Faking Ever After

4. Percy

CHAPTER 4

Percy

A hand touched my shoulder and shook me awake. For a moment, I wasn’t sure where I was, but the pressure dropped onto my chest the next instant. “Time to strap in,” Finn Connolly said in his melodic, honey-like voice.

Oh shit, I’m in the air , I thought as all sorts of horrible things rushed through my head. There never was a take-off or landing that didn’t make me imagine the airplane crushed like a can of beer on a frat bro’s forehead. Except, nobody would be on the side, laughing at how sick that was.

I sat up and Finn slipped a hand under my arm. “You’re buzzed out of your mind, Percy.”

I blinked twice. The sleeping pills had knocked me out long before we crossed the Atlantic Ocean. I vaguely remembered being woken up for our fueling stop some hours earlier.

The blinds were up and golden light poured into the bedroom and the lounge, where Finn led me with a gentle grip on my upper arm. More memories poured through the cracks of my sleepy mind and embarrassment heated up my face like a next-day lasagna in the microwave. I had thought Finn was a prostitute hired to accompany me to my parents’ wedding anniversary.

I sat facing Finn Connolly. We buckled our seatbelts and let the awkward silence fill the cabin. I looked around, clearing my throat and my groggy voice. “Is whiskey around?”

“Not after that horse tranquilizer, sunshine,” Finn said. He wagged his index finger to emphasize how low the chances of getting a drink were. “I need you semi-conscious to check us in. Kim’s not around.” He unbuckled his seatbelt and hopped onto his feet. “Here,” he said kindly as he picked a water bottle from the mini fridge and handed it to me.

While Finn returned to his seat, I drained the bottle. My ears plugged with pressure and my head throbbed.

“Hey,” Finn said.

“Mm.” I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Look at me,” Finn said in a tone that was equally soft and demanding.

I forced my eyelids up. He was a remarkably attractive guy. Black curls flew in all directions, long, dark eyelashes framing hazel eyes like he wore mascara, and his thick, black eyebrows gave him something of a dangerous and daring look. His eyes were ridiculously big—so big I could lose myself in them if I weren’t careful. And his thick lips with strong definition looked even better when he licked them.

“We’re going to be fine, Percy,” Finn said.

I had to relax my throat before I could squeeze any words out. “There’s no way you can know that.”

“Statistically speaking, the chances of something going wrong are incredibly low,” he argued.

“The thing about statistics is that it rarely predicts anything. Rather, it adjusts after the fact.” I gripped the armrest with all my might. We descended into clouds and that was possibly the worst thing that could happen in a moment like this. “Oh, god, what if there’s a bird strike?”

“A strike? Typical CEO worries.” Finn’s deadpan delivery made me force out a strangled laugh. “Besides, I highly doubt there are any birds that dislike you so much to go kamikaze on you,” Finn said. “Unless you busted their union. In that case, we’re dead men flying.”

“I get it, I get it,” I said as the airplane shuddered. A bright light pierced through the windows and the endless blue sea filled my view as we tilted left. “Eat the rich, and so on.”

“If the rich are as handsome as you, it gives that saying a whole new meaning,” Finn muttered.

I barked out a laugh that was tight with sudden embarrassment.

“I’m just saying, you’re kind of a snack,” he insisted.

My face must have gone red and my laughter definitely jumped an octave higher.

But Finn only smirked. “I have the right to say things like this since we’re in Greece and I’m officially your boyfriend for the next two weeks.”

His words inexplicably turned into butterflies in my stomach. “You are outrageous.”

“You forgot to be scared,” Finn said.

And he was right. The plane was on a straight trajectory, holding steady and descending fast. The airport was approaching us at incredible speed and we slammed against the tarmac hard, bouncing up and down once and twice. Hank hit the brakes and made me sink into my seat while Finn leaned out of his.

I was sorely tempted to clap my hands when the plane halted, and our pilot’s crisp, crackling voice welcomed us to Mykonos.

“Why exactly are we here?” Finn asked. “This isn’t our destination, correct?”

“We’re going in for two weeks of island living,” I explained. “And I can’t spend that long near the sea without my darling beauty.” Sweat was drying on my brow and under my arms now that we were back on Earth. Finn ogled me with confusion. “She’s the sexiest thing you’ll ever see.”

Finn gaped. “Are you…a closeted straight? Not judging, by the way.”

I snorted. “She’s a sailboat.”

“Huh,” he half-laughed. “I don’t think I’ll get used to dating someone who owns a sky hotel and a sailboat in time to be a convincing boyfriend.”

