Fake Marriage Box Set (A Single Dad Romance)

by Claire Adams

  She rolled her eyes dramatically and answered in a droning voice. “You like them better than people.”

  “Smart girl,” Daddy said, not even the hint of a smile on his face. I cracked a big enough smile for the both of us.

  “The trainer’s great, too. Her name’s Lacey. She does barrel racing in the rodeos.”

  “I’d never do that,” Kasey said, wrinkling her stub nose. “I wouldn’t want to risk getting hurt.”

  “You can ride just fine, Kase,” Daddy said.

  “I know I can ride. I just wouldn’t want to race.” She made a face down at her meatloaf. Her fingernails were painted light blue today. She redid them constantly, sometimes twice a week. Her toenails, too. I didn’t know when she found the time. Or the energy. But if part of her wasn’t painted or sparkly, she just couldn’t sit still. It was kind of like me wanting to be dirty, sweaty, and tired at the end of every day. If I wasn’t at least two of those things, I didn’t feel right at the end of the day. If I was all three, I could sleep like a baby for seven hours straight, no problem.

  “What do you have planned this weekend, Daddy?” I asked.

  He lifted his pale blue eyes long enough to meet mine. “I got some work needs doing in the barn if you want to come over Saturday morning.”

  “Sure,” I said. I liked having plans that would keep me busy outdoors for hours at a time.

  “Gross,” Kasey said, screwing up her heart-shaped face as she scrunched her tiny nose again. “Y’all have fun with that.”

  “What’ll you be doing?” I asked her.

  She brightened immediately, trading the overdone ugly face for one of her glittery, gorgeous smiles, all teeth and flashing eyes. “I have to work on Saturday, but Amanda and I are going out after that. You should come!”

  I shared another quick look with Daddy. He was swallowing back a grin, probably at the thought of me out partying like some dumb kid. I had to look away from him to keep from busting out laughing.

  “No thanks, Kase. I’m gonna help Daddy around here this weekend.”

  “Booooring!” she burst out, eyes rolling again before settling back on mine. “But I’ll have enough fun for the both of us.”

  I didn’t doubt that.

  I cleared the dishes after dinner. The person who cooked never had to take care of the dishes, so Kasey bopped outside while I stacked everything by the sink. I shooed Daddy off to read the paper in the living room while I washed, rinsed, dried, and put the dishes away. I hung up the damp kitchen towel when the job was done and went to find Kasey out back. I needed to talk to someone about what was going on at work, and I couldn’t think of anyone to turn to besides my surprisingly experienced little sister.

  She was on the wooden swing, moving lazily while she checked her phone for whatever gossip she’d missed while we were eating dinner. Daddy didn’t allow electronics at the table. We hadn’t even gotten cell phones until after high school. I plopped down next to her on the swing, wrecking the rhythm she had going. I pushed off with my heels, rocking us back so hard, Kasey squealed and grabbed for the arm rest.

  “Em!”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said, letting us relax into a less choppy rhythm, our legs moving in tandem to keep the swing going smoothly.

  She looked over at me, her green eyes wide. “What is it?”

  I drew a deep breath and let it out again, considering how to best put all of this — my feelings for Pete, blooming like stubborn weeds no matter how much I’d tried to chop them off at the root, the little thrill I felt in the mornings at getting to the farm, and spending the morning sneaking looks at him while we sipped our coffee.

  “Pete took me out to breakfast last week,” I said, speaking in a hot gush of exhaled air. “It wasn’t supposed to be a date. Just a boss taking out his employee. But it sure felt like a date.”

  She dropped her phone into her lap, its glowing face forgotten. She leaned closer to me, her eyes so wide I expected them to pop out of her head. “You didn’t tell me about going to breakfast!”

  “I’m telling you now,” I said, giggling a little. “After we got back to the farm, he asked me to dinner.”

  “Oh my God, Emma! That’s so great!”

  “I told him no.”

