Garrett shifted in his seat to face her. “I was hoping you had something in mind this time.”
“What? The great Garrett doesn’t already have it all mapped out?”
An impish smile curled his lips up. “It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled a prank. I’m a little rusty, what can I say.”
“Okay. Well, I think the first thing we need to decide is how long this dating charade will last and when we’ll have that gotcha moment.”
“Right. Maybe—what about Valentine’s Day? It’s coming up in a few weeks. That’d give us enough time to be good and dating.”
She blinked. He could not be serious. “You want to pretend break up with me on Valentine’s Day? That’s low, Garrett Hanson. Even for you.”
He shook his head. “Not break up with you, just—Wait.” He sat up, an old familiar glint in his eye that shouted very cunning but oh-so-dangerous idea ahead. “I’ve got it.”
“What do you have, oh-brilliant-one?”
“We break up.”
The man was losing his edge. The old Garrett would have come back with something much more elaborate. “Uh, yeah. That’s what I just said, right?”
“I hadn’t actually thought we’d break up. I figured we would just tell them we were joking. But you’re right. We stage a huge fight on Valentine’s Day, complete with yelling and everything. I’ll even let you slap me if you want. I know you always wanted to do that. Then just as they start to break us apart, we turn around and yell, Gotcha!”
The man had gone and completely lost his mind. “That has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. It’ll never work.”
His offended frown almost made her giggle. “Why not? It’s brilliant.”
“First off, don’t you have to work that night? You know, one of the busiest nights of the year for restaurants? Second, a lot of people are going to be the brunt of this joke, not just Tilly and your mother. Even the pastor thinks we’re well on our way to being an item.”
“You do have a point.” He sat back and rapped his fingers on his leg for a moment, then reached over and patted her on the knee. “I’ve got it. Problem solved.”
Beth looked from his hand, which rested on her knee, sending rockets of heat straight to her heart, then glanced back to him. “Uh, what do you got? I mean. Have. What do you have?” His nearness made her tongue tangled.
“I work on Valentine’s Day, but only in the evening. Matt’s handling lunch that day. So I’ll take you out to a nice lunch and whisper sweet nothings in your ear for all to see. Solidify our relationship, you know? Then the next day, that Saturday, the Emporium just happens to be catering the food at your church for a women’s Valentine’s Day brunch. I think my mom even mentioned that she and a few ladies from her church go every year, too.”
“That’s right. I’m donating some flower arrangements for it, too. Lunch will have to be quick on Valentine’s Day, though. It’s our busiest day of the year, remember, and I’m usually lucky to grab food at all.”
“You just meet me at the Emporium, and I’ll have the food already on the table. Thirty minutes, tops. And on Saturday, I’ll conveniently assign myself to oversee the food, and you’ll be there doing all your flower magic. Mom and Tilly will be there, and I’m sure quite a few others.”
“But we can’t sit there and make a scene during the brunch, Garrett. It’ll ruin the whole thing.”
“Fine. We’ll wait till it’s over. We’ll be helping clean up, and I can order you around or something, and you can be all like, ‘I’m my own woman, you can’t tell me what to do’ and I’ll be like, ‘Submit, woman, or else!’” He alternated high and low pitch voices to mimic his crazy idea.
“And you think people will believe that?”
He leaned back, tossed an arm behind her and squeezed her in a half bear hug. “Aw, sweetums. If there’s one thing I remember about my little Bethy, it’s that she always got an A+ in the drama department. I know you have it in you.”
Catching the silly vibe, she patted a hand on his chest and smiled up at him, playing along, ignoring the bliss that overwhelmed her at being hugged to him, fake or not. “Aw shucks. Thanks, mister. You’re awfully skilled yourself.”
He reached a hand up and brushed a thumb against her cheek. His gaze surreptitiously dipped to her lips. “You know—to make this believable, there may come a point where you’ll have to pretend kiss me.”
