How desperate was everybody at this point? No! It would never work. A nice fantasy, though.
A new notion popped into his head out of nowhere. If there was any hope of him finding some kind of pretend wife that was someone he already knew, what about an ex-girlfriend? He’d dated women before he married Helene.
How about Leslie Wang, his college sweetheart?
Leslie was a nice enough girl. They’d broken up on friendly terms, after which she’d left New York.
So, what, Jin was going to abruptly call her out of the blue and ask her to be his phony wife? Even if he did, what would she gain from the deal? Was she a person who needed money? What if she was unattached and wanted children? Would Jin be willing to give that to someone in return for LilyZ?
Of course not, the voice in his head shouted with certainty. The ruse was to stay married for a year after which time Leslie, or whomever, would carry on with the rest of their lives. He couldn’t father a child and then not be part of his or her life.
Pondering how he would even get in touch with Leslie, he grabbed his laptop.
He’d search for her on social media.
With Wang being a fairly common surname, he located an unruly amount of possibilities. Fortunately most people had a profile photo so that he could eliminate the majority of them. When he found her photo, Jin knew he wouldn’t be reuniting with Leslie Wang, who also used the name Leslie Franklin. No, she clearly had her hands full in the photo, surrounded by three young kids who resembled her. Behind them stood a proud-looking man, his thick arms encircling his brood with a hug.
All Jin could do was laugh out loud, the sound ricocheting around his empty studio. Whatever would have made him think someone from his past was available and waiting for his call?
Mimi’s drawings next to the will caught his eye again and that crazy inkling, and it was definitely crazy, picked at him.
He scanned a panorama of the studio, all the machinery dormant and only the night-lights illuminating the cavernous space. The tall windows up front facing out to the Manhattan night. This company meant the world to him.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, didn’t they? Aaron had said those exact words himself on the basketball court the other day.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk it through.
He called Aaron’s cell phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Tripping over Mimi’s stuff that’s all over my apartment.”
Mutually beneficial agreement?
“Can I buy you a beer?”
“You bet.”
“The place on that corner.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Jin reached for one of his favorite possessions—one of his grandfather’s thimbles. While Jin had kept many of Shun’s tools, this was the most special to him. Made of heavy bone china, it had an intricately painted scene on it. A Chinese Junk boat sailed in blue ocean waves at sunset. The sky above was purple then red then orange. As a young boy Jin had thought it was nothing short of a miracle that someone could have done a painting on an object so small.
That thimble was a sort of talisman for Jin. Shun did not travel to the United States on a boat. He’d arrived on a plane to a New York airport. But the thimble’s depiction of a lone vessel under the sunset always filled Jin with respect for perseverance and risk.
He placed it back in the caddy on his desk that held loose items—a button here, a spool of thread there. After he collected his phone and wallet to go meet Aaron, Jin changed his mind and grabbed the thimble again, slipping it into his pocket.
At the crowded bar, the two friends stood close in order to hear each other. They each nursed a long-necked bottle of beer. Aaron looked Jin in the eye after he’d laid out his plan. “So you’re asking me a question?”
“I suppose I am.” He’d never go forward if Aaron objected.
“How old school of you.”
“With your father long gone.”
“Have you actually talked to my sister about this?”
“I wanted to discuss it with you first.”
Aaron snickered. “It would solve my housing problem. Although there must be a simpler way.”
“Consider that a bonus.”
“You’re sure this would be a good business move for her?”
“I’d be giving her an opportunity she could never get elsewhere at this point in her career.”
“We go back a long way,” Aaron said, tapping his bottle on the bar. “But I’ve got to say it out loud. I think she might be in…”
“She might be in what?” Jin tried to coax him into finishing.
“Are you sure you and she could pull this off without anything…you know…physical happening between you?”
A fair question. One Jin was ninety-nine percent sure he had the answer to. He was only human. Mimi was very beautiful. And they’d be saying good-night to each other under the same roof, night after night.
With everything that was at stake, though, Jin would never do anything that would risk harming her. “I could only do this with someone I trusted.”
“Right?”
“It would be all business. Wouldn’t change anything between us.”
“I’m not sure it’s that easy. But talk to her about it. I’ll support you both either way.” Jin tipped his bottle toward Aaron’s and they clinked. Although Aaron finished the toast with, “You might be my best friend. But she’s my blood. You do know that if you hurt her I would have to tear off every limb of your body piece by piece?”
Jin chuckled. “Understood.”
When they got to Aaron’s apartment, Mimi was in pajamas, hand stitching a pair of pants. She looked sweet and pretty in her baby-pink T-shirt and matching leggings. Aaron excused himself to take a shower.
“Mimi.” Jin inhaled deeply to muster up his courage as he moved toward her. He pointed to her sewing. “Would you mind putting that down for a second?”
She placed it beside her on the sofa and gave him her full attention. “What’s wrong, Jin?”
Even though she didn’t find it with Gunnar, he knew Mimi believed in love—she’d grown up surrounded by it—but what Jin was offering was something quite different.
Just talk to her about it, he coached himself. She can say no if she wants to. Do it. Now.
He dropped to one knee in front of her. Then reached in his pocket for his grandfather’s thimble. Picking up her hand, he placed the thimble on the top of her ring finger.
She shot him a baffled look.
“Mimi, would you marry me?”
“Would I what?” Mimi’s heart thundered against her chest. Jin was in front of her on bent knee, having just asked her to marry him!
Was this actually happening? She may have dreamed of this happening before, albeit in softer focus. But she definitely wasn’t asleep now. If it was a dream she’d be dressed better.
