Chapter 3
3
Sloane
I don’t know how to silently communicate just go with it, I’ll explain later, holy shit, was that kiss real? , so I settle for making a face that I hope says sorry , and I turn to my friends and whatever Nigel is.
And that’s when I see my salvation.
“Oh my god, out! ” I shriek at Nigel. “You’re getting glitter all over the museum!”
Nigel’s glittered up like a Christmas snow globe gone wrong. There’s the big spray of glitter on his chest that was my fault, but he also has it all down his arms and pants. In his hair. On his face.
He folds his arms over his overly-glittered chest. “Oh my god ? What’s happened to your language?”
Dammit .
Might as well have said fuck me sideways, you won’t believe this goddamn shit .
“Nigel, meet Davis. My fiancé. Yes, yes, I lied to Grandma and told her his name was Steve because you know how she is about former musicians who fuck—have carnal relations with sheep, but we’re madly in love and we’re getting married next weekend because the ol’ ovaries aren’t getting any younger, and if we’re going to have six kids, we have to get on it and pray super hard for triplets.”
Davis stares at me.
Nigel growls.
And Tillie Jean—god bless Tillie Jean, who’s also glittery, though less so—lunges for Davis and smothers him in a hug. “Oh my god, Davis, finally ,” she says. “I thought you’d never pop the question. You two are going to be so happy together. Ray, go get Max, and do not spoil this for Sloane. Do not even tell your boyfriend . She gets to tell the whole town, not you , or I’ll empty every last glitter bomb that the glitter squad collected today and use that glitter to make sure that you fart glitter for the next fifty years. Do you understand me? ”
“How does a woman get two men that hot in her lifetime?” Ray mutters.
Tillie Jean releases Davis and spins to face Ray again, backing up against us until both Davis and I are forced to also step back toward the workroom.
“Sloane hasn’t had any other hot boyfriends.”
“There was that guy she was dating who was cheating on Ellie Ryder?—”
Davis clears his throat.
Lava replaces the blood in my face.
I don’t know what that noise meant from Davis.
Nigel clears his throat too, but this one, I can interpret.
This one means sex before marriage is a sin, Sloane, and I’m going to punish you for the rest of your natural life .
It would be so much sexier if a hero from one of my friend Henri’s romance novels said that than it is when Nigel implies it.
“ Go get Max ,” Tillie Jean orders again. “And so help me, if you ruin this announcement for Sloane… I know things, Ray, and I will repeat them.”
“Okay! Okay! I’m going. I’ll be back with Max in two minutes, I swear.”
“Stupid dresses without pockets,” Tillie Jean mutters. “I need my damn phone.”
“ Right? ” I gasp.
Gasping is pretty much all I’m capable of now that I’ve spilled the CliffsNotes version of our story to my fake boyfriend.
Especially with Nigel glaring at me.
And that pisses me off too.
We were friends once.
Friends should be happy for friends when they have good news.
Not that my good news is real, but I haven’t seen Nigel in far too long for him to know I’m lying.
Especially since Davis has an arm wrapped around my waist and is holding me close to his body.
He smells like camping in a forest. Like a starry sky next to a campfire. S’mores in the middle of summer.
And his arm—my god.
The man’s lean, but he’s strong.
So strong.
Stop it stop it stop it, Sloane .
I owe him an explanation.
Also some undying gratitude.
But wait— why is he going along with this?
Does he…? I gasp again, this one more of a croaking gasp.
Does he like me?
Oh, fuck.
Is this going to get complicated and ugly?
Of fucking course it is, dumbass. You made up a fake boyfriend who was just snooping around in your museum while someone else was here apparently trying to rob the place .
I shiver again.
Then remember that Davis was also unauthorized to be in here and that we need the sheriff, and this is too complicated .
Can I please have one emergency at a time?
“So you actually know each other,” Nigel says as Ray’s shoes slap over the wooden floor and back toward the door.
