Stud in the Stacks

by Pippa Grant

  She throws her arms around me and smushes a big, fat smacker on my lips. I should be the responsible one here, keep it short, but she feels so fucking good in my arms, and she tastes like honey and sunshine, and I’ve missed her.

  Still, I’m at work, so I break the kiss long before I truly want to. “Hey, beautiful.”

  Gertie clears her throat. Though Mom worked at a different branch until she retired, she and Gert have long been friends. And they’re both pissed at me for getting in trouble—again—with Dorky.

  Possibly more so this time, since I’ve never put my job on the line before. Not like this.

  Nana, on the other hand, keeps making me waffles for breakfast.

  “Parker, meet Gertie.” I introduce them, Parker goes pink and apologizes for groping me in public, and Lila just watches it all.

  Parker, I notice, manages to avoid looking at Lila entirely, as though she’s not actually there.

  “Lila was just telling me about your date,” Gertie says.

  Pointedly.

  “The bachelor auction date,” I make sure to clarify. For all of them. “That was a very generous donation to literacy. Thank you. Again.”

  “That was before we got engaged,” Parker adds.

  My heart drops. My stomach drops. Even my toes want to drop, but they’re already as low as they can possibly go.

  Fake dating is one thing. Pretending to be Parker’s fiancé for one night at her reunion is also entirely different. But fake engagement here, in my library, leads to—

  “Engaged?” Gertie’s brows are defying gravity. “Does your mother know?”

  And this Saturday is officially over.

  Lila’s frowning at Parker. “Weren’t you—”

  “Parker and I go way back,” I interject, because Lila was there when Parker asked me to play her fake fiancée, and her question can go nowhere good. “She used to babysit me. We reconnected after the auction. When you’ve dated all the wrong girls, you know when it’s finally right. Don’t tell my mom. We were going to surprise her this weekend.”

  Gertie’s going to be on the phone with my mother within the next thirty seconds.

  Fuck.

  I’ve read this book too. I know how this one ends as well.

  But hell if I can make myself cock a finger at either of them and pull out the just kidding card.

  Not here.

  Not in front of Parker.

  Parker, who had a miserable high school experience, so many bad dates her brothers now routinely stalk anyone she shows a remote bit of interest in, and who’s now going a little red in the cheeks and starting to breathe too shallow, as if she, too, has realized a fake engagement is a death spiral of evil.

  “See you Monday,” I tell Gertie. I nod to Lila. “Enjoy the library.”

  I steer Parker out the door, but we haven’t gone four steps in the bright afternoon sunshine before I hear my name.

  Lila’s following us.

  “Oh, god, oh, god, oh, god,” Parker whispers. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  She’s utterly adorable with her eyes wide and panicked, clutching her light cardigan as though she’s clutching her pearls. Talk to her about a social media strategy, about monetizing a blog, about catchy titles and loglines and the psychology of marketing, and she’s brilliant.

  But this side of her? The not-entirely-put-together, uncertain, socially clumsy part of her?

  It’s growing on me. She doesn’t always say the right thing, she couldn’t pick a paranormal romance out of a lineup, and I haven’t even gotten past third base with her, but she’s real.

  “Congratulations,” Lila says smoothly when she reaches us. I’m much better at playing hero than I am at reading the subtle jabs women take at each other, but if she’s exuding any of those secret signals women use to launch psychological warfare missiles, I can’t see them. “Can I buy you two a late lunch?”

  “What for?” Parker asks.

  I squeeze her hand. “Long week,” I say to Lila. “We were looking forward to some private time.”

  Lila smiles at both of us, and again, I look for the mocking that women seem so sensitive to, but I can’t find it. “Fair enough. I’ll check in next week and see if we can’t find a time to celebrate.”

  Before Parker can ask What for again—legit question, but she’s wound so tight there’s a real risk she won’t stop at What for—I drop her hand and put an arm around her shoulders to pull her away. “We appreciate the offer, but—”

  “No buts.” Lila smiles brightly. “I insist. Congratulations again. Looking forward to chatting soon.”

