by Amelia Wilde
He stands up straight and squares his shoulders. “I’m beginning to think I don’t know anything. But I do know this. I’m not letting you lose this ranch.” Asher scans the doorframe, which must not offer a single clue, because a second later those blue eyes blaze into mine. “Let’s get married.”
5
Asher
“I don’t think I can stay here.”
I blink down at Everly through the haze of the situation at hand, which strikes me as more bizarre by the moment.
We’re married. I’ve got a ring on my finger from a jewelry store over on Main Street. It’s a plain gold band, just like my father wore, and it feels heavier than a boulder.
“You don’t think you can stay on the sidewalk? Agreed.” I’m not sure why we’re lingering in front of the courthouse. This entire afternoon has put us in the uncanny valley of weddings. Everly slipped her hand into mine on the way out of the courthouse, but now that we’re on the sidewalk, she’s curled the little folder with the marriage certificate against her chest. It was the anticlimax of the century to walk down the hall from the Justice of the Peace to the clerk’s office and file the certificate. Everly’s ranch is hers, for the moment.
“No. I don’t think I can stay in Paulson.” She looks up and down the street and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in the afternoon breeze. There’s more to her than meets the eye. I knew it in the bar, and I know it now. “If we slip up…”
“What, someone might report you to the clerk’s office?”
Her dark eyes burn into mine. “Exactly.”
“Don’t you have things to do here? A job? Or…running your ranch?”
“Brooke handles most of that. She’s got people to help her, and I can do my part from anywhere.”
“What’s your part?”
“The finances. Running our website. And some other…side projects.”
My heart beats so heavily in my chest that I’m worried something will burst. Saying those vows to Everly, fake or not, time-limited or not, was like diving into Ruby Bay in February. I am awake. And as far as I can tell, I’ve met my obligations in Paulson.
“Is there…somewhere you want to go?”
Everly bites her lip and looks down at the sidewalk. “Wherever I go, it should be with you.” Her eyes fly back up to mine. “For appearances.”
“Right. Appearances.” A hot want spools up from the pit of my gut to my lips. A fake wedding does not come with a wedding night.
It doesn’t.
And the truth—the awful truth—is that I’ve been avoiding my brothers. I’ve even been avoiding thinking about the fact that I’ve been avoiding my brothers. My phone buzzes in my pocket. That’ll be one of them, wanting to know where I am and when I’m coming back. Over the last couple of weeks, the messages have become more and more urgent.
But the coward in me knows that heading back to Bliss will be the end. A soft spot behind my breastbone pulses with an ache I’d rather not acknowledge. Montana was the last place my father asked me to go, and from here on out, I’m on my own.
Not quite on my own. Now, I have a wife.
“I’ll be honest with you.” Everly’s eyes go wide, and I want to fall into them. “It works out that you can’t stay here, because I can’t stay here either.” I reach out and take her hand. For appearances. “Have you ever wanted to visit upstate New York?”
We’re off like a shot. Back to the ranch, where Everly scrawls a note to her sister and sticks it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a pepperoni pizza. She packs a suitcase while I book us the next flight out. A ten-minute stop at the Marriott so I can get my stuff, and then we’re gone.
Everly doesn’t relax until we’re in the air and the flight attendant has come by with refreshments. She lifts her miniature plastic cup of Diet Coke to her lips and drinks. When she’s got it centered back in the tray table cupholder, she flicks her gaze to me.
“So…we should set some ground rules.”
With our arms pressed together on the shared arm rest, the last thing I want on the planet is to set ground rules. But she’s right. A sex-fueled free-for-all won’t make it any easier for this arrangement to end after thirty days. And it has to end. Jumping into marriage like this was not on my life agenda, we’re not in love, and thinking someone is the hottest person to walk the face of the earth isn’t an appropriate foundation for a lifelong commitment. “Yes. Ground rules.”
“No kissing,” Everly offers. “Unless we’re in public, and it makes sense for the scenario. You said you had five brothers, right? They’re going to expect us to…you know.”
“Be in love?”
“At least be into each other.” A delicate pink spreads across her cheeks and it’s all I can do not to lean over and press my lips against that rosy color. She shifts her arm so there’s more pressure against mine. Curse the arm rest. Curse it. “Which could be hard. I’m not that into you.”
“You just like the looks of me.”
“I did last night in the bar.”
“And now?” Her dark eyes take me in, tracing me slowly from head to toe. Everywhere she looks, my body lights up in response. When her eyes linger on the front of my pants I clench my jaw and will myself to stay in control. “You don’t play fair.”
“I’m getting you back,” she says primly. “For rejecting me.”
“All’s well that ends well,” I counter.
“It cut deep,” she insists, and I get a flash of what it could have been like if she wasn’t on the verge of losing her home, and if my father hadn’t sent me to do this, and if any of it made sense.
“If you think that was deep.”
“Oh my god,” she whispers, eyes dancing. “That was your sex joke?”
“It was a sex joke.”
“Keep it to the jokes, Asher Bliss.”
“No sex, then?”
“No sex.” Everly shoots me a skeptical look. “No kissing in private, and no sex. This is…this is only…”
“This is only business,” I tell her.