“They’ve been dating for at least a year, and saw each other around town more or less since Sloane moved here like five years ago, so why would they not know each other?” Tillie Jean gives Nigel a once-over. “Who are you?”
“I’m Sloane’s fiancé.”
“ Oh my god , shut up ,” I snap.
He rears back.
Davis makes a noise that might actually be a laugh.
And wouldn’t that be something?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh.
Or even seen him smile.
Anytime he’s in a bar or restaurant in town with his friends, he’s just so straight-laced.
Like something terrible happened in his past and it made him forget how to smile.
I don’t even remember him smiling the night we played darts, and I was hella funny that night. I think.
See again, that night was a little hazy. I more have vibes than actual memories.
Focus, Sloane .
“Tillie Jean, this is Nigel Hipplewait. I grew up with him. Our grandparents thought we were adorable together, but we never dated, and we are not engaged.”
Nigel pulls himself up to his full six-foot, four-inch height. “We did too, and it’s an arranged marriage.”
Tillie Jean looks him up and down again. “Oh, I’m pretty sure I would’ve heard about it if Sloane was arranged to be married to a guy who looks like you.”
I sigh.
It’s incredibly annoying that Nigel is, by all objective and subjective standards, completely gorgeous.
He was born with thick black hair that has always fallen in the most perfect way possible over his broad forehead. His eyebrows aren’t too bushy or too skinny. His blue eyes are set not too deep and not too shallow. His nose is the right kind of prominent without being too big. His jaw square, his lips scandalously thick. He even has handsome ears.
Handsome ears .
What are handsome ears?
They’re what Nigel has, along with the build of a quarterback—which, again, he was in high school—the hands of a sculptor, and even handsome fingernails.
And to top it all off, all of his features are perfectly symmetrical.
If Michelangelo were alive today, he’d use Nigel as his one and only model for eternity. If we lived in Regency England, he’d be a duke. If Nigel had gone to Hollywood instead of following in his grandfather’s footsteps, People would’ve retired the “Sexiest Man Alive” feature because Nigel would’ve won every single year for his whole entire life.
And I fucking hate Nigel.
I’m not sure I realized just how much I hated him until right now, and there’s a large chunk of guilt and shame swelling up in my chest over acknowledging to myself that I hate him— hate is for the wicked, Sloane —but I do.
I. Hate. Him.
“Welp, now that you’ve seen that Davis and I are happy and engaged, you can leave,” I tell Nigel.
“I need to hear it from him,” Nigel says.
Tillie Jean makes a choking noise. “Because you don’t believe a woman?”
“Because I know how Sloane can be.”
Davis’s grip on me tightens. “Watch yourself.”
The quiet authority in his warning makes me shiver.
The good kind of shiver.
The kind of shiver that I’m never supposed to shiver for a man again because if I shiver this way over a man, and we fall into the sack, and we start dating, I’ll discover he’s secretly taking pictures of my feet to sell on that GrippaPeen video-on-demand subscription site, or he’ll give me a sob story about how his mother’s dying of cancer and he needs five thousand dollars to pay her bills and I’ll be the dummy who gives it to him even though he’s already told me before that his mother’s dead, or he’ll convince me that my apartment smells like pickles and we have to move, only to find that he’s somehow removed me from the lease, thus leaving me homeless when we break up.
I shake my head while Davis and Nigel have a staring match. “Can we please focus on what’s important right now?”
“You mean this lie?” Nigel says.
Once again, it’s Davis to the rescue. “It’s not a lie.”
I suppress another shiver and look up at him.
And my belly drops.
He stares straight into my eyes, and for a guy who keeps a pretty straight expression most of the time, he’s being very expressive right now.
I owe him an explanation.
This isn’t a small favor.
I’m going to pay for this.
He wants something in return.
And I need to quit thinking I can read anything at all in Davis’s expression because who does that?
We’re practically strangers.