  She waves merrily and turns to head down the cross-street, red hair blazing in the summer evening.

  “Why does she have to be so pretty?” Parker grumbles.

  That’s it.

  We’re standing next to my favorite lunch deli, and I twist so she’s against the wall and can’t see anyone but me.

  “Parker Parker Elliott, you’re fucking gorgeous.”

  “I don’t even want to marry you—no offense—but I don’t want her to have you either because she smiles and angels sing and her hair’s so perfect and I’m still this big dork under all the vice presi—mmph!”

  That’s right.

  Sometimes the only answer is to kiss a woman silly.

  20

  Parker

  One minute, I’m having a minor freak-out about a horny, green-eyed monster taking over my mind and turning Knox into my fiancé and the next, he’s swallowing the rest of my ramblings, his lips covering mine and his hands tangling in my hair. I squeak out a surprised whimper even as my arms instinctively wrap around his middle.

  While the kiss surprised me, he’s not attacking my mouth. He’s going slow and easy, tasting and savoring and leisurely exploring. Horns honk around us. The hard bulge against my belly gets harder. He twirls my hair around my fingers, and the tug on my scalp ignites nerve endings I’d forgotten I have, sending primal lust shooting from my roots, down my spine, around my ass and up into my forgotten land.

  This isn’t a normal, hungry, I-want-to-sex-you-up kiss.

  No, this is a lover’s kiss. Attentive. Thorough. He suckles my lower lip. Nips it gently, and licks the sting away, and repeats the caress on my top lip.

  Heat flares in my abdomen, and that achy need throbs between my thighs. He tastes like jungle heat and mint, and the low, satisfied hum in the back of his throat turns my nipples into needy little hussies.

  Why, again, are we going back to his place? Where his Nana will probably be watching our every move?

  His tongue touches mine, and lights out, game over, everybody wins. My pussy clenches, I grip his solid ass, and I dive into kissing him back like he’s the cheese on my taco.

  And that’s the last thought—rational or irrational—that I can manage—thank god, because cheese on my taco?

  What is wrong—holy sex on a stick, did his tongue just—and his lips—and ohmygod—and he’s not even touching me there—and where did he learn—how can I—just ohmygod again.

  His fingers brush the bare skin he’s exposed just above my jeans. Unicorns carrying tacos dance over our heads. His tongue curls around mine. My ovaries spontaneously combust into magical glittery fireworks. There’s a steel rod poking my belly, and I’m not sure if I’m still wearing pants or if they’ve completely evaporated off me.

  I just know I want more.

  That this is how a man is supposed to kiss a woman. I can feel it from my roots to my toenails and everywhere between.

  And along with the desperate desire to wrap my legs around his hips and rub myself all over that glorious thick swell of his package, there’s something else.

  Power.

  This kissing thing? Yeah, I can do this kissing thing. I can kiss like a fucking goddess. I just needed the right partner.

  Something jostles us, and he breaks the kiss.

  I whimper.

  And I slowly remember we’re still standing on a street on
the Lower East Side, the world going on around us. I have one leg hooked behind his knee, and my lips are tingling and swollen as though they’ve been stung by a bee. A very horny, pleasant bee.

  He pulls me against his chest, his heart drumming at triple-time in my ear.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. Even though I’m not really. But saddling a guy with a fake fiancée and then freaking out on him isn’t exactly nice.

  “Don’t make me kiss you again.”

  My chacha squeezes and my nipples activate all over again.

  He kisses my forehead once again, then pulls away to put a hand to the small of my back. Tendrils of excitement spiral out from the point of contact. “Let’s go have a drink.”

  21

  Knox

  I’ve read ninety-two fake fiancée books, which I can say with absolute certainty because I consulted my Goodreads shelves to make sure.

