Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Only it doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to.
Loukas sets a hand at the small of my back, light as anything, just enough to steer me through a doorway, and a girl appears from nowhere to take the canvas jacket I’ve been clutching like a shield, and she carries off my twice-patched jacket as though it were worth the careful way she folds it over her arm.
On the porch there’s a chair already pulled out for me, angled to the view. A glass of iced tea sweating gently beside the plate. Unsweet. With a wedge of lime.
Which is exactly how I take it.
Which I’ve told no one on this ranch.
I stop in the doorway, completely undone. I came braced for cruelty and contempt and the old familiar smirk, and what’s been laid out instead is care, the specific, itemized care of a man who found out how I take my tea and which side the light would sit in my eyes, and had a chair turned just so before I ever crested the rise.
Nobody arranges a chair for the bird lady. Nobody has, not in twenty years of my being the woman who arranges the chairs for everybody else. And I stand there in my twice-patched dignity and feel something in my chest tip dangerously toward a warmth I can’t afford and didn’t budget for.
He pulls the chair an inch farther out, which is somehow the last straw, and I drop into it before he can watch my face do the unforgivable thing it’s threatening to do.
“You assume you can ruin it,” I say, reaching for the tea like it’s a railing.
“Blythe.” He says it almost gently, and the gentleness is somehow worse than the smirk ever was. I’ve got armor for the smirk and none at all for this. “I’m about to offer you the only thing in the world you want. Of course I can ruin it.”
I wait. There’s nothing to do with my hands or my dignity but wait.
“I need a fiancée,” he says, as plainly as a man might mention needing a ride to the airport. “One week. There’s a journey ahead of me, and a great many people I’ve got to make it in front of, and I need a woman on my arm they’ll believe I chose. You wear a ring. You let them photograph the two of us looking insufferably in love. And at the end of it you go home with enough money to close that north wall, settle the county, and pay every invoice in that kitchen drawer twice over. No one ever has to know it wasn’t real.”
For a second the words won’t mean anything. They refuse to arrange themselves into any shape that includes me.
A fake fiancée. His. Hired by the week. Paid to be adored, in front of an audience.
The one thing I gave up letting myself want, held out to me at last, by the one man on earth I can’t afford to take it from.
Chapter Two
“ABSOLUTELY NOT,” I tell him, which is a strange thing to hear coming out of my own mouth, given that I’d promised myself on the long drive in that whatever this man offered, I’d be cool about it, I’d be unbothered, I’d be the kind of woman who has men proposing fake engagements to her over porch lunch on a Tuesday and merely lifts one eyebrow.
So much for that.
I’m already turning, already two steps back toward the door and the truck and the rest of my dignified life, when his hand closes around my wrist from behind.
He’s faster than a man that size has any right to be, and the next thing I know my back’s against one of the cool stone posts that hold up his impossible porch, with forty miles of his own gold country rolling away behind me, and Loukas Karalis is close. Close enough that the heat coming off him reaches me before he does.
Close enough that my pulse, the disloyal thing, leaps against the warm circle of his fingers, and I know he feels it, I know he does, the dark eyes holding mine a beat longer than a second ago.
I want this to make my skin crawl. I want it desperately, the way you want a glass of water in the night. Skin-crawling I could use. Skin-crawling would let me wrench free and drive home with my dignity in one piece. But that isn’t what happens.
What happens is warm and low and humiliating and entirely the opposite of crawling, and I hold onto my fury with both hands the way you hold a railing on a bad stair, the fury being the only thing on this porch I still trust.
“Let go of my wrist,” I tell him through my teeth.
“You walked before I finished.” He drawls it, unbothered, his hold not loosening by a degree. “Surely you know how much I dislike being walked out on.”