Chapter 7
SIMON
“Well, if it isn’t my old friend, Simon. Long time, no see,” a familiar voice drawled from behind me.
Theo had said this was meant to be an intimate wedding. I’d expected that to mean with a mere two hundred guests, but there really only were a dozen people milling around the courtyard with drinks in hand. I even knew most of them—at least, their names, or who they must have been.
This one, I could’ve lived without.
Unfortunately, since he was the groom, he kind of did need to be here.
“Corey,” I said, turning to face him. Theo had been dragged away by his mom a minute ago—with the intention of separating us for the hell of it, I assumed—leaving me alone.
As much as I’d never liked Corey, the feeling had been mutual. I didn’t know exactly what his problem was. Theo’s romantic partners typically didn’t care about me, treated me as though I was part of the furniture, but Corey was one of few I’d actually clashed with.
I couldn’t argue that he wasn’t handsome.
He was the kind of man who’d stop traffic—taller than me by a handful of inches, strikingly Nordic blond with cornflower blue eyes and a jawline that could cut glass.
You could tell he must have been some kind of model, someone who could make a living from looks alone, from across the room.
Which was why I’d never gotten his problem with me. Our lives were too different for him to care. The only point of intersection had been Theo.
“New suit?” he asked, looking me up and down.
A lot of people were doing that today.
“This old thing?” I asked, looking down at myself and scoffing. “I just had it dry-cleaned.”
I’d never owned a piece of clothing that required or for that matter would have held up to dry cleaning before.
Corey probably knew that—he’d seen how I dressed on a normal day.
Annoying him with an obvious lie he couldn’t politely point out was the absolute minimum payback he deserved for the way he’d left Theo.
Corey tilted his head, then nodded. “Well, looks good,” he said, accent mellowing from Actual Cowboy to something mellower.
He put on the Southern charm for other people, but it was all an act.
One that was wasted on me, since I’d seen him on a normal day, too.
Theo had wanted us to get along. “I hear you’re here with Theo? ”
My shoulders straightened reflexively. “I am. I hear you’re marrying his sister.”
“I am.” Corey met my gaze and held it. I let him, unwilling to look away or be the first to speak again.
“Sy,” the most welcome voice in the world broke the staring contest. The moment Theo’s fingertips touched my shoulder, it dropped four inches. I hadn’t realized how much tension had coiled in my gut in half a minute of Corey’s presence until it unraveled so fast it made me feel a little sick.
Theo passed what might have been a white wine glass or a champagne flute into my hand.
I’d never learned to tell the difference.
I would have liked to think I’d find out when I sipped it, but I’d never learned to tell the difference between a sparkling white and champagne, either. I wasn’t convinced there was one.
I turned and, with a shudder of nerves, pressed a lingering kiss to Theo’s cheek.
“Missed you,” I stage-whispered, peeking at Corey out of the corner of my eye to see his reaction. Something in his face changed, but it was so subtle I couldn’t work out what it meant.
As long as he wasn’t making Theo feel awful, I didn’t care.
Theo’s fingers slotted between mine, giving me a light squeeze. “Corey,” he said.
Corey broke into one of his lopsided, devil-may-care smiles. You could take the camera away from the model, but you couldn’t take the model away from the camera. Or something like that.
“Theo.” Corey nodded, eyes roaming between the two of us. “So, the rumors are true.”
“Rumors?” Theo asked with what was actually pretty convincing feigned innocence. Just as well one of us was a halfway decent actor. Especially since it was the one who had to pretend to be into the other.
“The two of you,” Corey said, tilting his head from side to side to indicate the both of us. “Actually dating.”
Theo’s fingers flexed. I squeezed back, wanting more than anything to ease the tension I could feel rippling through him.
“The two of us,” Theo confirmed. “Actually dating.”
I hated how much I loved the way that sounded.
When I’d made the split-second decision to go along with this, I hadn’t thought particularly far ahead. All I’d cared about was that Theo was asking me for something, and in that moment, I could give it to him.
It was starting to dawn on me that pretending to be his boyfriend from now until Sunday night, after the wedding, was going to kill me.
Corey looked at us again, eyes glinting in a way I didn’t like. Not that they could have glinted in a way I did like.