His lips caught her eyes, despite her best intentions. Heat soared through her body at the thought. How many times as a love-struck teenager had she laid in bed, dreaming of that very thing?
Suddenly, the room seemed to shrink, and Garrett’s lips lingered dangerously close to hers.
Pretend, Beth. It’s just pretend.
Pushing out of his arms, even though her body screamed to do the opposite, she stood and flashed him her best saucy grin. “In your dreams, Garrett Hanson.” In her dreams actually.
He smiled and crossed a leg over his knee. “Just giving you fair warning is all.”
“Garrett—”
His eyebrows raised in fake innocence. “Yes?”
“Stop it. I’m serious. No kisses. Period.” No fake ones, that was. Her heart wouldn’t be able to handle that, and she was quite sure if they ever did kiss, her secret crush on him would be not-so-secret anymore.
Pushing up from the couch, Garrett took a step toward her, his mouth tipped in a goofy grin. “Why not? Actors pretend kiss all the time on TV.”
All but running across the room to the small writing desk she kept in the corner, Beth opened a small drawer and snatched out a writing tablet and a pencil. Anything to create distance from the man who really needed to stop talking about kissing. “Time to get this all down on paper. Now, we have a plan for the end.” She tapped the pencil to her chin then sat down at the desk and started writing everything they’d talked about, bullet points and all. “We need to figure out some good steps between now and then. You working evenings puts a little wrench in date-night possibilities, but we can go to church together on Sundays and—”
“No.”
Her hand paused halfway through writing the word church. “No what?”
“No to church on Sundays.”
That’s right. He probably went to church with his mom on the other side of town. Beth liked her church, but he couldn’t be the only one compromising. And after this morning, skipping a week didn’t sound half bad. “How about we alternate weeks? Sandwich Baptist one week, and Sandwich Christian the next. Deal?”
“No deal. I’m not really—I don’t go to church anymore. Today was an exception.”
“You don’t go—” Beth turned in her chair and looked up to where he stood behind her, hands stuffed in his pockets, the goofy grin from moments ago replaced by a face of stone. “Why not?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?”
Tread lightly, Beth. Garrett had always been a Christian—one of those rare guys who stayed—mostly—out of trouble. He’d lead a student Bible study in high school. Talked about virginity until marriage even when the word made her face turn all shades of red—and sometimes just to make her face turn red.
She always thought he’d make a great youth pastor or something.
What had gone wrong?
She looked back at her list. “Well, I just—” Words caught in her throat as her hand trembled. Her Garrett had turned from God? She wouldn’t have been more shocked if Billy Graham himself had announced he was an atheist or something.
“Listen, it isn’t a big deal. I’m still a Christian. Just not a fan of the whole church scene anymore. Jesus can meet me on the sofa in my living room alone just as well as He can in a pew at church. I don’t work on Sundays though, so we can rock some Sunday afternoon dates in public.”
Beth let out the air in her lungs she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Well, at least he hadn’t completely turned his back on God. That was something.
All the sermons about the importance of “fe
llowship with other believers” danced in her head. She opened her mouth to quote a few scriptures, but the words stalled in her throat as if God himself had grabbed her tongue.
Wait.
She took a breath.
Wait. Okay, so now wasn’t the time God had appointed for a go-to-church lecture from her.
But the idiot still needed to come to church with her. “I’m sure there’s a fascinating story behind that, one I would love to hear at some point, but here’s the thing. I’m kinda an avid church-goer. If I miss church without letting anyone know, someone is immediately at my house checking on me, worried that I’ve died in the middle of the night. No one is going to believe I’m dating a guy who doesn’t go to church. And if they did believe it, I’m pretty sure my mother would be on my doorstep insisting on hosting an intervention for my wayward soul. So if this thing’s going to work, you have to go to church somewhere for the next few weeks, and it might as well be with me.”
The pout on his face would have been comical had they been talking about anything less serious. “Fine.”