  Her face fell along with her shoulders. She sank back onto the swing, making a disappointed noise as she shook her head, her hair bouncing all over her shoulders. “What? Why would you do something like that? You like him!”

  “I have to work with this man, Kase. And, I love the ranch.”

  “Who the hell cares about the ranch?” Her voice had dropped to a deadly whisper, the way it always did when she was being serious. This was Daddy’s mark on her — getting quieter the madder she got. Her wide eyes searched my face, but it was dark out here, so she couldn’t see much. “If you like him, you should go out with him.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It sounds pretty simple to me. You like him. He likes you.” She smiled, maybe to demonstrate just how simple it was.

  I shook my head. But I couldn’t find the right way to argue. Because I did want to go out with Pete. I’d seen something different in him that morning at breakfast. He became more than a set of mile-wide shoulders and a bottomless pool of bad jokes. I’d gotten to see something else: a soft, serious part behind the show he put on nonstop when he was around anyone else. The silliness was part of who he was just as much as the piercing blue eyes were, but he used it to keep attention away from that other, more vulnerable part, the part I was desperate to get to know.

  Kasey seized on my hesitation. “What do you have to lose, Em? Maybe things get uncomfortable and you have to quit, or you’re fired. You’ll just be in the same place you were before you started working there. You’re smart and hardworking. You’ll find somewhere else. But there isn’t another guy like Pete just waiting for you around the corner. If you like him, you have to take a risk.”

  I chewed on my lip, thinking hard. I wanted to go out with him. No matter how silly he was. I was actually coming around to liking that silliness quite a bit. Getting away from the ranch had made a difference that morning at the Texan. I was desperate to see that softer, gentler, less comical side of him. That wouldn’t happen at the ranch. It wouldn’t happen around Lacey.

  Kasey was right. I had to take a risk.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Pete

  Friday

  I was on the porch, tapping my leg like crazy as I tried to relax. Riley was asleep on the floor next to the steps, completely ignoring the tension in the air like the selfish little beast he was. The week started out so well — taking Emma to breakfast and getting a few smiles out of her while we exchanged stories about our lives. But then I had to go ruining it by asking her out to dinner.

  I just thought I’d seen something warm and inviting in her eyes at breakfast. Now I wasn’t even sure if she’d stay on at the ranch. Things weren’t bad between us, just unnatural. She refused to meet my eyes and avoided me like the plague in the mornings to keep from being asked to breakfast again. I’d made up my mind not to pursue this. Not if it was making her this uncomfortable. I liked her too much to lose her.

  Emma walked out of the barn and turned to slide the alleyway doors shut. She leaned in to listen to the noise on the other side of the door for a minute, a small smile on her face, before starting across the driveway and up to the house. I’d caught her doing that before — just listening to the whickering of the horses in the morning before she opened the door and after she closed it in the evening. Her love for the horses was another thing that softened my heart towards her.

  She walked up the steps to the porch slowly. It was the end of the week, so I owed her five days’ worth of wages. Her eyes were guarded, the tiny smile she gave me perfunctory.

  “I have your money inside,” I told her. The envelope was sitting on my kitchen table.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you asked the other day,” she said, staring dow
n at the snoozing shape of the dog. “About dinner?”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  She looked up at me, her wide eyes needy in a way I hadn’t seen before. “I’d like to go sometime.” Her shy smile widened just a little. “If you still want to.”

  I did a ten count in my head to keep from leaping from my chair and whooping with joy. I played it cool. Well, mostly cool. I couldn’t stop the grin that spread over my face, so wide it hurt my cheeks.

  “Of course, I still want to.” I stood, shifting the dynamic between us so she was looking up to see my face and I was looking down to see hers. “Do you have a place you like? Or do you want me to pick? We can go right now.”

  She giggled at that, and I smiled wider, loving the sound of her laughter. “I’m gross from working with the horses all day.”

