by Anne Harper
Brady was in the kitchen, sucking down a bottle of water. The heat index was ninety-eight degrees, but the humidity was becoming heavier by the minute. All the walking to and from Sloane’s place had drenched him thoroughly with sweat. The shower had been refreshing but did nothing to help his need to hydrate, especially after the coffee. He was pretty sure he could suck down the entire bay right now if given the chance.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” he said after he came up for air. “We’ll have lunch, smile, take a few pics, and then get out of there when we’re done. After that? Just repeat until Sloane goes back home. Easy peasy.”
Dixon shook his head. “I’m not talking about this fake-relationship bull hockey. I’m talking about going to the hoity-toity garden lunch thing when you know damn well that Felicity is going to be there.” He jabbed the chip in Brady’s direction. “You might be fake dating Sloane, but Felicity is real engaged to Marcus. You eating little sandwiches and snails and drinking champagne with them isn’t going to change that.”
Brady had known he was going to get flak from his cousin about the arrangement he’d made with Sloane, but him being grumpy over Felicity’s presence hadn’t crossed his mind. Then again, Dixon had never been a big fan when it came to Felicity. Not when Brady had finally had the courage to ask her out when she first came into the bar years ago and not when she’d left him at that same bar three years later.
“Escargot,” Brady said, side-stepping most of the concern. “That’s what the snail dish is called. And I don’t think that’s what they’re going to serve at lunch.”
Dixon rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Point is, the situation ain’t changing.” He crunched into his chip but kept talking. “You don’t have anything to gain from this other than a reason to turn into mopey, heartbroken Brady. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know if I can handle that again.”
It was Brady’s turn to roll his eyes. “I wasn’t that bad.”
They both knew it was a lie.
Felicity had blindsided him with their breakup, and he’d spent a little too much time trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong. They’d been happy, he thought. They laughed and had sex and brought each other presents every now and again. Sure, they disagreed on a few things. Neither one was a fan of the other’s profession—why would someone want to sell their soul to the corporate world and travel for a marketing company that seemed to praise stuck-up appearances more than hard work?—but that had never bothered Brady enough to make a big fuss over it.
It was only after Felicity had ended things that Brady realized that, for her, it had been a much bigger deal. She couldn’t stand being with a bartender at a local, small-time bar just as much as he couldn’t stand being anything else. She had wanted growth, but all he heard was money and power.
After he’d finally put that together? Well, he’d become a grouch.
“Even Santana started avoiding you at work. And that woman loves being in our business. Which, by the way, this whole shenanigan thing you’re doing is going to blow her mind. Fake relationship with some strange woman? She’s going to eat it up. Wait, you’re going to tell her, right?”
Brady wavered a moment.
He’d told Dixon about the fake dating—but not the real identity of Guy—for the simple fact that Dixon was his person. As mushy as that was, Dixon wasn’t just his cousin. He was, and had always been, Brady’s best friend since they knew what that meant. Not only that, but they also lived together. Brady could lie to him, sure, but it just made tactical sense not to try. At least not about the charade.
It was either that or run the chance of Dixon calling him and Sloane out in front of the entire bar.
As for Santana? It also probably wouldn’t hurt to tell the only other close friend he had. Since she had started working at the bar, they’d become somewhat of a trio. Plus, she was just smarter than the two of them, if he was being honest. She could probably help out in a pinch.
Then again. Santana was a fan of, as she put it, hot goss.
“I shouldn’t have even told you,” Brady admitted, still undecided. “Last time I shared a secret with you, I got grounded for a month.”
The tortilla chip flew through the air. It skidded across the breakfast bar in front of him.
“Hey! I don’t know how many times I gotta tell you this, but Mom knew someone took the car out. It was either you or me, bro, and I chose me. That was an isolated incident.”
Brady picked up the chip and threw it back.
“You could have blamed it on Lucy,” Brady pointed out again. “But no. You sang like a canary!”
“No way in hell was I going after Lucy. This was before our growth spurts, remember? She might be my little sister, but the girl had stilts for legs even then. She would have squashed us.”
Brady tried to hold his grouch face a little longer but couldn’t help but laugh at that. Lucy lived in Washington, DC, with her Marine boyfriend…who she was still taller than. Aside from her height advantage in life, she also had a streak of fire in her. She could cuss you under the table while drinking you there at the same time. The side effect of being raised around a bar her entire life, no doubt.
“Fine. I’ll tell Santana,” Brady said after he finished off his water. “But no one else, okay? Not even your dad. The fewer people who know we’re faking it, the better.”
“All right,” Dixon consented. “But just remember, if you’re going to pull this off, you need to focus on Sloane and not your ex during this wackadoodle lunch. That means pay attention to her. You know, arm around her shoulder. Tell some jokes, laugh at hers. Pull out her chair.”
Brady snorted. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me how to flirt?”
“I’m telling you that you’re voluntarily walking into a very awkward situation, so you at least better make it count.” Dixon went back to his chips but tacked on one more question. “Does Sloane even know about you and Felicity?”