The man looked like a two-year-old being told he could no longer go outside and play. Biting the side of her cheek to keep from laughing, she turned back to her notebook and scribbled a few more notes about Sundays. “Good. So we have that down. What about after church?”
“I promised my mom I’d have you over for lunch next Sunday. She demanded you come over today, but I told her we had other plans, and it’d have to be next week. Wanted to give us time to get our story straight.”
“Okay then. Next week at your place it is.”
“And I guess to be fair, we’ll have to go to your parents’ the week after.”
Dragging her parents into this mess would be a disaster. In fact, she was praying distance would keep both them and Jeff out of the whole shebang. “Yeah, we dodged a bullet there. As you know, Jeff lives in California now. We’re lucky to see him once a year. Dad retired two years ago, and he and Mom bought a condo on the Gulf down in Destin. They rent it out over the summer and live there in the winter to get away from all the snow.”
“Smart parents.”
“Exactly. The best part about it is that I have dibs on one week during the summer. A few of us girls go down there every year.”
“Sounds fun.”
“Okay, what else do we need for this plan?” She grabbed her phone and clicked on the calendar app. “We have three Sundays before Valentine’s Day.”
“We can wing it with the other two, just make sure everyone knows we’re spending it together. Should be easy enough.”
Easy and this charade were not words that meshed well together. “Okay. We’ll be spontaneous.”
He sat on the arm of the couch next to her and drummed his fingers on his knee. “I’ll have to do more flowers I guess. But that’s kind of difficult considering—”
“I have a better idea.” She wrote it down and put a giant star beside it, then moved the paper so he could see it.
Garrett laughed, a nice low rumble in his chest that made her pulse flutter yet again. “Chocolate. Nice. I think I can handle that.”
“None of that dark stuff, mind you. And you get extra points for added caramel.”
He reached over and flicked her ponytail. “Consider it done.”
Disappointment shattered the gooey feeling of moments before. It’s just pretend, Beth. Little things like playing with her ponytail confirmed that he saw her simply as a little sister with whom he’d get in trouble.
She glanced down at the paper in front of her.
Well, they were succeeding in that. Tilly was going to be so mad, not to mention Garrett’s mom.
She ripped out the sheet she’d made notes on and folded it in half. Standing up, she dangled the paper at him. “Okay, so here is the completed plan. Do you want to keep it, or shall I?”
“Neither. We burn it, remember?”
“I thought we waited until after it’s over to destroy it.”
“No ma’am. We make the plan, commit it to memory, then burn it. It’s tradition. Leave no evidence behind.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Except this time, we’re outing ourselves, remember?”
He shook his head, pushed up from the couch, and started toward the kitchen. “Doesn’t matter. Now, where are your matches?”
She followed behind, stopping by the couch to slip her shoes back on. “Second drawer down, right of the fridge.”
Opening what was effectively a junk drawer, he whistled. “Now here is a sign of the Beth I used to know.”
“Shut up.”
“Remember your locker at school? I always worried everything would come crashing down on you one day, and I’d have to dive into that mess and save you from textbook-drowning.”
She propped her hands on her hips. “It wasn’t that bad.”
He plucked a box of matches out from beneath a stash of unused, still wrapped McDonald’s straws and closed the drawer. “When I got here, I half expected to walk into your house and be met with a girly version of hoarders, but I see you’ve mostly grown out of that.”
Hopefully he didn’t open any closets before he left. “Let’s just get this over with, okay?”
He motioned her to follow as he let himself out the sliding back door that led to her small backyard then over to her small, square charcoal grill. Lifting the lid, he removed the rack and laid the paper on the bottom. “You ready for this?”
She stood next to him, hugging her body with her arms, trying not to shiver. “Yes, now hurry up so we can go back inside.”
Garrett flicked the match, an orange glow erupting, and tossed it on the grill.
As he tugged her against him in a hug, he smiled. “Let the prank begin.”
