Chapter 5
Autumn
“My brother should be here any minute,” Hanna says, gesturing at me to sit across from her in her office. “And I’m still sorry I couldn’t find a woman. I know this isn’t the ideal, but—”
“No,” I say. “I don’t know whether my dad’s brilliant at profiling or a little extra, but either way, keeping him and my sister happy and the wedding on track is my main goal.”
“And my brother’s really good at his job. He’ll be the picture of discretion.”
I’m not worried about that. I was pretty freaked out when Hanna first told me that my bodyguard would be a stereotypical Big Man, but then I realized that in some ways that’s even better.
I have an idea about how to take care of the whole discretion thing.
I’ve already put a few parts of my plan into play.
And luckily, we still have a full day before my sister arrives to get our ducks in a row.
There’s a knock on the door behind us, and it swings open, and—
Wow.
Yeah, this guy is not a blend-into-a-crowd type.
He’s gotta be at least six five, and he fills up the doorway—weight-lifter muscles under a lovingly clinging tee, a torso that tapers from broad shoulders to a trim waist, and tree-trunk thighs beneath snug-fitting jeans.
His jaw is a hard line to a well-defined chin, his eyes are flecks of pale blue ice, his nose is Roman-warrior-worthy, and his mouth is lush.
Did I say wow? Let me reiterate: Wow.
“Autumn, this is my brother, Tucker; Tucker, Autumn.”
I stand up. Giant White Guy grunts and extends a hand. Mine disappears into his, into heat and calluses and thick fingers that make me wonder—
Nope. Not wondering.
“Thanks so much for being willing to do this on short notice,” I say.
He grunts again.
Okay, so not a conversationalist. We’ll have to work on that because there is zero chance I would date a guy who isn’t a talker. My sister would never believe that.
“Anything you two need from me?” Hanna asks. “Or can you take it from here? I have to run a couple of errands.”
“That’s fine!” I say, hoping to warm him up a bit by being extra friendly, definitely one of my superpowers. “We’ll be great, right, Tucker?”
A grunt.
Not warm yet, but I can work on it.
She gives both of us a look that says she doubts we’ll be great, shoots Tucker another look that I interpret as Behave, and slips out the door.
“So!” I say brightly. “This is gonna be a cinch!”
He raises both eyebrows but doesn’t respond.
“Hanna told you about the discretion thing, right? That my sister can’t know that you’re a bodyguard, because she can’t know that my dad thinks there might be danger at her wedding?”
The grunts clearly have different meanings. I’m taking this one as a yes.
“But I don’t see that as a problem! Because”—I pause for effect—“you can pretend to be my date for the wedding week!”
“No fucking way,” Tucker says.
Oh, so he can say words.
And his words are deep and rough, like he’s out of practice at talking, and they rub over my nerve endings like a loofah in a hot shower.
“Oh, come on! It’ll be so fun!”
He has no idea how much experience I have with jollying people out of Moods.
I spent most of my teenage years doing exactly that.
School will be fun, Summer! Let’s make up a game you can play!
How many people can you say hi to in the hallways?
Two points if you like them and three points if you don’t like them.
Oh, come on, Dad, we’ll go out to dinner, the three of us, and it’ll be great. You’ll feel better if you get out of the house.
“We can make up a whole story about how we met,” I tell Tucker, “and it’ll give you an excuse to be by my side without anyone thinking there’s actually anything to worry about.”
His scowl deepens. “If there’s something to worry about, then they should worry. If there isn’t, you don’t need me.”
That was a whole lot of words for Mr. Grunty, but he’s just plain wrong.
“My dad thinks there’s something to worry about, so I do need you,” I say.
“This wedding is really important to all of us. My sister has had a hard time of it, and she finally found someone who makes her happy, and…I need this to go well for her and my dad, too.”
His gaze doesn’t soften at all. It’s almost like he didn’t hear me.
“Seriously, Tucker, please.”
I didn’t come here intending to plead my case, but I’m not too proud to do it.