“Everyone in Arbor Bay does. The dating pool is only so deep around here.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Brady had a feeling Sloane had no idea. He pictured her face going cherry red as he added on the little tidbit of info while rubbing elbows in the famed Robertson garden. He didn’t know a lot about the woman, but he had picked up how easily flustered she seemed to get.
It was cute.
Dixon must have sensed Brady’s hesitation without turning around. He chuckled. “Dude, this is all going to go so south.”
Brady scooped up his keys and dropped a punch to Dixon’s shoulder as he moved past the couch and to the apartment’s front door.
“Hey, if I can survive that time we did open-mic night with Stanley talking about his cat for an hour straight, I think I can survive something as simple as a lunch. Ex or no ex.”
Dixon kept on chuckling.
“Nothing is ever simple when it comes to women!”
With that, Brady agreed.
There was another car in the driveway when Brady pulled up to Sloane’s, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. He took a moment to contemplate laying on the horn but decided it wasn’t very boyfriend-like. Then again, he really didn’t want to deal with whoever was at the house now. He hadn’t spelled it out for Dixon, but he was actually anxious to get to the estate.
It had been almost a year since he’d seen Felicity in person. She worked for a marketing company out of Birmingham and often bounced around the state for them. The chances of running into her in Arbor Bay had been slim. Though Brady had kept a lookout all the same.
He’d never admit it to Dixon, but he’d spent way too much time trying to figure out what he would say after seeing her again.
How’s it going? Oh, me? You know, just doing the same ol’ same ol’. Still at the bar, wasting my potential, like you said. But who needs potential when you have money, huh?
It h
ad never been an impressive conversation, but it had always gotten beneath his skin. Resentment was like an itch, it turned out. So was disbelief at the fact that her words back then still managed to make him grumpy if he thought about them too much. Now, though, he was going to have to scrap his badly planned greeting. Never in a million years would he have thought their reunion would be surrounded by Robertsons and hand in hand with the internet’s newest sensation.
Now Brady was going to just play it by ear.
Which he couldn’t actually start doing until he was there.
Brady glanced at the clock’s readout on the dash. If they didn’t leave soon, they’d be late. Something he was sure Carol would talk about at length.
Brady’s hand hovered over the horn, seriously contemplating being rude if it sped things along, when the front door opened and Sloane burst out. The moment she locked eyes with him, she made a beeline for the truck. He didn’t even have time to open his door before she was sliding in.
“The devil chasing you?” He looked back at the house.
Sloane huffed, grabbed her seat belt, and ran it across her chest. The pale blue dress she was wearing fit against her curves nicely. Not that he was looking at her curves. Or her breasts. Or her lips.
Brady cleared his throat and started the engine.
“Not the devil,” Sloane said when she was situated. “Just a nosy brother who only digs in deeper when he knows I’m lying.”
“Lying? You didn’t tell him about our fake-dating arrangement?” She shook her head. “He doesn’t know about Marcus being Guy, either?”
“That’s a big heck no. I wasn’t just talking to talk when I said you were the only one who knows that secret.”
Brady feigned feeling honored. He touched his chest with one hand and pulled away from the house with the other.
“Wow, Sloanie, I’m touched.”
“No, you’re a bartender. A good one, who keeps emotional women hydrated with too many of Cassidy’s specialty drinks.”
“I’m still going to take it as a compliment. It’s nice to know my bartending superpowers are so efficient.”
Sloane’s mood looked nowhere near humored. Not that he’d seen a side of her that was anywhere close to what he considered carefree. It was like her attention was always split between what was happening now and a continuous loop of worries about what might happen next. Even as they drove away from the neighborhood, Brady could see her look back at the house.
“But you did tell your brother about us dating?”
“He got an email from his middle school ex-girlfriend about it.”
“Middle school?”
“Yeah. She lives in California now and is out of touch with Arbor Bay gossip. Apparently she thought he might dish to her, since they have ‘history.’”
“Wow, that’s a stretch.”
“And an annoyance. I was hoping to clear out of the house before Callum came home for lunch, but he caught me. Asked one point two billion questions about you, about us. I spent the last ten minutes trying to avoid answering any of them.”
Sloane was genuinely bothered by lying to her brother. Brady could hear it in her voice.
“Why not just tell him the truth? Or at least about our arrangement? Are you two not close?”
Sloane let out a sigh that Brady instantly empathized with. He’d heard himself make that same sound when things weren’t going well at the bar. And during the dark times—as Dixon had once called them—while he was still moping around about Felicity. A feeling of helplessness given a few seconds of breath.
“We’re very close. It’s just that, well, while I hate lying to Callum with all my being, he hates lying more. But if I asked him to do it, to lie for me? He would, without a doubt. So, to save him from that, I’d rather skip over that part and have him just be upset with me for now.” This time, he could see her turn toward him out of his periphery. “Though all of this lying, by any of us, is going to be pointless if we can’t get our story straight.”
“Our story?”
