Chapter 3
chapter
three
Gracie
I blow out a breath and stare through the windshield like it will somehow make the last half hour make any sense.
It doesn't. It's just glass and a smear of bug guts that Henry hasn't bothered to clean off.
There's also a crack in the lower right corner that's been there since I've known him, slowly spider-webbing its way toward the center with patient inevitability. Right now, it’s feeling like a metaphor for my entire life.
Drama, much?
“Okay. But what are we actually telling them?”
Henry pulls out of the parking lot, one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting casually on his thigh like we're discussing weekend plans and not the elaborate web of lies we're about to spin for his entire family.
The truck smells like leather and dust and that particular sun-baked warmth that all Texas vehicles develop by April—a scent I've been riding shotgun to since I was sixteen and Kelsie's older brother was the only one with a license and a willingness to drive us to the Dairy Queen in the next town over.
He looks calm. Relaxed, even. One wrist draped over the top of the steering wheel, shoulders loose, jaw unclenched. Like a man on a Sunday drive, not a man who just told a bakery full of people that I'm his wife and then kissed me in front of the pastry case.
Which feels deeply, profoundly unfair.
Because, let’s be honest, there was a time when I fantasized about Henry kissing me senseless.
Once upon a time, when were teens, when he was the handsome older brother of my best friend, I imagined hundreds of scenarios in which Henry realized I was there all along and he’d sweep me into his arms and profess his undying devotion.
Kelsie has been one of my best friends since the first grade.
I spent most of my childhood at their sprawling ranch outside of town.
The Blakenships own half the county. Maybe more.
Everyone knows they’re crazy rich, but they never act like it’s a big deal.
Instead, they have always opened their home to any and all of their five kids’ friends.
Which is undoubtedly how I ended up nursing a crush on Henry for so long.
I put the brakes on those after he rejected me so many years ago. At least, I stopped acknowledging them. They still pop up, unannounced and unwanted, all these years later. But who can blame me? Henry Blankenship is a goddamn snack.
Tall and impossibly broad with the kind of body hewn from actual manual labor rather than the sculpted perfection crafted in a gym. His blue eyes mimic that of the expansive Texas sky, which makes gazing up at that wide open space a constant reminder of his stupid, handsome face.
I sneak a peek at his profile. Yep, he’s totally relaxed.
His jawline isn’t even tense. I, meanwhile, am sweating in places I didn't know could sweat.
The backs of my knees, for instance. Who sweats behind their knees?
Apparently, women who've been proposed to by their ex-boyfriend and claimed by their fake husband in the span of four minutes. That's who.
“We use Halloween,” he says.
I turn toward him. At this point, I’ve completely forgotten that I asked him a question. “Halloween?”
“The night in Ace's. You were wearing a wedding dress, if you recall.”
Oh, right, we’re talking about how to explain our spontaneous marriage.
“We were all wearing wedding gowns. It was a Halloween costume. Well, except for Caroline’s.”
He lifts a shoulder. “Only noticed your dress.”
I blink, but get back to our discussion, refusing to overanalyze that comment. “You bellowed my name like a lunatic and pulled me out of the bar like the devil himself was on your heels?”
He flicks me a glance, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I had something to say.”
“That's beside the point.
“That's exactly the point,” he counters, voice maddeningly even. “Everyone remembers that night. Kelsie still asks me about it.”
“People still ask me about that night. What happened between us and all that.” I make air quotes. “The drama.”
“See? So it’s perfect. People are curious, now we can tell them what happened that night.”
“You gonna fill me in because I still don’t know what happened?”
“What do you tell people when they ask?”
“That you were drunk and I drove you home.” I shrug. “Short. Simple. Doesn't invite follow-up questions.”
He snorts. The sound is almost—almost—amused. “That's not what happened.”
“It's close enough.”
“It's not even in the same zip code.”
“It's in the same state, and in Texas, that counts.”
He shakes his head but doesn't argue. Smart man. He's learning.
“We say that's when things shifted,” he continues, steering us onto the county road that leads toward my place.
Live oaks line both sides, their branches meeting overhead in a loose canopy that throws dappled light across the hood.
“That we started talking more after that. Spending time together. Keeping it quiet because of Kelsie.”
