Worst Faking Idea (Babes of Brewing #4)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

NORA

Text conversation with THIRD CHOICE

But if you wanna hook up somet ime, you got my number, babe

Not anymore I don’t. [Middle finger emoji.]

I kick the bathroom door in frustration and then swear a blue streak, because damn, that hurt. Probably worse because I’m wearing uncomfortable kitten heels.

Obviously I knew the man whose name I hadn’t bothered writing down last night wasn’t going to be an ideal solution to my problem, but he’d seemed like an acceptable placeholder.

My friend Hannah and I went out last night on a mission to find me a last-minute fake boyfriend for my mother’s wedding, which is being held here.

Not here in my private office bathroom, but in my ginger beer brewery—The Ginger Station.

A magical place, which looks even more magical today, with the exposed wooden beams covered in fairy lights and miniature roses.

We set up the special events room for the ceremony, and the reception is being held in our expansive tasting room. Everything’s ready.

Everything except for my date.

Unfortunately, Hannah and I got a little too drunk last night. Much too drunk.

To be honest, I couldn’t pick THIRD CHOICE out of a lineup.

All I know is that choices one and two listened to my looney tunes story and had the sense to bail.

So I’d settled for Unlucky Number Three—until about five seconds ago, when he very considerately canceled on me an hour before my mother’s wedding.

Even now, Mom’s having her hair done, along with my aunt and cousin. I opted out, since I was hoping to sort out this whole date mess.

I’m not worried about how Mom will react to my datelessness. My mom’s not one of those mothers who’d shove her daughter down the aisle toward any old loser. She’s raised me to be independent and encouraged me to only share my life with a man who can take care of himself.

But I’m not being histrionic when I say my entire career hinges on me pretending to be in a serious relationship.

Yes, I know how that sounds.

It’s also one hundred percent true.

My friend and business partner, José, and I started The Ginger Station together. We’re a ginger beer brewery that distributes to hundreds of stores and bars around Western North Carolina. It was my dream, and because he believed in it too, it’s now our reality.

Unfortunately, he is engaged to a psychopath.

Pansy can’t stomach the fact that José and I briefly dated. Nothing on heaven and earth can convince her that I no longer have the slightest intellectual curiosity about his dick. She knows I’ve seen it, and that’s enough to make her hate me forever.

A little jealousy, I could understand, but this woman takes it to new heights. We’re talking cyberstalking and anonymous threatening texts.

But José is convinced she’s an innocent, delicate flower of a woman who’d never do such things. He thinks the texts, which stopped coming months and months ago, were from someone else.

My friend is deluded.

Still, I want to get along so my brewery can continue on. I’d do anything for that.

Which brings me to the real reason I need a date. Ever since Pansy came into his life, José has been pulling away from me and the business, leaving me to wonder about its future. So a couple of months ago I poured him a drink after closing and flat-out asked him if he was on his way out.

He sighed and gripped the edge of the bar, which we’d sanded together years before. He didn’t need to tell me it was a sign of nerves. I’d known him for over a decade.

“I don’t know, Nora,” he finally said. “It’s hard for Pansy, knowing we spend so much time together.”

“What would make her feel better?” I asked tightly, my heart pounding.

I was anxious but also furious that my future was going to be decided by a super-hot blonde who loves Bon Jovi so much she has “livin’ on a prayer” tattooed on her inner wrist. Her bad taste in tats wasn’t the problem, though—it was that she’d pussy-whipped my best friend into believing she was the only thing he should want.

She had no friends to speak of, and her whole family lives “out west.” He sees a free spirit; I see a walking red flag.

“Are you honestly asking me that?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Or is this another bid to pick on her?”

“Honestly asking.”

He rubbed a divot in the wooden bar, his dark hair tumbling over his face. “She’d feel better if you had a boyfriend.”

“So tell her I do. It’s super serious. His name is Marco, and I want fifteen of his babies. We’d need to get a fleet of minivans, but it would be worth it to have the whole block looking like him.”

He scowled at me. “A lot of people would be jealous in her situation, Nora. She’s not being unreasonable.”

He scooted his stool back an inch, signaling the conversation was over. I placed a hand on his arm to keep him from leaving, but he looked down at it as if I’d grabbed his junk.

