by Maisey Yates
“You know you have my support,” Sadie said. “And Eli’s. I mean, he can’t actually force people to vote for you under threat of arrest—I asked—but if anyone talks to him about it he makes his preferences pretty clear.”
“And I appreciate that. I appreciate the support that he’s given me, always. Which I mean in a nonsexual way.”
“I know.”
“Eli, in my opinion, is Copper Ridge. You two. The best, the future.”
“I feel like you’re avoiding giving details.”
Lydia let out an exasperated sigh. “I’m running against an institution. Not only that, he’s a man. It seems like the personal lives of women are always more scrutinized in these types of situations. I was single, which already made me somewhat unapproachable. I mean, people wonder why. They want to know if I even care about family. If I throw a quickie marriage and even faster divorce onto the pile...well, that’s it. I’m done.”
Sadie nodded slowly. “Okay. I see your point. So...what’s the plan? You stay married to him forever?”
“No. I stay married to him until I get elected. But, basically we’re just going to pretend to be married. I mean, we’re going to actually be married, but without the love, or the sex.”
Sadie frowned. “So, marriage with all of the annoying things like compromise, cohabitation and having to eat what he wants for dinner, without the things that make it fun?”
“For a limited time. We’re going to be roommates. Roommates who don’t like each other and who probably had sex and don’t remember it.”
“Wow. Good luck with that.”
“That is not helpful to me, Sadie. You’re an optimist. You’re supposed to be optimistic about this.”
“Sorry. Realist Sadie is the one who feels like weighing in. This is going to be a giant pain in your butt.”
It was Lydia’s turn to frown. “I think Realist Sadie is a pain in my butt.”
“She’s a pain in mine, too. I’m just saying, you honestly think that you’re going to live with Colton West for the next few months and pretend to be his wife and that isn’t going to be...awkward?”
“Oh, it’s going to be awkward.”
“Let me rephrase. You aren’t going to sleep with him?”
“No,” Lydia said, feeling each and every one of her muscles begin to tense up. “I’m not. The situation is complicated enough. We’re not going to mess it up further. It’s a blessing that we don’t remember what happened.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe that sex often overrules common sense.”
“Well,” Lydia said, “that has never been the case for me.”
“Except with Colton.”
Lydia set her cup down on the desk and threw her hands up. “I don’t remember it. It’s basically the same as it not happening.”
“Except that it did.”
“It isn’t happening again.” She picked her cup back up again, then set it back down. “You know what? I haven’t had sex in four years.”
Sadie’s mouth dropped open. “Excuse me?”
“So celibate, Sadie. So celibate. I don’t think a couple of months sharing a very large space with Colton is going to undo my willpower.”
“Except, you did... A couple of days ago. With him. He was the one that broke the celibacy.”
“Whiskey broke the celibacy. Alcohol is to blame. I’ll just...stay sober. Which is fine, because I usually am.”
“I support you.”
“But you don’t believe in me.”
Sadie shook her head. “Two different things.”
“You just can’t tell anyone that our marriage isn’t a real marriage.”
“Well, I’m going to tell Eli.”
Lydia scrunched up her face. “Do you have to?”
“Sorry. Husbands before... Well, nothing rhymes with husbands. But, I don’t keep secrets from him.”
The fact that it was Eli made it slightly worse. Lydia was over her Eli crush, but since she had been occasionally pathetic in his presence already, she didn’t want to add to it by having him fully aware that her marriage wasn’t real.
A very unsettling thought occurred to her. Even if people believed the marriage was real, she still looked kind of pathetic. The bride hadn’t shown up, so Colton had snagged the nearest bridesmaid.
But you weren’t the nearest bridesmaid. You were on the other end. So, he passed over like three bridesmaids to get to you.
The thought made her scowl.
Sadie clearly thought the scowl was directed at her. “He won’t tell. Not anyone. Not even Connor.”
“I believe you.” She couldn’t imagine the very serious, upright sheriff gossiping to his brother like a couple of hens. If there was one thing she trusted in, it was Eli’s goodness. He was one of the most truly responsible and decent people she had ever known. Which, really, explained her attraction. That and the fact that he was an integral part of the community that had become so important to her. The community that she wanted so desperately to be part of.
In a deep way. Not just a superficial way. She wanted Copper Ridge to be hers. Not out of a thirst for power; that wasn’t why she was running for mayor. It was just that she cared. She cared so deeply about this place, this place that was perfect in ways she could not begin to describe.
The sharp, salt air; the fresh scent of the pines; the way the mist hung low over the mountains. It was in her blood. It was part of her. When she had first driven into town with her car full of her earthly possessions eight years ago, ready to make a fresh start, she had felt like she’d crossed the earth, not just into the next state.
Had felt for the first time like something was hers. For her.