I didn’t know exactly what had gone down between them—Theo had been unusually reluctant to do one of his standard relationship post-mortems with Corey. What I did know was how badly it’d affected him. Badly enough that I still woke up in a cold sweat worrying about him sometimes.
So I did not like Corey, and would not be moved to.
“I guess you could do worse,” he pronounced.
“Simon is the sweetest, kindes—”
“I was talking to Simon,” Corey interrupted, lips quirking into a smirk. “Let’s catch up some time before the wedding’s over,” he added, patting Theo on the arm as he stepped around him, striding away without another moment’s pause.
“Asshole,” I murmured.
Theo shrugged. “He’s right.”
I wanted to kiss him again. Nuzzle his hair. Hold him close and tell him that yeah, Corey was right, I could do worse. Anyone else would be worse. There was no one in the world I felt better being around than Theo.
“He is,” I said, figuring I could tell him part of that, at least. “But not the way he means. No one could do better than you.”
Theo huffed, letting go of my fingers. I missed his hand instantly. We touched often enough, but we only ever held hands in private, when he was upset.
I didn’t mind that. I just wanted more. Even if it was all for show, it still felt good.
That was going to be a problem.
“No one huffs about my best friend, either,” I said, giving Theo a nudge with my elbow.
Theo sipped his drink, looking around the not-quite-bustling central courtyard.
It was a nice space, full of glossy, well-maintained plants corralled in beds and containers and comfortable seating.
All centered around an elaborate fountain lit up by gently glowing, warm lights and complete with big, darting koi.
The fountain was new—there’d been a pool last time I’d been here.
That was almost a decade ago, though. Pools were probably out of fashion now.
Too many poor people getting them, or something.
Theo turned back to me all of a sudden, eyes wide. “Audrey’s looking at us,” he said, a pink flush spreading over his cheeks. I’d always loved the way he blushed, although less so when it was because of something like this. “Don’t look,” he added before I could glance over his shoulder to see.
“Not looking,” I promised, sipping my own drink.
It definitely had bubbles, but I still couldn’t tell if it was a sparkling white or champagne. If there was a detectable difference between those two things other than by the label on the bottle, I didn’t know about it.
Theo’s eyes glinted as his gaze darted all over my face.
He laid a hand on my cheek, thumb brushing the ridge of my cheekbone. Before I realized what he was doing, he closed the gap between us and kissed me again.
I couldn’t help the gasp that escaped me, which I could barely hear over my own pulse pounding in my ears. Hopefully, Theo would think it was just surprise.
Hopefully, when I kissed back, he’d think I was still just playing along.
“Do you think they believe us?” Theo asked, so close his nose was still touching mine.
I had no idea. I didn’t even have the brain capacity to consider the question.
Theo was right there, a tilt of the head away from kissing me again, the warmth of his hand still branding my cheek.
How was I supposed to think about anything else when every nerve ending in my body was screaming to reach out to him, kiss him again, and again, and again, until he stopped ever wanting to kiss anyone else? Until this was real?
“I—”
“Theo!”
Theo jumped back at the sound of his mother’s voice, hand darting away from my face as though it’d been scalded.
For a change of pace, I was relieved to see her. Even when she gave me a look Medusa could’ve taken notes on.
“We’re going in to dinner now,” she said. “I’ve seated you next to Audrey and you are to be polite to her. Simon,” she added, turning to look me up and down, lips pursed. “… we’ll find a place for you. Come along.”
It was so nice to get such a warm welcome.
“You’ve got Mom fooled.”
My blood turned to ice as I glanced cautiously at Madelaine—I’d been given a seat at the corner of the big, square table, set at a weird angle, between her and Corey’s father, who I didn’t know and who hadn’t made any attempt to speak to me.
Until this second, I’d been unspeakably grateful that I knew and liked one out of two of the people beside me.
I did my best to look innocent, but the stage hadn’t lost anything of value when I went into information science instead of theatre. Which I’d never once considered.
Madelaine rolled her eyes. “I drove up here with him. I know what he’s like when he’s dating someone.”
I wet my lips. Yeah. Yeah, so did I. The word obsessed just about covered it. Theo was physically incapable of shutting up about his partners. Which was amazing, because he wasn’t the most talkative man in the world otherwise. When he was dating someone, they were his favorite subject.
So if he’d gone the entire drive from the city to here without so much as mentioning me…