“No touching, unless we have to do it in order to prove that we’re in love, and that this marriage is real.” Regret pierces me somewhere near my kidney, sharp and strong. Everly’s eyes make me wish this was real. It’s not. It will never be real. But I wish.
“Is that all of them?”
She nods definitively. “That’s all of them.”
I lean my head back against the headrest. “Good. I think we’re good.”
“Good,” she echoes.
No kissing. No sex. No touching.
But Everly doesn’t move her arm away.
“No falling in love,” she whispers.
“None whatsoever,” I agree.
Everly’s shoulders go up around her ears the moment we leave the plane, and they stay there all through luggage claim and the rental car pickup.
“You don’t have to be nervous. My brothers don’t bite.”
She shakes her shoulders, but it does nothing to relieve the tension singing over her muscles. “We have to keep up the act. We have to do a really good job, Asher.” Her voice is tight and thin.
“Even if my brothers did find out about our plan, they wouldn’t—”
“They can’t find out.” Everly whips around in her seat to stare at me. “Promise me they won’t find out, Asher.”
“All right. I promise.” I take one hand off the steering wheel, my heart jittery, the beats unsteady. What could my brothers possibly do to derail a fake marriage out of Montana? But her intensity thins out the air in the car until it’s hard to draw a breath. “I promise, Ev. Do you mind if I call you that?”
“No.” She sags back in the seat and turns her face toward the window. “No. Just…don’t let it slip, Asher. You can’t.”
We go straight to Bliss.
They’re waiting for me.
Ten feet from the door, I hear him—Charlie.
“I’ve tried everything. And if we can’t find him, we’re going to ha
ve to go another route. That’s the bottom line. We can’t have a mysterious expense line. It puts our entire livelihood in jeopardy.”
Beau pipes up. “Alex, what is calm down because this isn’t going to get solved tonight?”
A stifled laugh—Huck.
“Can somebody tell me when we’re going to quit discussing this? I’m planning a trip.” Driver.
“I’m planning to trip balls,” adds Huck. “Just kidding. God, you’re a tough crowd.”
“Guys, I’m telling you, we just need to give it a few more days.” Roman’s voice is calming, but Charlie’s had enough.
“I’m done with waiting. I’ve run a thousand miles over this.”
“We know,” says Huck.
We step through the door into Roman’s office. I’ve never heard a silence this loud in all my life.
Finally, Huck speaks up, punching through the quiet like a martini glass shattering on bare cement.
“Uh, this might be a dumb question, but…who’s that?”
“Hello to you, too.” I raise Everly’s hand up in mine, holding it tightly, as proud as I possibly can. “I’d like all of you to meet my wife.”
6
Everly
I’m looking at four additional sets of Asher’s eyes. At first I think it’s five, and I can’t believe that six people all have the same eyes.
But then the shock wears off, and I can see that they don’t. There are subtle differences that are easier to pick up at close range, and we are at close range, let me tell you. Close enough to see that one of the brothers has gray eyes with the same stunning intensity as Asher’s.
My hand feels slick in his and my heart beats somewhere at the base of my mouth. Any of them could know. Any of them. And if they do, if Asher appearing in Paulson really does have something to do with the neighboring ranch, I don’t know what I’ll do. If he finds out…
I can’t think about that now, when I’m standing in a room full of all his brothers. We’re performing now. Only the pause is so long and heavy I almost moonwalk backward out of the room just to put it out of its misery.
“Yes. I’m Asher’s wife, Everly Carson. Soon-to-be Carson-Bliss.” Brilliant. Even in this fake fantasy scenario, I’ve ended up with a hyphenated name I don’t walk. Now I’ve done it. At least the silence was a casualty of my word vomit.
“Soon to be?” The brother who asks holds an oversized martini glass with a turquoise umbrella balanced against the rim. “Ash? Care to explain?”
“I got married yesterday,” Asher says, and his thumb moves in gentle circles on the back of my hand. I know it’s for the appearances, but it feels so real I could curl up into that feeling and stay there for days. He takes a deep breath. “Everly, I’d like you to meet my brothers. Beau here has the martini glass, as usual. Roman is my oldest brother.” The man behind the desk lifts his hand. “Driver’s in the back corner.”
“Hey,” says the brother named Driver. I want to know the story behind that name.
“Next to Driver is Charlie.”
Charlie gives me a crisp nod, his arms crossed over his chest.
“We’re twins,” pipes up Beau. “In case you couldn’t tell. It’s a very opposites-attract situation.”
“No one here is attracted to you,” says Charlie, glancing at Beau at the last possible moment. Beau takes a sip of his drink and grins, but I get the sense his smile is usually a lot wider. Is it me? It’s probably me.
“And leaning up against the wall there is Huck.”
Huck detaches himself from the wall and stands up next to Roman’s desk. “Nice to meet you, Everly.” He swings his gaze around to Roman, who looks across at Asher like his older and more irritating. “Are you going to tell him off for this or should I?”
Roman waves him off. “Tell him off for what? He’s a grown man in a free country.”
“I call bullshit,” Charlie says.
