31. Juno
CHAPTER 31
JUNO
As the limo Lucius sent after me pulls up to Lucius’s grandma’s house—which is really a small mansion—my stomach feels like a blooming cactus being swarmed by butterflies.
Yesterday’s combination of Lucius and my family made the line between fake and real boyfriend blurrier than ever, so much so I’m still having trouble reining the idiocy in. That scorching kiss aside, Lucius was amazing with my family. I don’t care how much Elijah coached him—Lucius looked like he was enjoying himself, and he’s not a good enough actor to fake that… I don’t think.
The limo stops, and as the door opens, I come face to face with Lucius himself—which makes those pollinators in my belly go truly berserk.
“Hi.” I climb out with the help of his proffered hand, and when we touch, I feel it between my legs—a pleasant but unwelcome situation.
Releasing my hand, he turns his back to me and says, “Follow.”
Just “follow?” No greeting kiss for the fake girlfriend? No hug? No “nice to see you?”
Fine. Be like that. I let him lead me inside the house, where I finally get to see his Gram.
The first thing that springs to mind is just how tiny this woman is—and this is coming from me, who’s far from a giantess. The second thing: she must have laughed a lot in her life. The evidence of it is etched into the lines around her mouth and in the dimple in her cheek.
The same kind of dimple that Lucius has, I realize with a peculiar pinching in my chest.
Lucius gives her a big, warm hug and kisses her on the cheek—thus proving that he knows that greeting hugs and kisses are things people do.
Gram beams at him, and the whole situation is extremely adorable, especially since Lucius is just a few wires short of being a robot.
“Gram, this is my girlfriend, Juno,” he says, making me feel like I’ve just received a gold medal. “Juno, this is?—”
“Pearl,” Gram says to me. “Call me Pearl.”
I grin. “My best friend is also named Pearl.”
She grins back. “I hope I’ll also become your friend, just like the other Pearl.”
I hope she will not overshare about sex the way the younger Pearl does—like that time my friend told me she unironically enjoys a sexual act called a pearl necklace .
“You weren’t exaggerating,” Gram says to Lucius. “She really is strikingly beautiful.”
He looks taken aback—which makes me doubt he ever told his crafty grandmother such a thing.
I do my best to salvage the situation. “So, Pearl, do you have pictures of Lucius as a child?”
She gives me an approving look. “Going right for the jugular. I like you already.”
As she leads us to the living room, Lucius whispers, “That’s unfair. I didn’t see such photos of you yesterday.”
Pearl hands me a thick photo album, and I plop on the couch.
Lucius sits next to me. My heartbeat picks up. His large, muscular frame radiates enough heat to boil eggs… or fertilize them.
When Pearl sits on my other side, I open the album and greedily peruse it, an ear-to-ear grin splitting my face at the cuteness overload. Lucius was the most adorable kid ever, with a dimpled smile and big gray eyes. If we had a son?—
No. I close the album with a loud clap and look guiltily at Pearl. “What about his teenage years?”
That should be safer, right?
She grimaces. “Unfortunately, Lucius’s mother ‘borrowed’ that album and never returned it.”
“As is typical,” Lucius mutters under his breath.
Before I can comment, a burly middle-aged man walks into the room, carrying a tray with drinks.
“Ah, thank you, dear,” Pearl says to him before turning to me. “This is Aleksy.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Juno,” I say to Aleksy.
Aleksy sets the drinks on the coffee table. “And I you,” he says, and I detect an Eastern European accent.
With a courtly bow, he leaves us be.
I ask Pearl which drink is hers and hand it to her.
“Polite, too,” she says approvingly to Lucius. “Don’t mess this up.”
Lucius sighs. “Will you ladies excuse me for a second? I want to have a word with Aleksy.”
Pearl narrows her eyes. “Why? I assure you, my sugar has been between seventy and ninety. My blood pressure is that of an athlete. No back pain still, without pills. Even my bow?—”
“I’d like to hear all this from Aleksy,” Lucius says firmly, standing up.
“Doesn’t trust me,” Pearl whispers to me so loudly that he can definitely hear.
Before Lucius can exit the room, my phone rings.
I show Pearl my phone screen. “See? That’s my friend and your namesake calling.” I decline the call and put my phone on the coffee table. “I’ll call her back later.”
Lucius shakes his head, the way he does every time he spots my not-smart-phone, and then goes off to talk to Aleksy.
As soon as he’s gone, Pearl leans toward me and says in a low voice, “I’m glad you didn’t take that call.”
