Mama’s Boy by Avery Flynn

Chapter Fifty-Four

Dixon

At the office the next day, Dixon couldn’t focus. All he could think about was Fiona and how to keep avoiding his cousins so they couldn’t arrange for the last date.

He still couldn’t believe he’d told her about Nicole. He’d never told anyone the truth about his wife. Not Griff, not Nash, not even his mom. But Fiona hadn’t seen him as a loser with a failed marriage who’d been completely and utterly fooled by his cheating wife.

If there was anything that showed exactly how perfect Fiona was for him, it was that. Even when telling her his most humiliating truth, she somehow made it seem as if it was going to be all right.

And it would be—as soon as he won this bet with his cousins so he could be the man Fiona deserved: a winner.

That’s why he had temporarily blocked his cousins’ numbers on his phone. He just needed time before they could give him the plan for the last date to figure out his approach on his genius plan to win the bet. He and Fiona would go on a relationship break. It really was a win-win. He would still win the bet and after Christmas, he’d get to still have Fiona. Whoever had said you couldn’t have your cake and eat it, too, had lacked imagination.

His cell phone vibrated on his desk, and his mom’s photo appeared on the screen—it was the one where she was in mid-sneeze. If she knew, she’d kill him.

“So,” Mom said without even a hello when he hit the Answer on Speaker button. “Nash told me everything about the silly bet you made with your cousins.”

Dixon managed not to smack his forehead against his desk—just barely.

“Nash talks too much.” That was putting it mildly.

“And this woman Fiona, does she know that all of this is for a bet?”

“Yes, I told her I wasn’t interested in a relationship.” He’d protected her, made sure she wouldn’t get hurt, which did not explain why he was starting to eat Tums like M&M’s. “She’s fine with it.”

“Really?” His mom let out a disbelieving snort of a laugh. “I’m sure nothing has changed.”

He rammed his fingers through his hair and counted to four hundred because he couldn’t quite get rid of the feeling that she was right.

“I have a game plan, and I’m working it,” he said, hanging on to the idea with a white-knuckle grip. “Everything is going to be perfect. I’ll win the bet.”

“And Fiona?”

He let out a long breath as he looked out the window of his office at Harbor City. From up here, he could see the twin suspension bridge leading to the Breakwater neighborhood. How many times had he looked at that bridge now? Before Fiona, he didn’t remember ever noticing it beyond that it was there. In the past two months, though, he’d watched it, seen how the light changed its appearance, really looked at the cars, wondering if she was in any of them.

“She understands,” he said, sounding half as confident as he needed to be and at least a quarter more than he actually was. “We made an agreement.”

“And you’re sure you’re okay with that?” she asked, direct and to-the-point as always.

There was an answer to that; he just couldn’t put it into words. It was more of a feeling than anything, that certain dread deep in his gut, the kind the Neanderthals probably got when they heard the roar out in the dark outside their cave.

“Mom,” he said, waving in his assistant. “I gotta go. Ernie is here with some paperwork.”

“Hello, Ernie,” Mom said.

Ernie turned toward the phone lying on Dixon’s desk. “Good afternoon, ma’am.”

“You’ve known me for at least a decade. How long will it be before you take me seriously and actually call me by my first name?”

“Let’s put a pin in that and circle back in another ten years,” Ernie said with a grin.

His mom chuckled—as she always did when they had their usual back-and-forth—but then returned to her serious self when she said, “Remember, Dixon. If Fiona Hartigan is who Nash made her seem like she is, then she’s not one you can sleep with and move on from.”

“Goodbye, Mother.” He hung up and started flipping through the latest dismal numbers from their experienced woman skincare line.

The more he’d thought about it, the more sense his plan made to him. Every cosmetics company in the world geared their marketing for that segment toward holding on to youth. What Nana brought to the table was the concept of being her best self, not in spite of her age but because of it. A partnership that combined their current product line with her products and marketing spin could let them exploit a niche desperate for representation.

“Fiona Hartigan, huh?” Ernie said. “She’s a persistent one. She was one of the filtered appointments.”

The whole world stopped on that pronouncement, the words seeming to echo in Dixon’s head.

“Filtered appointments” were what they’d called the meetings that Ernie reviewed and moved off his calendar so that Dixon wouldn’t see all the possibilities in some harebrained idea and sink millions in research and development before he’d admit that he’d been wrong. Yeah, his hatred of losing—even when it came to making ideas into reality—really was that bad. So Ernie had become a kind of first-level barrier to gain access to Dixon. They hadn’t gone wrong a single time.

So why was his gut clenching?

Unease stabbed its way up his spine, each step taking a jagged slice out of him.

Ernie had to have the name wrong. It had never happened before, but there was always a first time.

His breath came in hard and fast gulps as his brain fought against what he knew was the truth. “Are you sure you have that name right? It’s Fiona Hartigan.”

“Will Holt made the appointment,” Ernie said with a nod. “You know how he is.”

Will, his twin Web, and Griff all played on the same rugby team together. With the exception of his cousins, no one gave him as much good-natured shit as the Holt brothers. They’d gotten him really good a few years back with a prank involving supposed nano-tech eyelash extensions and had an asterisk by their name in Ernie’s book ever since.

“I think there were two appointments—no, three—before she got the idea and must have reported back to Holt that their latest prank idea was a no-go.” His assistant headed back toward the open door of his office. “I don’t remember exactly what the pitch was, but supposedly her grandmother had hit on a brilliant product.”

A punch to the gut wouldn’t have landed so solidly.

“Thanks, Ernie,” Dixon managed to get out past the feeling of the wind being knocked out of him.

Just like with Nicole, Fiona had had ulterior motives for being with him. Here he thought taking an interest in Nana’s skincare line was a win-win—good for Beckett and a way to make Fiona happy.

But she’d been manipulating him about it all along. She’d seen him like Nicole had, as a means to an end.

And the brunch with her family where Nana just happened to be there with her wares? God, he’d been such a sucker, asking Bridget to send him a sample case afterward, his interest pinged by that lotion he’d massaged into Fiona’s hands. After that, it had been the foot masks. He’d been so fooled that he hadn’t noticed a thing when looking back the con had been as clear as the betrayal that had been in black and white on the police report for Nicole’s accident.

He’d been up front with Fiona the whole time and honest about the bet.

But she hadn’t.

If she would have just told him the favor she’d insisted on was for a meeting for her grandma, it would be different. But she hadn’t done that. Instead, she’d played him for a loser—just like Nicole had.

Really, the fact that she’d layered the deceptions—pretending to hate dogs—had been a brilliant move on her part. It had let him think he’d figured out why she was setting off his liar detector so he’d relax and let down his guard, be open to her suggestions about her nana’s skincare line. The truth unraveled before him, unwinding like a string that had been double-knotted but still didn’t hold.

He’d known in the beginning this bet was a stupid fucking idea, but he’d gone along anyway because he didn’t think he could lose.

Gut twisting, he looked out his office window and focused on the bridge leading to Breakwater until he knew exactly what he was going to do next.

He was going to win.

He took out his phone and unblocked his cousins.

DIXON: Date six. Tonight. What is it?

NASH: And here I thought you’d been avoiding me and Griff.

DIXON: The date, Nash.

NASH: It’s the last one. Are you sure?

DIXON: Without a doubt.

He wasn’t about to lose sight of what he was doing this for. Not again.