  Favorite sexy fake fiancée read? Lauren Blakely’s Big Rock.

  Favorite fake fiancée heroine? Kimmie in Jamie Farrell’s Sugared.

  Sweetest? Rachel Harris’s Seven Day Fiancé.

  The one most likely to help me survive my own fake engagement?

  Hopefully all of them.

  This wasn’t as hard when it was just for the sake of Parker’s reunion. One night, we can handle. Full-time for the next week?

  I know the pitfalls—we could get caught, I could lose my job, we might accidentally fall in love, etc., etc.—which means I’m giving Parker the Knox Moretti Crash Course in Fake Relationships as we huddle in a back booth at a noisy pizza joint six blocks from the library.

  It’s not sopapillas, but it has the best dark corners for plotting how we’re going to pull this off without any danger of being caught by Nana or anyone else. Because for a fling, we’re perfect. Long-term, though, we’d have issues. I’ve discovered she’s a workaholic, staying at the office until eight or later most nights unless she has band practice, and I know for a fact she was working before she came to the library today. On a Saturday. When corporate offices are closed.

  I live with my grandmother to make ends meet, am probably going to lose my job, and I’m fairly certain Parker doesn’t want to be anyone’s sugar mama.

  And then there’s the kid thing.

  Unfortunately, I’m less interested in pulling off this fake fiancé thing and more interested in how I’m going to pull off Parker’s tank top, which keeps distracting me and making me hope lots and lots of sex is also on the agenda over the next week until we go our separate ways.

  “Simple is better?” she prompts. She has a smear of pizza sauce on her chin and she’s shaking fake grated cheese all over her slice of pepperoni and mushroom, which is causing some jiggling action in her chest, and I have to give myself—and my dick—the stern reminder that we’re not an ogling Neanderthal.

  “Yes.” I force myself to concentrate on her eyes. “Simple. As close to the truth as we can get.”

  “So I fell for your loincloth.” She flashes a cheeky grin, and if I didn’t already know nearly everyone in my life will most likely suspect I’m trying to pull off a classic romance trope, I might consider grinning back. My mother’s going to read me the riot act when Parker and I have our staged split over her refusal to agree with me that Pride and Prejudice is the greatest romance novel ever written, which is the best I can come up with so far, since I’m not interested in getting into the real weeds on why we won’t work.

  I shake my head. “I already told Gertie we’ve known each other for years. And your friends will almost definitely know something’s up.”

  “Do you know what people love?”

  “A good public humiliation?”

  “A good mystery. If we don’t say when we officially hooked up, there’ll be a dozen hypotheses raging all over the internet within four hours, and people will forget which is true and which is just conjecture.”

  “And at least six of them will be some variation of it isn’t real.”

  Cynicism isn’t usually my thing, but this fiancé act?

  I’m telling you, I’ve read the book.

  She reaches under the table and strokes a hand from my knee up my thigh, my pocket rocket fires its engines, and a satisfied smirk crosses her lips. “I think we can be very convincing.”

  I tug at my collar. “Is this an act, or can we go find a storage closet?”

  “I’m practicing being Jane in public.”

  The thought of her in a leopard-print thong and matching bra arouses me to the point of pain in my nuts. But the weirdest part? I almost don’t care if we don’t find a storage closet. Because watching her come out of her shell is better than any book I’ve read in the last ten years, that’s for damn sure.

  “You know what the best part of being fake engaged to me is?” Parker says.

  “If you’re going to say something about fake sex, I’m leaving.”

  “I don’t read romance novels, so nobody can say I just want you for your books.”

  Fucking sweet torture. The words physically sear my chest. “You know I’m going to change that about you.

  “Go ahead and try, lover boy.”

  Ninety-two fake fiancée novels, and not one of them has prepared me for her.

  “You try that book I sent you yet?” Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me. One of my classic favorites.

  She shakes her head. “No time.”

  “You don’t commute?”