“And as you said, my love, we have bigger issues.” Davis breaks eye contact and looks at Nigel. “Were you invited?”
Oh, I can answer that. “No, he was not .”
“How did you get past security?”
“That’s an excellent question.” Tillie Jean turns to Nigel again. “How did you get past security?”
Nigel quirks a brow, which makes him look like a dark-haired Prince Charming from the Shrek movies. “I’m hardly a threat to anyone.”
“You walk in here trying to break up my best friend and her fiancé, and I’m going to classify you as a threat.”
“I’m a preacher.”
“That’s not the flex you think it is.”
Nigel rolls his eyes.
One of my hands curls into a fist.
Davis tightens his grasp on me even harder. “Tillie Jean, we need the sheriff.”
She squints one eye at him. “I don’t think the sheriff is the one ordained in town to do impromptu weddings, and as much as I love you both, you’re not upstaging my sister-in-law’s wedding day.”
I freaking love Tillie Jean.
I would give her a kidney. I would sell pictures of my feet for her. I would move out of a pickle-scented house that wasn’t actually pickle-scented for her.
That’s how much I love her.
“There was a break-in,” I say.
My friend’s eyebrows meet her hairline. “What? When? Where?”
“Sheriff first, details later,” Davis says.
“ Here ?” TJ looks down at Davis’s pants like she’s just realizing something more is off than me kissing him and him going along with this fake fiancé ruse. “ Today? Dammit. I have to sober up, don’t I?”
Davis doesn’t answer her directly, but he does answer. And it’s oddly calming to have him issuing orders. “Everyone needs to leave.”
Tillie Jean looks at Nigel. “You. Out. Now.”
“Sloane—” Nigel starts.
I growl at him.
He draws back, clearly shocked.
Probably thinking I need an exorcism.
“You can talk to Sloane later.” Tillie Jean pulls a move I’ve seen her do on each of her brothers and forces Nigel to step backward merely by walking at him in the right way. “But right now, you’re talking to my brother’s security detail about how you got into town when you weren’t on the guest list. Sloane, Davis, I’ll be back with the sheriff in the next five minutes. Please keep your clothes on.”
Nigel bristles. “I’m not leaving Sloane alone with this?—”
“If you want to keep your ball sack intact, you won’t finish that sentence,” Tillie Jean says. “Move.”
Davis gives the subtlest of subtle headshakes as we watch Tillie Jean back Nigel all the way out of the room.
“Five minutes. Clothes on,” she calls to us.
The museum door closes, and silence settles around us.
I try to pull away from Davis, but he doesn’t release me.
So I look up at him again.
Big mistake.
Big mistake.
The full intensity of his gaze lands on me in a way that makes me want to confess everything.
Probably more than everything.
I’d take the blame for every glitter bomb ever launched in Shipwreck. I’d own up to being the one who taped a kazoo to Waverly’s armored SUV’s tailpipe a year ago in an incident that shut down the entire town for three hours. And I’d claim credit for the goats that got loose during my first trip to Shipwreck and still are all over town, along with their offspring now.
None of which I’ve done or had anything to do with, but I want to confess to everything when he stares at me like that.
You know the way.
Like he’s figuring out that he’s been my secret pretend boyfriend for the past year.
And I’m still unprepared for his first statement on the situation.
“You named me Steve?”
I force a bright smile that probably looks like the expression a panicked goat would make when it comes face-to-face with a lion. “Haha, yeah, probably should’ve gone with Colt or Steel or Aiden. Actually, I don’t know why I would’ve thought you looked like an Aiden. But there was an Aiden that my grandmother hated when I was growing up, and I don’t mean my brother, I mean the other Aiden. The one who used to draw penises on my arm in math class. Although sometimes I hated my brother too, but you know how it goes with siblings.”
He’s not saying a word.
Not interrupting me.
In fact, his gaze is dipping to my lips.
That kiss recreates itself in my mind, and the only reason I don’t shiver again is that I’ve decided I’m done shivering today. Possibly for the rest of my life.