  “We’ll be gross together,” I told her. I’d been out in the field all day. I probably stank to high heaven, but I didn’t want to give her an excuse to wiggle out of the date. Because this was definitely a date. I didn’t wait for her to come up with another reason why we couldn’t go out tonight. She followed as I walked out to my truck. I started it up, turned around in the driveway, and drove out to the main road.

  “I have just the place for us to go,” I said.

  She relaxed into the seat, smoothing her ponytail over her shoulder. “I’ve never done this before.”

  I looked over at her, grinning, and had to keep from reaching to make sure she was really sitting here next to me after a long week of thinking she might never meet my eyes again. “What? Gone on a date?”

  She laughed, and I felt that tingling in my gut. Goddamn, I could sit and listen to her laugh all day and never get tired of it.

  “I’ve been on a date before, Pete. But never spur of the moment like this.” She wrinkled her long nose again, still grinning. “And never without taking a shower first.”

  I had to laugh. “Yeah, this is a first for me, too. I normally don’t stink quite so much.” And, I did stink. But if she didn’t care, I didn’t either. The tension of the week was gone. Whatever I’d done wrong on Monday had been forgiven, and she didn’t seem so careful around me anymore.

  The restaurant was the best Italian place in Round Rock. Okay, it was also the only Italian place in Round Rock, if you didn’t count Pizza Hut and Dominos. I’d never taken a girl here before, so I hoped we weren’t underdressed in our jeans, boots, and dirt-smeared t-shirts.

  We sat in a booth near the rear of the restaurant, grinning like teenagers at how the hostess had looked us up and down for a solid minute before begrudgingly showing us to our seats. We ordered a few drinks before cracking open our menus.

  “Have you ever been here before?” Emma asked, peeking over her menu at me.

  “Nope, but it looked fancy from outside, didn’t it?” I grinned. “Dressed the way we are, we probably should’ve just rolled past a drive-thru and ate in the truck.”

  “Probably,” she agreed, smiling down at her menu. “But they don’t have chicken parmesan at the drive thru.”

  When the waiter came back with a basket of bread and our drinks — a beer for me and a glass of red wine for Emma — we both ordered the chicken parmesan.

  Emma fished a piece of bread out of the basket and started nibbling on the crust, drawing my attention right to her perfect mouth. “Is this what you wanted to do when you were young?” she asked. “Work on the ranch?”

  I took a piece of bread, too, tearing it in half while I thought of how to answer. “I never really thought about it. I’m happy on the ranch. But I don’t think I ever considered the possibility of doing anything else. I hated school. I just didn’t like sitting still all day. Now that I’m an adult and no one can make me, I don’t plan to sit still again for the rest of my life.”

  Emma smiled at that, her straight white teeth flashing in the candlelight flickering in the middle of the table. Her green eyes drank up that light and looked much darker than they usually did, like precious emeralds hidden in some ancient tomb I’d been lucky enough to discover.

  “I liked school,” she said. “But I like being outside in the sunshine, too. I wouldn’t be happy doing anything that kept me penned up inside. I need to be around animals. I need to feel like I worked hard at the end of the day.”

  We had that much in common, I thought. “What part of growing up on a farm did you like most?” I asked, speaking gently, both of us leaning into each other as we tore through the bread. We’d put in a long day. I for one was starved half to death.

  “Spending so much time with my daddy,” she said. “He’s a quiet man, but we never had to talk to feel close to one another.”

  The way she handled herself made a lot more sense now. The quiet gene had to run in the family. Someone like me must’ve thrown her completely off balance. I’d been a talker since the cradle. But she was here. It had to mean she was interested, even if I couldn’t keep from joking and laughing the day away in between working hard. I reminded myself not to get my hopes up. This girl was still a locked safe.

  Our meals came next, and we refreshed our drinks and kept talking. Every time Emma smiled, a warm tingling filled up my insides, and my heart beat a little faster. I’d been with girls before, but this was different.

  “Do you want dessert?” I asked after we’d finished. She looked stuffed. I touched my neck just below my Adam’s apple. “I’m full to about here, but if you want something, I’ll try to help you eat it.”