And she wanted more. Something that couldn’t be taken from her. It was an ache, a longing that she had a difficult time articulating, even to herself.
“So, where do you go from here? What’s next?”
“I guess...I’m moving.”
CHAPTER FIVE
LYDIA HAD NO idea what she should bring with her. Obviously, she wasn’t going to bring her furniture. She was going to have to forward her mail. She would need clothes, but mostly early fall clothes. Maybe a winter jacket. Definitely nothing for the late-coming spring. Because they weren’t going to be married that long.
She was standing in her living room pondering these things when there was a knock on her door.
She wondered if it was Sadie with more mochas, or perhaps that was more of a fantasy than a wonderment.
“Just a second.” She turned, moving to the door and jerking it open without checking to see who was on the other side. “Hi,” she said, trying to ignore the fluttering in her stomach when she came face-to-midchest with Colton.
He was so tall. It was borderline obscene. Tall and broad and extremely muscular. Utterly masculine, with just a few days growth of gold-tinted whiskers covering his square jaw. And it made her feel a little bit regretful that she didn’t have any memories about the interior of his pants.
No. No, she was not going to go there.
“I just came to see if you needed help with anything,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets.
“I’m fine,” she said, very aware of the fact that she didn’t have everything together at all.
“So, are you about ready?”
“I mean, I’m ready kind of. Mostly. Also, you didn’t have to come and pick me up.”
“Sorry, I’m a little rusty on the protocol of how exactly you help your fake wife move into your house for a temporary period of time.”
“Yeah,” she said, “we may have to pioneer that.”
“Do you need any help?”
Absurdly, she was ridiculously edgy about th
e idea of him coming into her house. Possibly because when all was said and done, she kind of wanted to go back to life as it had been before she had decided to make a Colton-sized mistake.
“No. I have it. Just wait there. You can sit in...” She didn’t really want him sitting in her porch chair, either. But denying him a spot to wait was a little bit shrewish. “You can sit in the chair,” she said finally.
“Okay,” he replied, looking rather like he thought she was insane.
Well, maybe she was. But he had married her. So, that didn’t say anything good about him.
“Just a—” She held up a finger. “Just a second.”
She slammed the door shut and turned back around, looking at her half-packed duffel bag. She picked it up, turning quickly into her bedroom, then grabbing some clothes that were hanging in the closet and stuffing them into the bag. They didn’t fit. She was going to have to get a suitcase.
Several suitcases, probably.
What had she been thinking? She had been thoroughly convinced that this was some kind of overnight trip, and she was going to pack a bag, and then she was going to return to her house as though nothing had happened. She was moving in with him. That was completely different. It was... Okay, now she felt like she was going crazy.
“I was tired of waiting out on the porch. I thought the entire point was that we minimize gossip.”
She turned around, starting when she saw him standing in the doorway. “I did not invite you in. I, in fact, did the opposite of that.”
“Do you really want people to start talking about how your husband was standing on the porch looking lonely only hours after your wedding?”
“That’s so dramatic,” she said, attempting to look less perturbed than she felt.
“You’re the one with a lot of concern about appearances.”
“You’re not...disinterested in appearances, yourself. I have to find a suitcase.”
“I thought you were almost ready.”
“Okay, let’s not stand around acting like you would be fully on top of the procedure for going about all of this. I admit, I was feeling a little shortsighted. Like, I was kind of thinking of packing an overnight bag. And then I realized that we’re going to be living together for a few months.”
She could have sworn that Colton paled slightly when she spoke the words. “More like a month and a half.”
“Semantics. But we have to stay together until after the election. And presumably you need some time to allow your mother to adjust... Or whatever it is exactly that you’re waiting for her to do.”
“I would like to avoid giving her a mental breakdown,” he said, sounding exasperated.
“Right. Well, I don’t really know your mother, so I don’t really understand the situation. But I do understand that it’s kind of complicated. But all that means is that it’s not going to be a quick weekend stay at your place. And maybe I was in denial about that.”
“It’s not that big of a deal,” he said, while his expression said something else entirely.
“No,” she said, “not at all. We just have to learn to coexist.” She opened up her closet and began to rummage around, digging in the bottom until she produced her suitcase, which she hadn’t used in years.
“How hard can it be?”
Neither of them spoke the obvious, which was that they had a difficult enough time coexisting when they lived in the same small town, let alone the same house.
“I’m sure it will be super easy,” she said, hefting her suitcase up onto the bed and throwing it open. “Super, super easy.” She continued muttering as she walked into the bathroom.
She looked around at all of her things. Her makeup, put away neatly in the dark purple case that she kept on the left-hand corner of the counter. Her flat iron, snapped into its sparkly holder, which kept it and its cord carefully contained. Then she turned and looked at the shower, at the carefully organized caddy that contained her shampoo, conditioner and oil treatments.