We had planned on putting together a story of our relationship history during the flight, but the pill had knocked me out too hard to get to that. “You’ll do fine,” I promised. “You have until tomorrow to get used to it.”

“Got it,” Finn said and gave a light salute.

We got off the plane a short time later. To Finn’s surprise, an immigration officer waited for us by the car, and Hank handled the details. The car that had been waiting for us was a black SUV with dark windows, big seats for extra comfort, and drinks in the cooler under the armrest. The ride was short enough that I barely opened another bottle of water before we had to get out.

Along the way, I told Finn about my family. “Mom’s the one you have to watch out for. Dad is chill enough that he wouldn’t notice if you got recast midway through our stay. But Mom is going to be skeptical no matter what. You need to stay on high alert around her.”

“Got it. And Emily?” he asked.

“My sister could go either way,” I admitted. “If she suspects something, she’ll think it would be funny to tell everyone.”

Finn mouthed their names. Alicia, Lawrence, Emily . “Very well. I’ll be careful. Is there anyone else I need to know about?”

“Aunt Judith,” I said after a moment of consideration. “There’s an ever-so-delicate chance that she has someone in mind to match me with.”

Finn gasped in outrage. “Not on my watch.”

The car glided along the winding roads between the airport and the town of Mykonos until it pulled up in front of a villa with a large welcome sign that said its name was Hermes . Finn followed my lead as I got out of the car and let the hot air ruffle my hair and lift my blazer. Sunshine kissed my face in welcome and I inhaled a lungful of warm air that carried the scents of sea salt and summer adventure in equal measure.

“Let me guess,” Finn said as he stood shoulder to shoulder with me, facing the sprawling landscape of the villa’s front yard and the white plaster with blue window frames and blinds that rose three stories high. “We’re not sharing a room with seven other families.”

“You are correct,” I replied.

Finn nodded with a healthy dose of pride. “I’m getting the hang of this rich-as-Crassus thing.”

We marched across the green lawn to the front door, looking over our shoulders once to inspect the blue horizon and the strip of the town by the coast far below us. Positioned high above it all, Hermes boasted seven en-suite bedrooms.

When the staff showed us to our suite, I didn’t dare ask why there wasn’t another room prepared for Finn. If the word got out to someone connected to my family on Naxos, the entire plan was in shambles. So I thanked our guide politely, tipped, and shut the door of our large bedroom before leaning against it. “Oh God, this is already becoming too much.”

Finn was eying the bed suspiciously. “Who gets this bed, then?”

“You’re welcome to take it,” I said. The bed was on the far left side of the immense room. There was a sitting area on the right end. I was happy to crash on the sofa for one night before heading out in the morning. In between the two ends of the room, there was a desk under the window with a comfortable office chair and space for work. I had no plans of getting too comfortable here. Hopefully, we would get one last moment of peace before the chaos of my family descended upon us tomorrow.

“Do you mind if I shower first?” Finn asked.

I was sure I could find a few other bathrooms if I needed to shower. “Not at all.”

Finn nodded his thanks. “Showering on the plane is just weird to me. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

I almost said he would get used to it, but then I remembered that we had a two-week expiration date. “It’s all yours,” I said, gesturing at the bathroom.

Finn bit his lip excitedly and I felt something like a wave of lightness in my chest. Just as he slipped through the open arch from the bedroom into the bathroom, I could hear his shocked “Oh. My. God!” He poked his head through the arch. “Have you seen this thing?”

I followed him to a fairly standard bathroom for this sort of place. It had a very spacious walk-in shower, a separate hot tub, and two matching sinks under a wall-to-wall mirror. A door at the far end led into the restroom. “Neat,” I said.

I couldn’t help but feel a trace of delight that was so plain on his face. It wormed its way into my heart. Though I often told myself I wasn’t a victim of lifestyle inflation beyond what was necessary, I found that, at times, I forgot what it had been like to be struggling.

“Neat?” Finn demanded in a squeaky voice. “Are you kidding me? This is more than the average room I get when I travel alone.” Finn closed his eyes gently and inhaled, forming a plan. When he looked at me, there was a fiery determination with a hint of mischief in his warm, hazel gaze. “Don’t call me out unless there’s a fire. And even then, I’ll be showering, so maybe I’ll be fine regardless.”

“Duly noted,” I said, struggling to keep laughter out of my tone. “Enjoy your shower.”