“Oh?”
Pearl’s gaze locks with mine. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about without my grandson present.”
My pulse speeds up. “Oh, sure. What is it?”
She hesitates for a second. “Lucius… he can be a little prickly.”
I almost burst out laughing. “A little prickly?”
She sighs. “Is he very prickly?”
I smile sheepishly. “Well, maybe not very. At least not to me.”
“Good,” she says softly. “I was worried. He seems to care a lot about you.”
More like he’s a great actor. “We’re fine.”
“You don’t seem to mean that,” she says, cocking her head.
Damn it. Am I messing up the whole fartlek? “I guess…” I take a breath and search for something to say that would ring true to her. “Sometimes, I get the sense that he holds back. Like he’s wary of getting close.”
Actually, that’s true, period. Not that I can blame him, given the fakeness of our relationship. I hold back myself because that’s just logical.
She nods. “He is—wary, that is. I hope you can be patient with him. He may be rich now, but he hasn’t had an easy life. First, his useless father left him and my daughter. Then she turned out to be a less-than-ideal mother, as much as it saddens me to say it.” She lets out a heavy sigh. “When things like that happen, a boy is bound to question if he’s lovable—and the high school girls didn’t help matters.”
“High school girls?” I say dubiously. The rest of what she said I’ve already suspected—though my heart aches to hear it confirmed. “I would’ve thought high school girls swarmed Lucius like angry bees. In heat.”
I know I would have, if we’d been in school together.
Pearl scrunches her face. “You’d think so, looking at him now, right? But that wasn’t the case, I’m afraid. As cute as he was as a child, it was an ugly duckling situation when he was a teen. At least for a time. He got gangly overnight, and it took him a few years to grow into his body. Didn’t help that he was already starting to be prickly.” She sighs again. “As far as I know, he didn’t start dating at all until he made big money—and now he thinks that’s all any woman is interested in when it comes to him.”
Of course. That would explain why his first kiss happened around the time he made his first million—and why he didn’t want to elaborate on it when I asked.
“Since I can tell what the two of you have is real,” Pearl continues, “I wanted to?—”
Lucius strides into the room, his eyes flinty. “Of course, what Juno and I have is real. But go on, what was it you wanted to do?”
“I wanted to tell Juno that you seem like the perfect couple,” Pearl says—and sounds so earnest that I would believe her if I didn’t know for a fact she was going to say something else. Something like “give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“Try again,” Lucius says.
“Fine.” Pearl’s eyes gleam mutinously. “I was going to tell her about your PhD in Roman history. I know you never would.”
“Because it’s an honorary one,” he says. “Get famous or give a school a large-enough donation, and you’ll get one too.”
“I’m sure there’s more to it than that. Have you at least told Juno about your MBA?” she asks. “You earned that, right?”
He sighs. “Juno’s dream is to get a degree of her own, so I figured that bragging about my scholastic accomplishments would be gauche.”
“That doesn’t follow,” I say. “I can be proud of you… and a little jealous at the same time. Besides, I want a degree in Botany. You don’t have one of those, do you?”
“No,” he and Pearl say in unison.
“Then I’m only a little jealous,” I say. “And, obviously, impressed.”
“See?” Pearl says. “No problem. You should have told her.”
Lucius rubs his temples. “Are you trying to make me forget what I came in here to say?”
Pearl grins. “It was probably, ‘Juno, I missed you.’”
“No,” he says grumpily. “I was going to ask you about your elbow.”
“Aleksy, you’re a traitor!” Pearl yells.
“What happened?” Lucius demands.
Pearl lifts her right elbow theatrically. “Nothing. I probably overplayed badminton. Aleksy had me ice the elbow for a few days, and it’s feeling better.”
Lucius examines her elbow with such intensity you’d think he’s x-raying it with his gaze. “You’re seeing a doctor tomorrow,” he announces. “I know you’re up by ten, so that’s when I’ll have him come over.”
As they gently bicker about the timing, I can’t help but smile on the inside. I already knew that Lucius cared about his grandmother, but his overprotectiveness is showing me just how much—and it gives me an epiphany about him that I should have gotten much, much sooner.
If Lucius were a plant, he’d be a cactus. Prickly at first glance, but in the right circumstances—like around his grandmother—he blooms. He had a tough start in life but was able to make billions and otherwise thrive. Just like his cactus brethren, Lucius has hidden depths to him that I’m still unraveling.
This explains a lot. Like the way he’s been hijacking all my thoughts lately. I mean, I love cactuses, so should it be so surprising that?—
Aleksy walks in the room. “The chefs are here with the dinner.”