From the shock wave that goes through the room at his words, I’m guessing that Charlie wouldn’t normally say that kind of thing to a guest.
But…I’m not a guest. Not really. I’ve been thinking of myself as one ever since Asher told me about the resort and club on the plane.
“Charlie…” Beau balances the rim of his glass against his lips. “Don’t be an asshole.”
“Sorry, you’re right. I should be absolutely calm about the fact that I’ve been trying to find you for weeks, Asher, and you’ve been off the radar. And now you show up here married?”
“You’re overreacting, Charlie,” Driver says from the back of the room. “They’re here now. That’s what matters.”
“Yes. They’re here, and we have a problem that needs all of us, not outside interference.”
“Sorry about him,” says Beau, lifting his chin and smiling at me. “He’s been a little uptight since birth, but especially this summer.”
“Did you read any of the messages, Asher?” Charlie runs two hands over hair. “We’ve sent hundreds. Maybe a thousand. Did you read any of them? Do you know what you’re walking into with a complete stranger hanging off your arm?”
“Hey.” The word bursts out of me before I can stop it on a swell of hot indignation that I can’t swallow down. My throat is a tight not. This is not what I was expecting. I was expecting something more along the lines of an early fall vacation with a few stolen beach days, not a bunch of errant rage contained in a small room. “I’m not hanging off his arm. Since when is it illegal to hold your husband’s hand?”
“It’s not,” says Beau helpfully. The heat in my chest splits into two halves. One wants to stay righteously indignant and the other wants to burst out laughing at how stupid it is to be righteously indignant about my fake husband.
“For another,” I barrel on before I double over with a fit of the giggles. “Your brother is back, and he’s fine. Shouldn’t that count for something?”
“It does count for something,” Roman says neutrally. “Of course, we were all very worried, Asher.”
“He’s downplaying it,” says Huck. “He’s been pissed, too. Charlie’s run several ultramarathons up and down the beach for stress relief.” He puts the last two words in air quotes. “Clearly, it hasn’t been working.”
“I read some of the messages,” Asher admits, squeezing my hand. “Not all of them.”
Charlie looks at Roman. “See? He doesn’t give a shit what happens here. He does whatever he pleases, and we’re left to scramble when he doesn’t show up for months on end.”
My face has gone numb with the sheer awkwardness of standing in what is clearly a family problem to be solved. Asher didn’t mention any kind of tension at Bliss on the plane. He only said that his job in Montana was done, and he had to get back, which is irritating, to say the least. I want to pull my hand away from his and demand to know what this is all about, but I can’t. He’s my husband.
“I’m sure that’s not true.” Roman’s voice is even, but his eyes narrow when he looks at Asher. “And I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation of why he’s been out of contact.”
Asher shrugs, lifting my hand along with the movement. “I had other things to do.”
“Other things to do,” Charlie repeats, acid dripping from his voice. “Other things to do, while we pay your salary and try to fix everything without you?”
“Fix everything?” Asher’s jaw is locked so tight I’m surprised he can get his mouth open to talk. “You think you’re the ones who have been fixing things all these years?”
“How would we know?” Charlie laughs, the sound bitter and frustrated and exhausted. “You never tell us where you are. You never tell us where you’re going. Nobody knows what you do, Asher, we just pay for your expense card and even that’s privileged information.”
“He gets privileged information?” asks Beau.
“Do you think I’d be this pissed if I could have tracked him based on his credit card purchases?” Charlie yells. “No. Because Dad wanted him to have a whole secret life. The r
est of us got no such special treatment.”
“If you wanted special treatment, Charles, all you had to do was be less of a prick.” Asher’s squeezing my hand so tightly now that I have to wiggle my fingers to loosen his grip.
“I’ve never asked for special treatment. I only want you to pull your weight in this fucking family. Are you even going to do it now, or did you just bring her here to weasel your way into taking more from us?”
Asher nods. “That’s reasonable. That’s a reasonable thing for you to say. But you know what? If you can’t be civil, there’s no need for me to be here. Let’s go, Everly.”
He leads me out of the office by the hand. “Nice to meet all of you,” I call over my shoulder.
“Are you serious?” he says under his breath.
“We’re supposed to be married. Any woman would want to impress your brothers.”
“My brothers are assholes.”
“Beau seemed nice.”
“Asher.”
He wheels around and I turn my head to see Charlie standing at the other end of the hallway.
Charlie stabs a finger in our direction. “I don’t buy this.”
Asher doesn’t hesitate. He turns to me, takes my face in his hands, and kisses me. Our lips crash together with the kind of raw, desperate passion that I’ve only ever witnessed in the movies—hard and hot and relentless. The air flees my lungs, and I run my hands up the sides of his neck, threading my fingers through his hair. I want more of him. I want all of him. I want—
He breaks the kiss. “Buy that,” he spits at Charlie.
Then we’re gone, my lips bruised and my heart racing.
7
Asher
“We might run into my brother, but I have to get out and move.”
Everly stretches her arms above her head, which has the delicious side effect of making her black tank top lift along with the curves of her breasts. “I’m not afraid of your brothers.”