Finn let out a whimper that was so pleased it gave me unholy thoughts and made my face heat up. I retreated from the bathroom before I could turn red. There was no door separating the two rooms, so I searched my luggage as soon as I heard the water hitting the tiles. My portable speaker was in one of the suitcases and I had to dig through several neatly stacked piles of clothes before I found it. I hooked it up to my phone and put on some music to give Finn a bit of extra privacy. What I didn’t expect was to hear Finn singing Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now from the top of his lungs. For a guy who walked the Earth as if he might pluck the stars from the sky if only someone told him he couldn’t, Finn did not have a voice that won karaoke competitions. Instead, he had absurd confidence and a total lack of care about anyone’s opinion. And frankly, it was just as good.

I busied myself running through some reports Kim had sent to me. Reviewing various pitches from last week’s meetings was as good a way to pass the time as any. But as Finn sang from the top of his lungs and as I struggled to read the paragraphs beaming from my tablet, I decided it was a futile effort. Simply listening to him was far more enjoyable than it should have been.

I’d never have the balls to do that , I thought. Despite once meeting the President and having to face CEOs at the top of their game all the time, I easily reverted to the shy person I had been in college and before. When someone walked with confidence, I stepped out of the way. This applied to every facet of my life except around the negotiating table, and the attitude I had there was something I had to fake for a long time before it came true.

My playlist went from one song to the next on shuffle mode until it returned to the very beginning. Only then did I realize that Finn had known the lyrics to every single song. Also, he had been showering for almost an hour. When he stepped out, singing his heart and soul off, my heart quickly climbed into my throat. His black hair was wet, drops of water covered his sculpted chest and abs, his shoulders were broader than his clothes had allowed me to see before, and he only wore a towel. Holding a hairbrush in one hand, he sang into it like he owned the world.

“I love this song,” he exclaimed when the instrumental part allowed him a moment of rest.

“I figured that out,” I said loudly over the blasting soundtrack, but Finn was already filling his lungs with air to sing his butt off again. Though every sensible shred I had screamed at me to avert my gaze, I found myself grinning at this joyful guy who moved his hips left and right and back and forth as if that towel wasn’t hanging by a thread.

I couldn’t look away from the alluring perfection of his torso, even as I told myself he was the very last person I should look at this way. You’re doomed to share a bed for two goddamn weeks. Do not get any ideas, Percy . But ideas were fickle things, coming and going on their own. The clear lines of his rounded pecs made me wonder what it would feel like to drag my fingertips over them. The hard abs tensing with the odd dancing exercise he was performing made me almost able to guess what his skin would taste like if I licked it.

“I was thinking,” I said, dialing down the volume only to spark a devastated expression on Finn’s attractive face. “Would you like to have dinner with me down by the harbor?”

“Mm, now that you mention it, I am starving,” Finn said, smoothing away the hurt over me ending the party so soon. “Let me get dressed.” Finn turned away from me and bent down to lift his backpack. We really had to find an excuse for his lack of luggage, but those thoughts faded out of my mind as my gaze landed on the big, round, peachy bottom and the curvature of Finn’s lower back.

Politely, I looked away, but his ass, with nothing but a towel hiding him, burned itself into my long-term memory. Oh, Kim , I thought desperately. Could you have found a better-looking boyfriend for me? It was like she had set out to make this as miserable for me as she could. Now that I was able to look at Finn without the panic of falling from the empty sky, I realized more and more that pretending to be intimate with him was going to be the sweetest kind of torture.

I hated it.

Finn straightened after digging through his backpack. In his hand, he had a pair of denim shorts, a cream shirt, and a pair of light gray boxer briefs. He walked toward the bathroom, his hair still dripping over his broad shoulders, and a few drops of water trickled down the length of his spine. I gazed at the space between his shoulder blades until he was out of sight, and then I released the deep breath of air I had been holding.

My face heated up, my stomach hollowed, and the flutters of anxiety filled me.

I narrowed my focus on the most important things. Like the algorithms Richie and I had created in college, I followed a complicated path of situations and assigned them tags that opened up new paths inside my mind. By the time Finn returned in casual attire, and we headed out, I had something resembling a list of things we needed to discuss.

Finn let out a soft, pleased sigh as we crossed the sprawling front yard and gazed out at the blue speck of sea beyond the white-painted town. “This truly is Heaven on Earth.”

“Just wait until you see my little corner of Naxos,” I said. There were few places I loved more than our small estate on the neighboring island. Mykonos drew all the tourists to this side of Naxos, and Santorini did the same to the south, making my beautiful island a tranquil place with just enough people to make it lively but never overcrowded.

The breeze lifted off the sea and made my half-unbuttoned shirt billow. I glanced at Finn, whose hair had dried messily and flew in all directions. His curly locks made me think of running my fingers through them. “We sail in the morning, just the two of us,” I explained, distracting myself on purpose. “So we better have a story ready for when we get there.”