“We can do it the regular way. I’m your bodyguard. I stand with my arms crossed by the wall. You pretend I don’t exist.”
“And then my sister will be constantly worrying that something else is going to go wrong with the wedding.”
Which defeats the whole point. The whole point of appeasing my dad was to keep any whiff of his anxiety from reaching my sister.
“Look,” I say. “If I have to choose between disappointing my dad and disappointing my sister, that’s an easy choice.
If you don’t want to do the fake-dating thing, I’ll tell my dad we couldn’t find anyone and reassure him that I’m going to be fine.
He’s overreacting anyway. This was probably a bad idea.
” I cross my own arms, mirroring Tucker. “You’re off the hook. You can leave.”
Something shifts behind his eyes. I’d almost call it a flash of alarm. “I can’t do that.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “I really don’t think anyone’s after me—that’s just my dad being—”
“It’s not that,” he cuts in. He rakes a hand down his face. “Fine. You want me to be your fake date? I’ll be your fake date. Just—can we be…I don’t know. I’m some guy you work with and we’re friends and we’re going to the wedding as friends?”
I bite my lip. “Erm, no, not exactly.”
“Why not?”
“I may have gotten slightly…carried away…when I told my sister about you.”
He groans and drops into one of Hanna’s office chairs. “Seriously?”
I wince. “Um, yeah, I may have told her we’d been out a bunch of times and I think it might be—you know…”
“I don’t know,” he says, eyeing me narrowly.
“Serious. That you might be…The One.”
“Are you kidding me?”
I’m not taking any personal pride in the fact that I have made Mr. Grunty raise his voice to almost a shout. “Hey, hey, hey, it’s okay,” I say, holding up a hand and sitting in the seat next to his. “Everything’s going to be great.”
“I doubt that.”
“I’m a natural optimist,” I say.
“Yeah. A happiness influencer.”
Tucker doesn’t say it the way a lot of people say it, like it’s the coolest thing he’s ever heard. He says it like it’s a piece of bad food he’s rolling around his mouth in preparation to spit it into a napkin.
“You’re going to have to pretend to think a little more highly of my career if we’re going to be boyfriend and girlfriend for a week.”
“Fake boyfriend and girlfriend,” he says roughly, under his voice. “I’m not good at pretending.”
“I’ll do most of it,” I say. “You just have to, you know, look at me like the sun rises and shines out of my—” I pause. Maybe better not to go there.
His face gets one notch more scowly.
“—and pull out my chair before I sit down and—you can still be the strong and silent type. You just have to be the strong, silent, and extremely solicitous and supportive type. And maybe, you know, hold my hand and dance with me and help me over a threshold or two—”
Something happens to his face. It gets very line-y. Like the thought of touching me is loathsome.
“What?” I ask.
“I think that’s a bad idea. The touching.”
“We can’t do the fake-boyfriend/girlfriend thing without touching. People touch.”
“Then there have to be rules,” he says. “In advance.”
“Of course there will be rules.” He’s been hired to protect me; anything other than strict rules would be super weird from a consent perspective.
“Only hand-holding and arms around each other. Oh! And dancing. The bachelorette party is a mock high school prom—” I’m about to launch into an explanation, when he interjects: “Any dancing, there has to be three inches between us.”
“I don’t know if that will be believable.”
“It’ll have to be,” he says. “And no kissing.”
Why does that hurt my feelings? Of course there will be no kissing. I don’t want to kiss Grunty McGruntface. Even if he does have the most beautiful biceps I’ve ever seen—and that includes all the marble sculptures I saw on vacation in Italy.
Screech. Reset. Disregard the biceps. “Okay. No kissing. Unless, you know, we’re in a situation where it would be super weird not to.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
It’s a wedding. Lots of weird things happen at weddings with kissing. But I don’t tell him that. He seems like he’s barely hanging on by a thread, and I don’t want to scare him away.
“What did you tell your sister about”—he winces—“us?”