Fake Husband
LILA
Ilisten to his heartbeat slow from a gallop to something steadier. Feel his hand in my hair, his lips at my hair, the warm solid weight of him all around me.
“I promise I’ll be gentle next time,” he whispers.
“Okay,” I say. “Or don’t. I like everything you do.”
He pulls me closer to him, nuzzling into my neck.
We’re officially cuddling.
I’ve wanted this so badly. The sex, yes, but this too. The intimacy. The comfort. Feeling like a real couple. I settle into him happily.
“So you wanna keep doing this?” he asks. “Us? Together, like this?”
“We are married,” I say. “Might as well enjoy every minute we have together.”
His fingertips skim across my hip. After a long pause, he says, “I wanted to do that for so long. Hold you like this for… God, I don’t know. Since I met you. But I think… I didn’t want to mess it up with you. I was scared I’d do something to make you pull away. I’m not good at dating.”
“You say that, but if we count that first day we met, that was the best first date I’ve ever had.”
A kiss on the back of my neck. “For me too. I wish I was better at the whole relationship thing.”
I take his hand and brush my lips against his scarred knuckles. “You’re way too hard on yourself. Trust me, you’re great at it.”
He sighs heavily. “Been told I’m always absent. Emotionally unavailable. Cold. The feedback ain’t been great.”
I struggle to reconcile Slade’s words with what I’ve experienced of him. It just doesn’t compute. And… feedback?
“Your exes told you that to your face?” I ask.
I feel him shrug behind me.
A surge of fierce protectiveness and indignation simmers through me. “That was rude and cruel,” I say. “And patently false, for that matter.”
He chuckles as his arm tightens around me. “Not gonna lie, I like when my wife defends my honor. Even if I don’t deserve it.”
“They slandered you!” I say, still bothered on his behalf. Slade is sensitive, I know that much about him. He internalizes criticism. My first instinct, that still waters run deep where he’s concerned, is true in so many ways.
If anyone throws a stone at him, it sinks all the way to the bottom and stays there.
I wriggle against him, pulling his arm more tightly across me. “I know you’re busy with all the work you do at Wild Rose, but you always make time for me.”
“I’m not playing hockey right now,” he reminds me gently.
“That’s true. Okay, so I can’t speak to that. But calling you emotionally unavailable and cold… no. You might have a hard shell, but you’re a warm gooey marshmallow inside.”
He actually laughs at that. It’s a low but warm sound and I decide right there I want to hear it a lot more often.
“I guarantee you’re the only person in the world who thinks so,” he murmurs against my hair.
“That’s because they don’t see what I see. Someone thoughtful and generous in every possible way, someone who I…”
I press my lips together because I’m dangerously close to revealing how deep my own emotions run for him. Dangerously close to blurting out something stupid like, yes, you are secretly a marshmallow, and I love marshmallows.
For one, it sounds cutesy and vapid. And two, it sounds a little too close to I love you. Which would be the stupidest possible thing I could say in this moment.
This is still a fake marriage. One with real sex now, but the terms of our original deal haven’t changed. He’s still going to Denver after this. I’m still staying behind in Marble Falls. There’s no future here.
“I don’t know how you are as a boyfriend because we skipped that stage,” I tell him instead. “But I can tell you this. You’re an amazing husband.”
Silence.
Awkwardly, I add, “Fake husband, of course.” The term tastes bitter on my tongue.
He brushes my hair away from my cheek so he can kiss it. There’s a pause before he says, “Lila. I know our situation. I know this has an end date. I know we said no complications, but the truth is, I’m crazy about you.”
“Same.” The admission slips out of me, but I don’t take it back. Not when his eyes crinkle at the corner with genuine pleasure when I say it.
“I know we don’t have forever,” he says.
His hand covers mine against his chest, his wedding ring gleaming, almost in mockery of his words.