I pulled back, wounded. “We can’t even touch each other anymore?”

A sigh seeped from him. “Look, I’m sorry.”

“We tried being together for two months. Two months out of ten-plus years of friendship. This is ridiculous, José.”

I knew he agreed with me. It was there in the lines of his face, which I knew almost as well as my own, but he said, “I can’t tell her the way she feels is ridiculous.”

“So tell her I have a boyfriend,” I insisted. “I’ll find one, so it won’t be a lie.”

He laughed, looking more like himself for a second, but it slipped into a grimace. “I don’t want to force you into dating someone just so—”

“I’ll do it, and hey, maybe he’ll be my soulmate, and I’ll have Pansy to thank. Just don’t ask me to name my kid after her.”

“Nora.”

“Tell her,” I said, my voice dangerously close to pleading. “We can’t lose this place. We can’t.”

I can’t lose this place. I don’t have the money to buy him out. And it would be pointless for him to buy me out given I’m the one who makes the ginger beer we sell. He never caught the ginger bug himself—he hitched himself to my dream because he believed it could be successful, and it has been.

We’ve both poured so much of ourselves into this place. For either of us to step back now would be unthinkable. I mean, what would he even do?

Pardon the pun, but he’d be livin’ on a prayer.

“All right,” he said after a moment. “I don’t want to lose this either.”

And I knew he wasn’t just referring to the brewery. He was talking about our friendship and working relationship.

Of course, Pansy swung by the brewery after hearing about my new “boyfriend,” because she had dozens of questions.

She wanted to know his name.

Marco.

She was desperately curious about his job.

Computers, but his position was classified.

Most of all, she wanted to know when they could both meet him.

In a reckless game of kick the can, I told her it would happen at my mother’s wedding.

Back then, the wedding had been months in the future, and I’d figured there was plenty of time for me to start dating a man who’d pretend his name was Marco.

And, no shit, I’d actually met a guy whose name was Marco. I’d half convinced myself I should marry him just to make my life easier, but he’d broken up with me two weeks ago, saying he was worried I liked the idea of him better than the reality.

No one could say that wasn’t fair.

I’d shifted to Plan B—find a shameless liar who doesn’t see any harm in playing a part—but my shameless liar has a hangover, and now I’m out of luck.

Unless Pansy is an even bigger dipshit than I thought, she’s going to realize Marco is as fake as an orange tan.

I didn’t get good results the first time, but I kick the bathroom door again.

Yup. Still doesn’t feel good. And this time someone yelps on the other side.

“Is someone out there?” I ask incredulously.

“Uh…yeah,” says a familiar voice. “And we need to talk.”

Fuck my life, I know exactly who’s behind that door.

Cormac Peebles, my soon-to-be stepbrother.

Cormac and I went to school together, starting with elementary school, although we didn’t have classes together until high school.

It was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I mean, sure, I had a lightning-quick crush on him during my brief emo phase in my junior year of high school, spurred on by his don’t give a fuck attitude toward everyone, along with his superintelligence, curly hair, and smoky gray eyes.

But the first time I tried to strike up a conversation with him, he informed me that there was a grain of pepper stuck between my teeth.

Specifically, my lateral incisor and cuspid.

I attempted to talk to Cormac a second time by commenting on his Half-Life T-shirt, because I was still obsessed with that game, and I’d thought I was the only one. He replied, “Oh, actually a lot of people are. That’s why they made a sequel.”

The third time we interacted was at a high school party. I was shocked to see him there. He wasn’t the party kind of guy. I didn’t think the lame gatherings had much inherent value, but I figured anything was better than being stuck at home.

I was flabbergasted when he consented to play seven minutes in heaven. Everyone else was too, and Justin Greene, the most popular asshole in our class, thought it was hilarious to back him into going first.

His bottle spin stopped on me.

Cormac refused to follow through. Refused. Supposedly, he hadn’t understood the rules of the game.

Total BS. Either he didn’t like me or he figured I always had pepper in my teeth.

Never let it be said I can’t take a hint.

It was at that exact moment I stopped trying, and started disliking him and his superior-ass attitude in earnest.

Honestly. Who doesn’t honor the rules of seven minutes in heaven?

A monster, that’s who.