Everything was right where she wanted it to be. Organized exactly the way it made sense to her. She didn’t have to compromise. Didn’t have to modify herself to be different for anyone. Didn’t have to contort so that she wouldn’t be in the way.
Darn it, she liked having her own space. Needed it, even. And maybe she was being really, really dramatic about the fact that she was going to be sharing a house with somebody for a couple of months. Maybe.
“It’s a vacation,” she muttered, picking up her various items. “A vacation on a ranch. With a surly roommate that will maybe cook breakfast?”
She walked out of the bathroom, back into the bedroom, where Colton was still standing in the doorway, his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“I thought you came in to help me.”
“You didn’t give me a directive. Did you want me to just aimlessly go through your things and try to decide what you needed?”
She made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat. “Obviously not.”
Silence stretched between them, along with a thick band of tension that seemed to wrap itself around her, more specifically, her throat. She found it difficult to breathe all of a sudden. For some reason, the air seemed to reduce around them. For some reason, she was unbearably conscious of the scent of the soap that he used, and just how familiar it was.
It was a reminder. A reminder that—whether she remembered it or not—she had absolutely smelled it on his skin before. Her brain didn’t remember, but right now, her body seemed to.
“Do you have a food processor?” she asked, because talking about food processors seemed as good a method as any for diffusing the unwanted crackle of tension in the room.
“Of course.”
“There’s no of course about that. A lot of men wouldn’t have one.”
“Well, I have a housekeeper. She cooks a lot of my food.”
Lydia’s eyebrows shot up. “A housekeeper?”
“You feel a little less victimized now, don’t you?”
“No. Thoroughly victimized.” She added as many clothes as she could to her bag, followed by shoes.
“It isn’t like you can’t come back to the house. You can make vague noises about how you intend to rent it out if anyone asks. But we’ll never get around to it.”
“You know, I hear some people live in cities, where nobody knows their name, or pays attention to what they’re doing.”
The corner of his mouth curved upward. “What must that be like?”
“I don’t know. Do you have a juicer? Because I juice.” She had juiced twice. Once right after she had bought the juicer, and another time when her pants had refused to zip after the holidays last year. But then, she had just bought new pants because juice with kale in it was an abomination.
Colton treated her to a baleful look. “Nobody juices.”
She scoffed. “Well, okay, I don’t do it every day. But I do stop at the store on the way to work and buy a bottle of juice sometimes.”
“Do you?” he asked, his tone rife with skepticism.
“I mean, I don’t always have time to stop on the way to work. But I do stop at the store on the way home. For a bottle. Of wine. But it’s almost grape juice.”
“I have wine, and several corkscrews. So why don’t you just leave your juicer here.”
She wanted to run through a list of yet more appliances that she would probably never use in his house, because she wanted to do something to delay the inevitable.
“Did you get Natalie’s things out of your house?” she asked.
“I paid some movers to come by this morning and take care of it. I think they took it back to her parents’ house.”
“Is that where she is?”
“You know, I didn’t make it my mission to figure out where the woman who left me at th
e altar was. But, seeing as she’s your friend, you might know.”
Lydia swallowed. “I didn’t exactly think she would want to hear from the bridesmaid who ended up marrying the groom.”
He laughed. “Coward.”
“So are you.”
“No, I just don’t think she’s my problem anymore. That woman is a project. And I did my very best to make her happy.”
Lydia should not feel at all like she had to defend her friend. Natalie had abandoned Colton at the altar. Not only that, the relationship between the two of them had been borderline toxic during the planning of the wedding. The only reason that Lydia had continued to be involved was for appearances. Which was what her entire life was beginning to feel like it came down to.
Still, Natalie had been the first friend she had made in Copper Ridge. And things might have been rocky in the ensuing years, but she still didn’t think that Colton had a right to act like he had no stake in what had happened. Natalie cared more about appearances than Lydia did. Possibly more than Lydia and Colton combined.
“Right. You had nothing to do with her running out on the wedding.”
“I told you, I was totally shocked.”
“Totally. Completely. There were no indicators that things were perhaps not completely healthy?”
“I didn’t know. If I’d known I would not have submitted to standing up in front of the entire town with my dick in my hand.”
Heat flooded her face, which was stupid, because he was being crass on purpose, and not talking about his actual...that. Still, it forced her mind there. And that, in combination with the scent of the soap, was a little too real.
“Fine. I’m just saying. It’s clear to me the relationship wasn’t perfect. And I sincerely doubt that she’s the only one at fault here.”
“Oh, are you a relationship expert? Does that mean that this marriage is getting in the way of a close, intimate relationship you’re in?”
She shot him her deadliest glare. “Yes. The relationship I hold most dear. The one I share with my personal space.”