  She laughed, and that warmth spread from my full belly to between my legs. I couldn’t stop staring at her mouth. I’d never wanted to kiss someone so much in my life. I’d go crazy if I didn’t put my attention somewhere else.

  “I don’t think I could eat another bite at gunpoint,” she said. She wasn’t smiling, but her eyes were sparkling in that way I was getting to know meant she was happy.

  I paid the check in cash as soon as it came and we left the restaurant together, still chattering companionably. The drive back to the ranch passed by too quickly. I wanted to find some excuse to spend more time with her, but I just pulled into the driveway a little ways behind her sporty blue sedan. We got out of my truck, slamming the doors at the same time.

  “Thank you for dinner,” she said, inching closer to her car.

  I knew I was going to spend the weekend thinking about her in between all the things I had to get done on the ranch. Lacey would be here, too, working with Elroy and some of the others. I’d need whatever distraction I could get to keep from just dreaming with my eyes open until Emma came back on Monday morning.

  “Your pay,” I blurted, seizing on that small glimmer of hope like I would a life raft in rough waters. “I left it on my kitchen table.”

  She cocked her head, but it was too dark to read the look in her eye. I didn’t want to wait for her to tell me she’d stay out here while I ran in to get it. I just turned and walked to the house, grinning when I heard her footsteps falling in behind me. I didn’t have much in the house besides beer and coffee, but I was happy to offer her whatever would get her to stay a little longer.

  Riley was keeping watch on the porch. He lifted his head as we walked by, but didn’t get up to follow us. The front door wasn’t locked. I had my guard dog, didn’t I? I went into the house, too nervous to turn around, sure Emma would tell me she’d wait on the porch if I did.

  The kitchen was bathed in moonlight. I turned on the overhead and picked up the envelope of cash from the table. I turned, a smile stretching over my lips that was wiped clean off by the look on Emma’s face. She was standing in the doorway, her green eyes wide. That hungry look was back in them, the one I’d seen earlier on the porch. And, her body was tense. I wanted to take her into my arms, but that wasn’t my place. She looked lost. The self-possessed, confident woman who worked the farm every day was gone. This was a glimpse of the girl inside the safe.

  “Here you go,” I managed to force out in a wavering voice. I cleared my throat and held out the envelope. She
reached to take it, her fingers brushing over mine. That heat moved through me, and I held my breath. She hesitated, her fingers still touching my skin as her eyes widened, that hunger passing from her to me in a straight line.

  I didn’t think. I just reached for her, my hand wrapping gently around the back of her neck and bringing her closer. Her lips parted as she lifted her head to keep meeting my eyes. That was what undid me.

  I leaned to finally taste that perfect mouth, softly at first, but I couldn’t hold back. Her hands lifted to rest on my sides, and I curled my hand into that soft brown hair at the back of her neck. We kissed harder, her sweet mouth opening so I could press my tongue inside. She kissed back, her body straining into mine.

  I couldn’t help how excited she made me. Within a few seconds of tasting her, my cock was rock hard. I pressed it against her, still kissing as hard as she’d let me, our tongues exploring the deep, sweet warmth of each other’s mouths. It was all I’d wanted for weeks, from the time she walked up to greet me on the porch that first day.

  She pulled back, breathless, her green eyes as wide as before, the look in them a little disoriented. But she didn’t step out of my embrace. I wanted to kiss her again. I wanted to peel off every piece of clothing that was between us right now. The envelope with her pay inside of it had fallen on the ground at our feet.

  “Do you have a bathroom?” she stammered, cutting her eyes away.

  “Down the hall,” I whispered. I didn’t want to let her go. The minute I did, there was a chance I wouldn’t get her back.

  She stepped out of my arms and backed into the hall, her dark eyes meeting mine for a few seconds before she turned to hurry down to the bathroom. As soon as the door closed, I collapsed onto one of the dining room chairs, the strength leaving me in a warm rush. I touched my tingling lips, amazed at what they’d just done.