“Exactly! We don’t have one! We know nothing about each other, so how are we going to make a believable story about ‘us’?”
Brady took a turn that led them right to Main Street. He could see that the communal parking lot across from Town Hall was already filled with people heading into the café or to the Basket Case restaurant for lunch. In two weeks, the entire street would be crawling with locals, out-of-towners, and parade floats ranging from total crap to top-dollar designs. Cassidy’s Place hadn’t had a float in the parade in ten years. Before that, it hadn’t been a pretty sight. The Knox men were good at a lot of things. They were shit at papier-mâché.
Brady gave the customary lifted-hand wave to a few of the pedestrians who looked up as they moved across the sidewalk. Sloane paid them absolutely no mind. Her dark eyes were burrowing deeper and deeper into the side of his face.
It was unnerving.
“Hey, I know some things about you.”
Her scoff said she didn’t believe him.
“Like what? That my name is Sloane De Carlo and I make poor life choices?”
“Well, yeah. Those two, and I know that you are a lightweight when it comes to fruity drinks, you live in Nashville but are here visiting your brother—the same brother whose name is Callum and who hates to lie—and you don’t really seem to be a fan of Carol, despite having some intense feelings for her twin.”
Sloane groaned. “That’s it. We’re doomed.”
Brady laughed. “Hey, let’s just keep it simple, and we should be fine. Carol will only ask so many questions, and half of those I can joke my way out of. It’s a skill we bartenders hone—getting people to talk to themselves while we stand there looking pretty.” He sent a wink Sloane’s way. Then he realized there were some things not even his jokes could sidestep. “Or, wait. Did you ever post about the first time you met Guy? If so, give me a rundown.”
“I didn’t, thank goodness. The first time I mentioned him at all, I didn’t say anything about how we met. I didn’t really say much other than how I felt. That and that he was a friend.”
Brady made a mental note to read that post when he got another break. In fact, he needed to sit down and at least go through the most popular posts from The Girl Who Said Nothing. He had no doubt Carol had at least done that much, especially given all the attention Sloane was getting.
Attention was a zero-sum game for the Robertson woman. Any attention on someone else was attention not on her. Which meant she’d either have to outshine that other person or learn everything there was to know so she could dismantle them.
Honestly, Brady still didn’t think Sloane stood a chance.
“Okay, so let’s just say we met outside of school at the café. Started talking, became friends, and you caught some intense feelings and kept it to yourself. Then last year, when you showed up at Cassidy’s, we reconnected as friends, but it wasn’t until the blog went viral that you told me how you felt. So we’ve been doing romantic-style things in secret for a week.”
Brady could almost feel the stress radiating from the seat next to him. Yet Sloane didn’t try to change what he said. She actually backed it up.
“And since this is so new—the romantic-style relationship—we don’t know everything about each other.” She interrupted herself with a gasp. Since they were now driving past woods instead of businesses and houses, Brady got ready to slam on the brakes to avoid whatever animal might be lurking on the side of the road, eager to jump in front of the truck.
“What?!”
“Plot hole: What if they ask or talk about something I wrote in my blog and you don’t know it? Especially the Guy-related posts?”
Brady put his foot back onto the gas pedal and rolled his eyes.
“Tell them the truth. I didn’t have time to read it. Plus, why would I read your blog now whe
n I’m literally with you?”
Sloane quieted. He glanced over. In profile, her lips looked even more inviting. There was a sheen to them, a slightly red one that reminded him of watermelon on a hot day. Or maybe strawberries. He wondered if she tasted differently today. If the gloss changed how his body would react to pressing against her.
Sloane tucked her bottom lip into her mouth again, in thought. She looked worried.
“Don’t overthink it,” he said after he took a moment to focus. “In fact, if I squeeze your hand twice, that’s the code to remind you to just go with the flow. If things get way too intense with them asking about the past and I can’t shake the convo, then let’s just redirect their attention to something happening now.”
“A distraction.”
He nodded. “Exactly. Something that will get them off our backs for a bit. The Sailors and Mermaids Festival would probably be our best bet. Carol and her mom are a part of that beautification committee that’s heading more than half the events. With it being so close, asking about even one of the events would probably get her flexing her socialite muscles.”
Sloane’s dark hair, down and loose, shifted over her shoulders as she nodded. Once again, Brady’s mind wandered in an instant.
How soft would it feel around his fingers?
“Or we could talk about Marcus’s engagement to Felicity,” she said. “I’m sure Carol would love to deep dive into throwing the first Robertson wedding in years. The white lace and dove-filled horror.”
It was good advice, but it didn’t seem to sit right with either of them. Brady wasn’t about to voice that, though.
The truth was that he didn’t want Felicity back. That much he knew.
But he did want something from her.
An apology?
Her admitting that she made a mistake?
Closure?
He wasn’t sure, but that itch was there.
He also wasn’t sure what Sloane wanted with Marcus.
Everyone was freaking out because she hadn’t told him how she felt, but did she still actually feel that way now? Was her saying she didn’t have the hots for him just another lie?