Chapter 4 #2
“She is definitely credible.”
Nora laughs, then sobers.
“This is going to spread.”
“Yes.”
“You could have PR bury it, couldn’t you?”
There are agencies that can redirect attention, place friendly stories, starve a small article of oxygen, and turn a day of gossip into a footnote by tomorrow afternoon.
My first instinct is already assembling options.
I make myself stop.
“I could ask them to try.”
“But?”
“But you didn’t ask me to.”
Her gaze stays on mine.
“I don’t want that.”
“Then I won’t.”
Something quiet passes between us.
Not trust yet.
Maybe the first clean board laid across the gap where trust might eventually go.
Nora exhales. “Okay. One more rule.”
“We’re at seven.”
“You are counting.”
“I am remembering.”
“Worse.”
She slides off the desk.
“No surprise physical stuff in public. If one of us thinks we need to sell it, ask first. Hand holding is probably fine. Arm around me, fine if you give me some warning. Kissing, definitely ask.”
“Agreed.”
“And privately…”
She stops.
I wait.
“Privately what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That answer is more honest than anything easier she could have given me.
“Then we don’t need a rule yet.”
Her eyes meet mine.
“You really are good at contracts.”
“Occasionally.”
A knock lands against the door.
Tessa opens it without waiting.
“I know you’re building the Geneva Convention in here, but Nora, we have a problem with the three-thirty shoot.”
“Wait.” Nora points at her. “Before the problem, this started as a lie. We’re keeping it up until Harvest Lights. You’re one of four people who know.”
Tessa looks from Nora to me.
“The relationship or the kissing?”
Nora’s face turns pink. “The relationship.”
Tessa presses one hand to her heart. “That answer is going to sustain me through winter.”
“Tell no one.”
“I would never destroy a renewable source of private entertainment.”
“Tessa.”
“I won’t tell.” Her expression sobers enough that I believe her. “Now can I give you the problem?”
Nora is upright before Tessa finishes the sentence.
“What kind?”
“Jeremy wants to put you and Grant in the background of the product-table footage because apparently the internet has already decided you’re adorable.”
Nora’s face goes blank.
Mine probably does something worse.
We walk out together.
Jeremy is near the picnic lawn with a camera operator and two Northspan backpacks arranged on a weathered table beneath string lights that will look much better after sunset.
He sees us coming and brightens.
“Perfect. If you two just walk behind the table while we roll, nothing posed. It’ll feel organic.”
“No,” I say.
He looks at me.
“It’s just background.”
“Nora isn’t campaign talent. Her relationship to me isn’t campaign content. Shoot the product.”
He glances at Priya, who has arrived behind him.
Priya does not hesitate. “You heard him. Reset without them.”
Nora says nothing until we’re ten steps away.
Then, quietly, “Thank you.”
“That was rule three.”
“You are going to become unbearable about the rules, aren’t you?”
“Probably.”
“Good to know early.”
The rest of the afternoon is less dramatic, which I am learning is not the same thing as calm at Bellweather Orchard.
A family loses a phone in a picking bag. One of Landon’s crew discovers that a folding table has been put away with a wasp nest underneath it. Tessa sells out of cider doughnuts at four twelve and behaves as if she has personally won a trade war.
Nora moves through all of it with a radio in one hand and three pens clipped to the collar of her jacket.
I keep finding reasons to be where she is.
Some are legitimate.
Not all.
At five thirty, Northspan wraps the day’s public shooting. Most of my crew heads toward the inn or the rented house Priya booked for production staff. I should go too. I have email, a board packet, two calls from New York, and a quarterly forecast I promised to review tonight.
Instead I find Nora behind the market carrying a crate of folded lanterns toward the storage barn.
I take the other side without asking.
She looks at my hands on the crate.
“This is dangerously close to helping.”
“It’s dangerously close to carrying half a box.”
“Slippery slope. Next thing I know, you’ve purchased municipal bonds.”
“For the orchard?”
“See? You’re already brainstorming.”
We carry the crate into the barn.