As Beth stood in his brotherly embrace and watched smoke rise from the blackened sheet of paper, she could only hope that her heart wouldn’t go up in flames in the process.
Nine
He’d survived his second week of church attendance.
Granted, a week later than he’d plan, but Beth had been down with a wicked cold last weekend. They’d barely even talked, much less pretend dated, except for a few late-night Facebook messaging marathons.
They’d both changed their statuses on Facebook to In a Relationship, though. That had raised more than a few eyebrows and certainly done more than any real dating ever could do to advance their prank.
Garrett shook yet another out-stretched hand of a well-meaning church-goer and offered the required smile and nod as he and Beth made their way from the sanctuary.
Grudgingly, he had to admit it hadn’t been as bad as he’d anticipated. Her church had that coming home vibe he’d always remembered when he was younger—that feeling he’d never felt at the churches he’d attended in Chicago.
Especially not at Dayna’s church.
A bunch of blood-sucking leeches, the whole lot of them.
Beth squeezed his hand, and a spike of pleasure shot up his arm, dismissing the bad memories.
It was getting harder and harder to remind himself their relationship was just a prank.
And he had to admit, having Beth by his side improved his outlook on church. Her soft voice singing the mixture of hymns and contemporary songs. Her hand raised during a song, her face tipped up and eyes closed as she worshiped. It wasn’t some showy look-at-how-spiritual-I-am display. It was as if she were all alone, worshiping God.
It had been years since he’d felt the Spirit of God like Beth obviously did. He enjoyed his Sunday mornings of reading his Bible and prayer, but if he were honest with himself, he rushed through or skipped it altogether in favor of a football game on TV more times than not.
Pushing aside the thoughts as they entered the foyer, he spotted his boss coming toward him, and his very pregnant wife waddling beside. He thought she’d been in the last few months of her pregnancy when he started at the Emporium in December given the size of her belly, but then he’d found out about the twins. Now, almost
two months later, the poor woman looked utterly miserable. “Garrett, glad I caught you. Maddie and I are having a little get together at our house tonight and wanted to invite you and Beth.”
Beth frowned. “Are you sure you’re up for company, Maddie?”
The petite woman with a belly—now the size of an overinflated beach ball—nodded her head. “Yup. We thought we’d have one last hurrah before the babies come. Adam says I’ll have to be on bed rest soon if the babies don’t decide to come before. But I figured it’ll be a while before we’re able to have company after that, so I asked Reuben to give me this one last night of fun.”
Reuben laughed put his arm around his wife. “More like demanded.”
She shrugged. “Same thing. Adam and Tilly, and hopefully a few others, are coming. You both in?”
Beth looked up at him with eyebrows raised. “You okay with that?”
He wrinkled his face, pretending to think about it. “I don’t know. We’re already going to Mom’s after church. Having to spend the whole day with you? I’m not sure I can handle that much Beth in one day.”
She laughed and punched him in the arm. “Hey now. I’m the one having to put up with you.”
Reuben shushed them both. “Okay, lovebirds. Enough. I’ll take that as a yes and see you at five. Maddie and I’ll have pizza and drinks, just bring a snack or dessert to share.”
Garrett shook Reuben’s hand. “Sounds good. Thanks for the invite.”
“No problem. See you tonight.”
Beth turned to him and whispered under her breath. “We were just invited to a party as a couple, Garrett. They believe it.”
He winked at her and grabbed her hand, escorting her out into the parking lot. “Good. We’re officially in phase two then.”
She linked her fingers with his and pressed close to his side. “I didn’t realize this had official phases. That wasn’t in the plan. What was phase one?”
“Making everyone think we’re dating.”
At his SUV, he opened the passenger door for her. She stopped and turned toward him. “I thought that was the whole point of the prank in the first place. What’s phase two then?”
A Side of Faith, Hope and Love: The Sandwich Romance Novella Collection Page 24