“But I don’t want to spend whatever time we have left on opposite sides of a hallway, pretending like we’re not husband and wife. I want to make the most of this.”
I ignore the sirens ringing in my head that warn: Danger. Heartbreak ahead. This man is leaving in less than a year and it’s going to devastate you and you know it.
Whatever emotional damage is coming my way, I can’t help but think in this moment that it will be worth it.
“I’d like that,” I say.
“But,” Slade continues, “for as long as we’re together…”
I get nervous because he’s getting nervous. I have no idea what he’s going to say next.
He takes a deep breath. “Will you move in with me?”
I blink, turning in his arms to face him. “Um, Slade. I’m already living with you.”
His cheekbones turn a little red. “I mean, into this bedroom. It’s been killing me, sleeping in a separate bedrooms from my wife.” His fingertips stroke along my arm. “I’d like to go to sleep holding you. Wake up in the morning with you. If that’s okay.”
Slade just confidently fucked me into the mattress and now he’s getting shy asking me to sleep in the same bed with him?
The affection I feel for him surges up inside me like a tidal wave. Right before reality comes crashing down.
I mean, what he said is part of what I want to hear. Like, twenty percent of it.
The other eighty percent goes something like, fuck the deal. Stay. Be my wife for real. Forever.
Because that’s what I actually want. To keep the ring and the dog and the house and the man who leaves wildflowers by the door and checks my ankle even in the middle of wanting me.
Because I don’t think there’s a better man out there than Slade Rhodes. A better husband. Protective, devoted, generous… and the man who just gave me the hottest sex of my life.
Yeah, I want to keep that ring he put on me.
But there I go again, wanting too much. Being too much.
That’s what my family has always said to me: that I’m too much. Theirs are the voices I can never fully silence, even after years of therapy and thousands of miles of distance. That assessment of me, delivered in a hundred different ways over twenty-five years: too much. Too emotional. Too needy.
Intellectually, I know that I’m allowed to want things. That it’s good and normal to want to be loved, not a character flaw.
But the part of me that still believes my mother’s words says otherwise.
I’ve spent weeks wanting Slade to touch me, to kiss and hold me, and now that I’ve got it, I’ve instantly set my sights on getting even more.
Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to ask for everything I want. But not tonight. Tonight I’ll take what he’s offering and be grateful for it.
Slade told me very clearly on that overlook that he’d never been in love and that wasn’t something he could offer me.
When someone tells you about themselves, you should believe them the first time.
So, yeah. The impending emotional damage is going to be significant. But I’ve survived the people I love breaking my heart before this.
And I didn’t get to have nearly this much fun before they did it.
I take his hand, the one with the wedding ring on it, and rub my cheek against the cool metal. “Yes, I’ll move my stuff into this bedroom.”
He smiles. Slow and warm and real. Only for me. He wraps a hand around my nape and kisses me. “And I can keep kissing you?”
“You better,” I murmur against his lips.
His mouth moves down to my neck, a drag of his stubble sending shimmers of pleasure across my skin. “And I can keep touching you?”
He palms my breast, thumb moving in circles around my nipple.
“Please do,” I say, more breathlessly.
He rolls us so he’s on top of me, his hips pressing mine into the mattress. His gaze wanders covetously over my breasts and hips and I feel him thickening against my leg.
He’s hard again already. Damn. What was that, a couple of minutes? I guess cowboys really are built to ride.
“Good,” he says, “because I really love fucking my wife, and I’d like to keep doing it.”
“Right this minute?”
Taking my hands, Slade pins them above my head.
The movement stretches me out, serving up my tits to him like an offering.
That dark, primal, animalistic heat comes back into his eyes as they roam up and down my naked body.
The whole time he examines me he keeps my hands pinned, trapping me beneath him.
I feel the grip of it, the way his fingers tighten, like he’s afraid I’ll disappear.
He kisses the inside of my wrists, one by one, lips pressing into my pulse. “I’m just getting started, sweetheart.”