Inside, the air smells like wood dust, cold metal, and last year’s dried leaves. Coils of string lights hang from pegs along one wall. Stacked signs read HARVEST LIGHTS, CIDER PRESS, PICKING THIS WAY, and PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB THE DISPLAY TRACTOR, which suggests a history I want explained later.
Nora sets down her side.
“You can go, you know.”
“I know.”
“Your company will survive without you for an hour?”
“We have contingency plans.”
“Naturally.”
She turns toward the door, then stops.
Evening has started thinning the bright September light outside. The maple leaves are still mostly green, but the shadows across the orchard are longer now, and the air coming through the barn smells cooler.
“For this to work,” she says, “we probably need to be seen together somewhere that isn’t my job.”
“A date.”
She winces. “Don’t sound so pleased.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“You’re failing.”
“I’ve heard that today.”
She considers me.
“Tomorrow after close. One drink at the Bellweather Tavern. Public enough that nobody thinks I invented you under pressure, normal enough that it doesn’t look like a press strategy.”
“Seven?”
“Six thirty. I have to be awake before tourists.”
“Six thirty.”
“And you are not buying the tavern.”
“I was not planning to buy the tavern.”
“Good.”
“I was going to ask if dinner is allowed under rule four.”
She gives me a suspicious look.
“You can buy dinner if I buy the next one.”
The next one.
It is a tiny phrase.
My brain treats it like a door opening.
“Deal.”
She starts toward the barn door.
“Nora.”
She turns.
I could leave it alone.
I should leave it alone.
We already have enough complications for one day, and I have spent years training myself to avoid actions I cannot control after they happen.
That instinct feels suddenly less like discipline and more like a room with no windows.
“You said kissing requires asking.”
Her breathing changes.
Barely.
I notice anyway.
“I did.”
“May I kiss you?”
She looks at me for a long second.
No reporter. No Landon. No Celeste post. No audience except a crate of lanterns and a sign warning strangers not to climb a tractor.
“That would not be fake,” she says.
“I know.”
Her eyes widen slightly.
There it is.
The truth before the frost, delivered without assistance from the tree.
I step closer, but not close enough to touch her.
“So?”
Nora’s mouth curves.
“Yes.”
I kiss her.
This one is nothing like the first.
The first was surprise and adrenaline and an audience.
This is permission.
Her hands slide up my chest, deliberate this time. Mine settle at her waist, and when she moves closer I feel the soft impact of her body against mine all the way down to my hands.
I have the immediate, unhelpful thought that six weeks is a very long time.
Then she opens her mouth under mine and I stop thinking in calendar units.
The kiss deepens slowly. No performance. No strategic angle. Just Nora making a quiet sound in the back of her throat that goes straight through me.
I pull back first because if I do not, rule discussions are about to become theoretical.
Her eyes stay closed for half a second.
When they open, she looks annoyed.
“Why did you stop?”
I laugh once, low.
“Because I am trying to be responsible.”
“I liked you better when you were blocking the loading lane.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“No,” she says, still holding the front of my sweater. “I really didn’t.”
Neither of us moves.
Outside, someone drives a utility cart past the barn and calls goodnight.
Nora drops her hands, but slowly.
“Tomorrow,” she says.
“Six thirty.”
“One drink.”
“Dinner.”
“One dinner.”
“And then the next one is yours.”
She points at me. “Do not contract-lawyer my own words.”
“I would never.”
Her eyebrows lift.
“Fine,” I say. “I would, but not tonight.”
She laughs and walks out of the barn.
I follow a few seconds later because giving myself time to recover is a practical necessity.
My phone has nine unread messages.
The North Country Living story has already been reposted twice.
My alerts are filling with Celeste’s name beside mine in ways I am going to have to address.
The campaign schedule changed three times while I was kissing Nora Bell in a storage barn.
None of that is the problem I am thinking about.
The problem is simpler.
I agreed to fake-date Nora for six weeks because it solves two public complications.
I am already looking forward to tomorrow like the arrangement is the least fake thing in my life.