  “Motion sick.”

  Fuck. “I’ll get you the audiobook.”

  Her phone dings. She licks her fingers—she’s fucking killing me—and pulls it out of her pocket, a frown creasing her brow.

  “Work?”

  “Your mother. She just invited me to your niece’s birthday party tomorrow.”

  “My mother has your number.”

  “Well, yeah. How else do you think she booked us for her party?”

  Now my phone buzzes in my pocket. I don’t grab it, because I have a pretty good idea what it’s going to say. When were you going to tell me you got ENGAGED?

  “My sister-in-law does birthday parties like Macy’s does Thanksgiving Day parades,” I tell Parker. This is complete and total desperation to convince her not to come. To be busy. To not make us fake being engaged in front of my entire family and every single family from Abigail’s preschool class, plus probably most of my brother’s neighborhood. Fuck, even my college roommate will be there with his kids.

  She can’t come. The fewer public appearances, the better. “You can’t see anything through the balloons, there are six times as many people as there should be crammed into a small space, and after Steph spends all week making tacos, she’s pretty much coming undone at the hinges.”

  “Tacos?” she says brightly.

  Shit. Fatal mistake. This is what her boobs are doing to me.

  “Did you miss the balloon-and-too-many-people part?”

  Her eyes narrow. “Do I embarrass you?”

  Shit. Shit shit shit. “No. I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

  “You mean like you are right now?”

  That sly little devil.

  She just played me.

  “You should come,” I say, taking a page from her playbook. “If only for the unicorn poop.”

  “I will. For the tacos. And I’ll make sure you get a good picture of you and an adorable child and unicorn poop for your Facebook and Snapchat pages. More ultimate anti-dick moves, and even your new readers are going to fall a little more in love with you.”

  “We need to talk about how we’re going to break up. The Pride and Prejudice thing might be too much.”

  “Whatever it is, it’ll be all my fault, of course.” She shakes more cheese on her pizza, then folds it and points at me with it. “You need to look like a saint.”

  I open my mouth to argue, and she sticks her pizza in it.

  “End of discussion,” she declares. “And you’re going to do everything I tell you with your blog, now, because if you lose your
job, you’re going to need another source of income stat. You should’ve had affiliate accounts set up ages ago, and on your regular readership numbers alone, you could be pulling in advertising revenue. We should talk about a YouTube channel as well. The camera has to love you.”

  I’m not fucking turning my blog into a job. Maybe that’s what we’ll break up over. My father put himself into an early grave working himself to death. Hell if I’ll do it myself. Or let any woman I marry overwork herself either.

  I bite off a piece of her pizza, powdered cheese and all, and swallow it down. “If we’re going to pull this off,” I say, leaning into her, taking in her widening eyes, the catch in her breath, and the way her eyes dip to my lips, because this is better than contemplating our break-up, “I’m going to need to know every single intimate detail about you.”

  “Every one?”

  “Every. Last. One.”

  “Do you want a list?” She licks her lips, questions shimmering in those pretty eyes, and all my objections to this fake fiancé business are forgotten. “Or do you need to do hands-on research?”

  I want to touch her. I want to lick her. I want to claim her. I’m so hard I couldn’t walk if I wanted to. “Hands-on. The sooner the better.”

  “What are you doing at eleven?”

  I huff out a laugh. “What are you doing now?”

  “I have a gig tonight, which is why I can’t stay past five.”

  “I have something better.”

  Her pupils dilate and she licks her lips. “While I’m beginning to believe you, if I miss this show, all three of my friends and probably my brothers and Sia’s brothers and Chase will all come hunt us down, and they’ll make that little incident with Rhett the other night seem like a happy frolic in the park.”

  “Where is it?” I ask.

  Now it’s her turn for the no way are you coming to my gig panic. “Jersey.”

  And now it’s my turn to stroke a hand up her leg. “You know what happens to sexy guitarists who lie to their fake fiancés?”