“You know I’ve been trying to figure out how to satisfy the condition of the will,” Jin began, still on one knee in front of her with a wrenching look of vulnerability on his strong face that was so unlike his usual sureness. “Which led me to think about motives for why people get married. That it isn’t always for love. How nobody but me would know if I got married to someone for a different reason.”
Mimi deflated.
This wasn’t the moment she’d been holding out hope for all these years. Just the opposite. He was making it clear that he wasn’t in love with her. Stating up front what she already knew to be true.
Which made perfect sense. Jin never had an inkling of what she held inside, so he wouldn’t know to be sensitive with his choice of words. It was his business that he was concerned about.
Rightly so.
“I see,” was all she could scratch out. Still, the hairs on her arms stood at attention.
She indulged a quick fantasy. Her Jin had finally come to claim her. To begin their life together, at last. Children. A home filled with joy. Like her parents had had. She’d show him the meaning of loyalty, and the wounds cut into him by his father and his ex-wife would heal. He’d learn to love again.
Reality check.
That wasn’t the proposal being offered.
“You know I’ll never marry again in earnest. So I got to wondering,” Jin continued as he rose up from one knee and gestured for Mimi to make room for him on the sofa.
Suddenly self-conscious about the skimpy jersey fabric of her pajamas she scooted across the cushions, as far as she could, as a matter of fact. She folded her arms across her chest in modesty. Jin had seen just about every inch of her body over the years, but not while he was proposing marriage.
“Wondering?”
The thimble was still fitted over the top of her finger as it pressed against her other arm.
“What if I married someone for practical purposes and then divorced a year later after I fulfilled the requirements of the will?”
“Uh-huh.” So that was his scheme. Disappointment rang through her.
“Then I thought about that from a realistic standpoint and realized it couldn’t be just anyone.”
Mimi’s breath sputtered at the acknowledgment that she wasn’t just anyone to him. There was a bit of satisfaction in that.
His eyes seemed to be pleading for her to connect the dots so that he didn’t have to lay it all out for her.
They might be friends but there was no way she was going to make this easy for him. Not after all she’d had to swallow for the past thirteen years. She’d hear out his proposition before issuing a resounding no. After all, she might as well stretch the moment out. It was the only time she’d ever hear those words coming out of his mouth.
What a thought. Fake married to Jin. To live as man and wife except for the love part.
A fate worse than death.
“I see.”
“We’re practically family already, Special Agent Mimi,” he said, referring to a silly taunt he and Aaron had used as teenagers when she would disclose to them school gossip they knew nothing of. “Would you consider this ultimate con to help me save LilyZ? If not for me, could you do it for Mamabai?”
She scrunched up her face at him. If he was trying to draw on the loyalty they had for each other, he was doing a pretty good job. It was just this morning that she and Aaron had been talking about finding a way to help Jin out of his predicament. But marriage! That was beyond a line she could cross in the name of duty or anything else.
“There must be another solution.”
An image passed across her brain. She was in an elaborate lace wedding gown with a long train, the type she wouldn’t wear in real life, walking down an aisle toward Jin in a tuxedo. She strode in rhythmic paces, each one taking her closer and closer to her beloved.
Wait. It wasn’t her in that mental picture. It was Helene. The woman Jin had actually married. In reality, on that fateful day Mimi was cast off to the side with two other women, the three of them in pewter-colored bridesmaids’ dresses. Later, when her brother, who had acted as best man, asked Mimi why she had dabbed streaming tears from her eyes during the ceremony, she’d told him it was because she was so happy for Jin.
It had been one of the hardest days of her life.
“I’ve considered it left, right and center, and I can’t come up with any other way,” Jin said, bringing her attention back to the here and now. “Hear me out. I’m trying to think logically about a way this could be a good step for you, too. You could come stay with me. You could have the master bedroom and bathroom all to yourself. I’ll take the guest room.”
The master suite. Where he slept. Again he was making crystal-clear that his proposal had nothing romantic attached to it. He wanted to be sure she received that message loud and clear. Separate bedrooms.
“You’ve already offered to let me stay with you,” she quipped, perturbed by this whole suggestion.
“Why haven’t you said yes?”
She uncrossed her arms and twisted the thimble on her finger, studying its painted details. Unable to answer Jin’s question.
To tell him anything would be to tell him everything. Which she never had and never would. She’d decided years ago to settle for the friendship, the concern, the trust and the fun.
It had never been easy but it had always been worth it.
“We could make it quite simple,” he insisted. For him maybe. “No one would know that we were living apart under one roof.”
“I’d like to help but…”
“Please—” he glanced at the thimble then back to her eyes “—let me finish. As I said, I know this is a huge thing to ask of someone. I’d want it to be worth your while. What if we got married and I named you as LilyZ’s new designer?”
“What?” Lead designer for his prestigious label? Otherwise known as an ultimate career goal? Her eyes bugged at the suggestion.
“You could do it. I know you have the talent. I’ll teach you everything else you need to know.”
Like thousands of others who go through design school, Mimi’s goal was to have her own fashions manufactured, sold and actually worn. It was the carrot every young designer was chasing. Not to merely assist a company with their ideas, but instead to be the one creating the vision. Only a few made it that far. Others adjusted their expectations into other occupations in the industry. Some left it altogether.
Be careful what you ask for, the saying went. Because you just might get it.
Life had a sense of humor, though. Offering Mimi what she’d always wanted.
In more ways than one.
Except the most important.
“Look, if I could, I would hire you as my designer with no strings attached. But the industry would crucify me for appointing an apprentice as my lead. And I’ve got employees with far more experience than you. They would feel betrayed and overlooked. I could never do that to them.”
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