I’m all shivered out, and I’m in control of my body.
My eyes dip to his lips, and my nipples, vagina, belly, knees, and heart demonstrate that I’m full of shit if I think I’m in control of anything right now.
“My grandmother’s the type who thinks a woman’s job is to get married and have babies, and I have a pretty crappy track record with men, so I’ve decided I’m never getting married, and I’m not interested in doing the single mother thing, but she wouldn’t stop asking who I was dating, no matter how many times I told her I like being single and that my life is fulfilling all on its own. It used to be funny, like, haha, of course that’s what older generations think, but the past two or three years, she’s gotten…harder? Yeah, harder about it, so I just kinda…snapped…one day, and the next thing I knew, I was sending her a picture of you and making up stories about us dating so that she’d leave me the ever-loving fuck alone about it.”
He keeps watching me, not saying anything, and my mouth keeps verbally vomiting when I should probably shut up. “I swear on my honor as a human being whose life has mostly been guided by guilt and shame, even if I’m working on getting over that, that I never once imagined that we were actually dating. I didn’t tell anyone else we were dating. I mean, Tillie Jean was in on it, but it’s Tillie Jean. If there’s mischief, she’s in, you know? But she knows the truth. She knows why. I didn’t send pictures to anyone else. I didn’t fantasize about actually dating you, and I have never masturbated to thoughts of you.”
Crap.
Craaaaap .
The minute you say you haven’t done anything, that’s like saying you have done it, even if I haven’t , but I certainly will now after kissing him, and unlike Mr. Straight Face, I have a face so expressive that outer space aliens could probably translate everything that’s going through my brain right now.
Davis continues to stare at me in silence.
Heat floods my entire body, including my eyeballs.
No.
No no nope nope nope.
I will not cry.
I won’t.
Even in absolute mortified embarrassment.
“Okay,” he says.
I suck in a breath so fast that I choke.
He releases his grip on me and lets me cough myself out.
You know what’s dumb?
It’s so dumb that I’m worried about what he thinks about this whole situation when we’re not even really friends.
We’re people who know a little bit about each other who once played a game of darts and then today shared a kiss during a very stressful time, and that’s it. That’s the end.
“Okay?” I manage to say through my coughs.
“Okay,” he repeats.
“You’re not mad?”
“Anger serves no purpose.”
I slide a look back at the workroom. “What were you doing here?”
“Being the good guy.”
“Good guys don’t say things like that.”
He doesn’t reply out loud.
But I hear myself in my own head claiming to have never masturbated while thinking about him.
Which is the truth.
It is .
So maybe he’s telling the truth.
“You want to get married?” he says.
“ Want ? God, no. I have awful taste in men. But I wouldn’t mind if my grandmother believed I was married.”
He looks back at the workroom too.
Then at me once more. “Okay.”
“Okay? What does that even mean, okay ?”
“I’ll marry you. Next weekend. Like you said.”
If I were capable of breathing, I’d be choking again.
But I’m beyond bodily functions working like they’re automatically supposed to.
“Staged,” he adds. “Not for real.”
“Why would you agree to fake marry me?”
“Family’s gonna family. Have to occasionally out-family them.”
That’s a bullshit answer and we both know it. “Do you have a secret X-rated comic book collection? Do you bet on illegal hamster races? Is your long-term life plan to cozy up to rich old ladies to get yourself countless inheritances while keeping people like me on the side for fun and sex? Wait. Am I the old lady? Am I the old lady? ”
He doesn’t answer.
I suck in a long breath through my nose and look up at the ceiling tiles. “He’s not saying anything. Of course he’s not answering.”
“Have my own money, rarely think about hamsters, and for the comic books—is yes or no the right answer? Could see that going either way.”
“Any other time and place, I’d agree with you. Today, no is the right answer.”
He shrugs a shoulder the barest amount. “Then no.”