I watch the road blur past, the yellow lines swallowed under the truck's tires in a hypnotic rhythm.
A roadrunner darts across the asphalt twenty yards ahead, fast and indifferent.
Probably chasing a snake. I envy that roadrunner.
That roadrunner doesn't have to construct a convincing romantic backstory with a man whose kiss is still tingling on her lips.
“Using Kelsie as the excuse is risky,” I say. “She's going to want to know why we didn't tell her. She's going to be hurt.”
“She'll get over it.”
“You clearly don't know your sister.”
“I've known my sister her entire life.”
“And in all those years, has she ever—even once—gotten over being left out of something without making it everyone's problem for a minimum of two weeks?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it.
“That's what I thought.”
He exhales through his nose. “I'll deal with Kelsie. I’ll tell her it was my choice because I didn’t want her to talk any sense into you before I’d ensnared you with my manly wiles.”
I snort. “Pretty sure men don’t have wiles.”
“Fine. We tell her we didn't want to put her in the middle. That we knew it would be complicated—her brother, her best friend—and we wanted to figure it out between us first before dragging anyone else in.” He glances at me. “That part's even true.”
I hate that he has a point. I hate it like I hate decaf coffee and people who say moist. It’s a visceral, full-body rejection that my rational brain knows is disproportionate, but my gut refuses to moderate. It’s an unnecessary word.
“And that's when you decided you suddenly wanted me?” I ask lightly. Despite the fact that my pulse isn't doing something stupid in my throat.
His jaw tightens. Just slightly. Just enough that I notice because I've spent twenty years cataloging the micro-expressions of Henry Blankenship's jaw and that is a piece of information I am not going to examine right now.
“That's when I decided to stop pretending I didn't want you.”
The words land heavy in the cab. They sit there between us, taking up all the oxygen, refusing to be ignored. They settle into the cracked leather seat between my thigh and his like a third passenger—uninvited, inconvenient, and impossible to ignore.
I swallow. Hard.
He's acting, I remind myself. This is just a story. The fake story. For our fake marriage.
He's simply rehearsing. Running lines. Getting into character. Henry Blankenship: walking, talking thirst trap in Wranglers and boots, cattle rancher, smart ass, and apparently a method actor who commits to the bit hard enough to make my cardiovascular system malfunction.
But my stupid, traitorous heart doesn’t know the difference. She’s just fluttering in my chest like a damned floozy.
“So Halloween,” I repeat, forcing lightness into my voice. “That's when the great Blankenship emotional awakening happened. Angels sang. Choirs wept. You looked upon me and thought, yes, her. The one who spilled queso on my boots at the Fourth of July cookout.”
“Those were good boots.”
“They were fine.”
“They were Luccheses, Gracie.”
“And boot snob, I’ll add that to the ever-growing list of things I didn’t know about you.”
He cuts me a look that would be withering if I weren't completely immune to it. I've been weathering Henry Blankenship's withering looks since middle school. They bounce off me like hail off a tin roof.
“Something like that,” he says, dry as a creek bed in August. But there's warmth underneath it. Buried deep.
I stare at my hands in my lap, picking at a hangnail that doesn't exist. My nails are short—baker's nails, practical, permanently scented with vanilla extract, no matter how many times I wash them.
They are not the nails of a woman whose romantic life is in order.
They are the nails of a woman who woke up this morning worried about her sourdough starter and is now in a truck with her accidental husband, discussing their fabricated love story.
“And before that?” I ask. “Before the alleged Halloween awakening? If anyone asks about the years prior? Because people will ask, Henry. People in this town have long memories and nothing to do.”
He shrugs, casual as anything. “We were friends.”
I laugh—a soft, incredulous sound that escapes before I can stop it, pushed out of me by the sheer absurdity of that word applied to whatever Henry and I have been doing for the last two decades.
“Henry, you barely spoke to me for years.
You'd show up at family dinners and sit at the opposite end of the table. You once handed me a plate of potato salad at the Labor Day picnic without making eye contact, like I was a stranger at a buffet.”
“I made eye contact.”
“You made eye contact with the potato salad.”
“There was a lot going on at that picnic.”
“There was corn hole and Bud Light. That was the entire event.”
He exhales through his nose. Long. Controlled. The exhale of a man constructing a sentence he's not sure he wants to release into the wild.