At dinner, Pearl turns into a hybrid between an inquisitor and a detective, so all our earlier get-to-know-each-other training pays off in spades. What impresses me the most is how many details Lucius remembers about me—even things I mentioned in passing.
It’s nice to be noticed like that, even if it’s just to fool his grandmother today.
“Have you heard from your mother?” Pearl asks Lucius as we finish the divine éclairs the pastry chef made for dessert.
He nods. “Your daughter is on a safari in Botswana.”
“Ah.” Pearl dabs her mouth with a napkin. “Excuse me a moment. I have to go powder my nose.”
As soon as she leaves, Lucius whispers, “I bet this is a test.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What kind?”
“To see if we’ll be able to keep our hands off each other.”
Is he saying what I think he’s saying? I swallow the last bit of éclair over a lump in my throat. “Did you want to put our earlier practice to use?”
He looks at my lips greedily. “If she catches us, it will cement the fartlek.”
Grr. I’m beginning to really, really hate that f-word.
“Unless you mind?” he says.
Saguaro give me strength. I turn to him and pucker my lips. “Let’s do it.”
He leans in, and our lips lock.
Oh, my. He tastes of chocolate and vanilla from the éclair, but also like him—deliciously male.
If this is purely a performance on his part, it’s good. My nipples are certainly giving it a standing ovation, and my ovaries whistle and catcall.
“Couldn’t wait, could you?” Pearl’s tone is the opposite of judgy, but I feel like a naughty teen anyway.
I pull away, and my heart skips a beat at the heat in Lucius’s eyes. Can he fake that? Also, is that a tent under the napkin on his lap, or am I seeing things?
“Sorry,” I say to his grandmother sheepishly. “I confused Lucius’s mouth for an éclair.”
Ugh, why did I say that? There’s something much more X-rated that’s éclair-shaped under that napkin.
“It’s quite all right, dear,” Pearl says. “Dessert isn’t complete without a kiss from one’s sweetheart.”
“Gram,” Lucius says with mock-sternness. “Don’t make Juno feel awkward.”
She chuckles. “Are you sure it’s Juno who feels awkward?”
Lucius puts his hands in a prayer position. “Can we please talk about something else?”
Oh, no. The eyes he’s making at his grandmother. If he ever used that look on me, I’d say yes to pretty much anything. Particularly dirty anything.
“Okay,” Pearl says graciously. “Will you leave the leftovers when you go?”
Lucius shakes his head. “I think I’d better take the dessert with me, so you’re not tempted.”
They argue about the fate of the dessert for a few minutes as I sip my non-caffeinated tea. Then Pearl launches into a story about fighting for women’s rights in her youth.
As I listen, I can’t help but feel a gnawing sense of dread. Will Lucius and I stop spending time together now that his grandmother is utterly fooled into thinking that we’re together?
No. It’s too soon for that.
Still, we have an expiration date.
It hadn’t hit me until now just how much I don’t want whatever it is between us—no matter how fake—to end. I like kissing my human cactus. I like talking on the phone with him. And having dinners with him.
Is it possible he feels something similar? If so, how would I go about finding that out?
“Juno?” Lucius’s voice intrudes into my thoughts, and I sit up with a start.
“Yes?” What did I miss?
He smirks. “The question was, are you ready to go?”
“Go?”
He nods at Pearl. “It’s Gram’s bedtime.”
She rolls her eyes. “I can stay up later.”
I leap to my feet. “No, no, I’m ready. Sorry about the woolgathering.”
“It’s understandable.” Pearl gives me a lascivious wink. “It is getting late.”
What is this grandmother implying? Whatever it is, my cheeks burn. Traitors.
To make matters worse, Lucius puts his hand on my lower back to lead me out. My cheeks burn hotter and my brain short-circuits. On autopilot, I tell Pearl what a great pleasure it was to meet her, and she returns the sentiment. I think.
Keeping his hand on me, Lucius leads me to the limo and shepherds me inside.
“Great job,” I say when his touch is gone and coherent thoughts return. “She has to think we’re really together.”
He agrees, but all I can think is that Pearl isn’t the only one fooled. The way he looks at me—I’m not sure what’s real anymore… and that makes a crazy idea invade my mind.
A way to see if I’m alone in my confusion, or if Lucius might be in the same yacht.
The idea is simplicity itself, but I’m not sure if I have the proverbial balls to carry it out.
All I need to do is invite Lucius over to my place.