Finn nodded and gazed out at the horizon, deep in thought. “How about this? A year ago, you threw a big party, and that’s where we met?” I opened my mouth to say it sounded perfect, but Finn ran straight over me. “I had been harboring dreams to go to this party for weeks, and I even had a small horde of animals help me make a perfect dress, but my evil stepmother set her daughter to ruin my night, and all was lost, but…”

“That sounds a bit too familiar,” I said.

“That’s the beauty of my plan. We already know all the details without having to think,” Finn concluded with pride.

“What if you were Kim’s plus one at a charity gala I did in New York last Christmas?” I asked.

“Boring,” Finn said. “How about we were business enemies? The rivalry between our families has lasted generations and I came to your gala with only one mission in mind: to outbid you at every turn and be the biggest donor of all.”

“Let me guess. We fell hopelessly in love, but the feud between our families made our love impossible, so you faked your own death, but I never received the letter in which you explained the details of your plan.” I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously.

Finn had the nerve to make a surprise expression as if he’d assumed I’d never read Shakespeare. The fucker even slapped my shoulder. “Look at you go. That sounds great.”

“There’s just this problem of us appearing at the party after our deaths forced our feuding families to reconcile. Also, my parents would have noticed sworn enemies if they had any,” I pointed out with parently patience. “So, back to my plan. Kim introduced us to one another and I got very interested in…um…what do you do?”

“I’m a rocket surgeon,” Finn said gravely. “It’s a very niche occupation. I earn a stupendous amount of money.”

“This could actually work,” I said, my brain racing. “I mean, ideally, we’ll be in and out before anyone even notices us…”

“Is this your plan for our wedding night, or?” He shot me a teasing look.

Heat rose to my face but I blamed the setting sun’s brilliant rays. “What I’m trying to say is that we should keep a low profile because you’re, erm, shy, let’s say. But if all else fails, you can just be downright silly and we’ll call it a trait that attracted me to you.”

Finn pouted and let out a contemptuous sniff. “That’s all nice and fine, but what attracted me to you, then? If it’s not the looming shadow of death and the sweetness of forbidden fruit, why did I pick you?”

I swallowed my laughter and poked him in the ribs with my elbow. The truth was, I didn’t want to think why he would have chosen to be with me. I really wasn’t that special. “You’re with me because you love cats. So when I told you about this network of shelters my foundation runs, you were swept off your feet.”

“Cats?” Finn glared at me with an overly hurt expression. He grabbed his chest in haste. “First you call me a hooker and now you tell me I look like a cat person. When will these attacks stop, Percy?”

Finally, I threw my head back and laughed out loud. He was not a serious person and I was going to pay the price, but at least I’ll pay it laughing. “Fine. Dogs, then. Your love for dogs softened you for me, so when I asked you out, you gave in.”

“I asked you out,” Finn corrected me. It made sense. “In fact, I didn’t ask. I told you. That fits the bill, I think.”

He was right. Nobody would believe me if I said I had pulled my nose out of work for long enough to ask someone out.

We reached the harbor laughing and adding silly details to our first date that nobody was ever going to hear. It was nobody’s business that Finn went out with me wearing edible underwear or that I was so indecisive about kissing him by the end of the date that I stumbled and kissed the merest corner of his lips like a teenager at his prom night. So I let Finn make up ridiculous stories and enjoyed the vivid imagination that swirled around his head.

“Speaking of kissing,” I said awkwardly.

Finn gulped, tension visibly entering his body. Of course, he wouldn’t want to just smooch around in order to make our story more believable.

I cleared my throat. “I’m not a big fan of public displays of affection,” I said. “So that should cover it.”

“Oh.” Finn’s eyebrows shot up. He must have been relieved. “Okay.”

We walked along the harbor, where the scents of grilled food mixed with the salt in the air.

After a while of total silence, Finn sucked his teeth. “But if push comes to shove and we just have to assure them we’re really boyfriends, you should know that I don’t have any diseases or whatever. We can survive a kiss.”

My heart stumbled. “Um, oh, right, okay. That sounds good.” Then, scratching the back of my head, I parsed through his words more carefully. “I’m also clean. I can show you my most recent results.”

He nodded.

It wasn’t like we’d be exploring each other’s mouths this entire time. And that thought made me glance at his lips. You probably taste like honey and the sweetest summer wine. Not that I would assume he wanted me to kiss him. Still, if we were absolutely forced to, it was good to know he wouldn’t mind taking that bullet for me.

“Did I thank you for doing this?” I asked absent-mindedly.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Finn said. “We haven’t even started.”

That thought was enough to send my heart into panic-beating mode. Tomorrow. We would cross that bridge tomorrow.