“Are you just saying that to make me happy?”
Once again, all I get is a straight-faced stare.
“Right. Right. It’s pretend, so it doesn’t matter if you have secrets.”
“Everyone has secrets.”
“Yes, but I need to know that no one in my hometown will see Steve on the local news for having murdered a man.”
“You have an ex who made the news for murdering someone?”
“No, but there’s always a first time, isn’t there?”
“Could be justifiable homicide.”
“ Oh my god . Are you marrying me to get an alibi?” I flap my hand toward the workroom. “Was that your accomplice? Are you trying to steal something from my museum? Are you involved in some kind of extortion scheme?”
“Pretend marrying. No. I don’t steal and I don’t help criminals.”
But what’s he doing here? Who was in the workroom? And where’s the sheriff? “Why would you do this?”
“I like helping people.”
“So you just go around agreeing to fake marry women to get their grandmothers off their backs?”
He looks me straight in the eye. “World’s been good to me. Why not be good back?”
“Again, that’s not an answer.”
“It’s true.”
“Is it the full truth?”
“No.”
“What’s the full truth?”
“I’m offering fake marriage. That’s it.”
This is too easy. Entirely too easy. “Is this the first time you’ve offered to fake marry someone?”
“No.”
It says something about this conversation that I’m not actually surprised, and I think I believe him. “Were there pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Just one wedding?”
“No.”
“How many times have you fake-married women to help them out?”
“Fewer than five.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
For as much as I think I believe him, I also can’t believe anyone would subject themselves to more than one fake wedding. “You’ve fake-married women four times?”
“Legally, I’m not allowed to say anything else.”
Fucker . “How many of them thought fake marrying you was a path to romance and a real forever?”
“Just my sister.”
Speechless.
I’m actually speechless.
In all of the dozens of times I’ve seen this man in Shipwreck, I’ve never once witnessed him crack a joke.
I’m sure he has before. I mean, what human being hasn’t? I’ve even heard Nigel crack jokes.
But Davis’s reply is so dry and straightforward that I believe him.
“That was a joke,” he says.
And now I don’t believe him.
I think he did marry his sister once. And I don’t know if I want to hear the full story or not.
I shake my head. “You’d agree to fake-marry me simply because you’re a nice guy?”
“Are you always this suspicious?”
“Around men? Yes.”
His gaze once more lingers on the door to the workroom, then slowly peruses the displays here in Thorny Rock’s wardrobe room.
The door swooshes again, telling us that Tillie Jean is likely back with the sheriff.
“You grew up with that guy?” Davis says, looking toward the front of the museum where Tillie Jean pushed Nigel out a few minutes ago, leaving a trail of glitter that’ll be hell to get rid of.
“Yes.”
“You were friends?”
My history with Nigel is so much more complex than just friends . “I thought so.”
“He know what friend means?”
“I was raised to not speak ill of preachers.”
Once again, he looks at me like he’s reading my soul.
Like he knows how much work it’s taken for me to not feel guilty for breathing, to embrace my body as a gift and sex as something that’s not shameful, to sometimes choose myself over the expectations of the people I grew up with and the woman who raised me when no one else would take me and my brother in.
But I have no intention of getting any closer to Davis than I have to in order to finish pulling off this ruse. “Thank you for your help. If there’s anything I can do to make it up to you, I will.”
While I’d make the offer to anyone, and I mean it, there’s something about the way Davis has been watching me that’s put me at ease.
That’s led me into a false sense of security.
I’m doing it again .
I’m believing the best in people.
But as I watch him, something shifts in his expression, and I know I’m going to pay for this.
Probably dearly.
Of course I will.
I have terrible taste in men.
Before he even opens his mouth, my stomach is already dropping. My shoulders are already bunching. My breath is getting shallower and shallower, and my pulse is pretending to be a cheetah.
His deep brown eyes connect with mine, and I feel his words more than I hear them.
“Appreciate that. Because I need a favor.”