The Fine Art of Faking It

by Lucy Score

  He turned and she could see his quick grin in the moonlight. “Polo.”

  Eden ignored the turmoil in her head and went instead with the lightness in her heart. She stepped into his open arms and placed a soft kiss on his mouth. “Should I ask what sent you on a midnight walkabout through the vines?” she asked.

  Davis slung an arm around her shoulders. They’d both made affectionate moves without an audience. Eden decided not to worry about what that did or didn’t mean.

  “Just clearing my head,” he told her. “We’ll be pruning soon. Earlier than last year. The cold came faster.”

  They walked slowly down the row as he talked. It was peaceful being surrounded by the promise of another harvest, Eden thought.

  “What does pruning do? How long does it take?” she asked, enjoying the cadence of his voice. It settled her thoughts. Stirred her blood.

  He explained the process, the purpose, with Chewy trotting faithfully at their heels.

  “What’s in the bag?” Davis asked.

  “Ah! I almost forgot.” She plucked the bottle from the bag and held it aloft.

  “Your whiskey,” Davis said, holding the bottle to the moonlight.

  She shook her head. “Our whiskey. I figured after tonight I owed you at least half.”

  “We’re partners.” He said it as if he meant it. As if their little revenge plot relationship were real. “What are we celebrating?” he asked.

  She looked around them in the dark, at the dormant vines, the frost tipped ground, and sighed. “New leaves?”

  “I like that,” he said, his voice low and dangerous.

  The shiver that worked its way up her spine had nothing to do with the cold.

  “Can I show you something?” he asked.

  Davis’s house was small, charming, and smelled of stale smoke. He shut the front door behind them, and her gaze went immediately to the stretch of plywood that blocked off the fire damage from the rest of his home.

  “Davis, this is awful. I’m so sorry,” she breathed.

  “Hmm? Oh, that.” He glanced in the direction of the mess formerly known as his kitchen and scratched the back of his head. He nudged the thermostat out of the fifties.

  “It makes me angry all over again,” she told him. “Maybe this was a mistake? Maybe we should have gone to the police?”

  He shook his head, took her hand. “No, you were right. What good would come from having half the town arrested for what was probably an accident?”

  “An accident caused by a team of dumbasses.”

  “No argument there,” Davis said wryly, tugging her toward the stairs.

  “You’re not taking me to bed, are you?” she asked, stalling on the first step.

  He looked at her over his shoulder. “Scared you can’t resist me?”

  She scoffed. “Excuse me! Who resisted you for one and a half decades? That’s gold medaling in resistance.”

  Davis opened a door off of the second-floor landing, his cocky expression daring her to enter. Eden breezed past him into the tiny bedroom. It had the musty smell of an empty house mixed with the scents of smoke and soot. She stopped when she saw the easel.

  “Well, well. Unexplored depths,” she murmured. “You always were good in art class. May I?”

  At his nod, she handed him the bottle and flipped through the canvases stacked against the wall and was pleasantly surprised by landscapes, still life, and even the occasional abstract. Bold colors, beautiful light. “These are great, Davis. Really great.”

  He took a swig and crossed his arms, watching her. “It’s a hobby.”

  “I didn’t think you had time for hobbies.” She paused on a painting of rolling grass of emerald green, her inn in the distance. Fanciful and vibrant. “I want this one by the way. If you say I can’t buy it, I’ll smuggle it out under my shirt.”

  “It’s yours.”

  Her heart leapt. She’d hang it in her quarters, in the bedroom. Davis studied his feet. “My father would prefer if I didn’t have time for hobbies.”

  “Doesn’t he care about a well-rounded life?” Eden asked, holding out her hand for the bottle.

  His laugh was short. “Definitely not. If there’s any room for anything besides business in your life, you’re not working hard enough.”

  “Said the man who worked himself into two heart attacks.” She studied the bottle and took a drink.

  He pointed at her and winked. “Bingo.”

  “How’s he going to handle what we’re doing?” she asked. Eden wasn’t sure which part of “what they were doing” she was referring to. Banding together for revenge. Having sex. Being… friendly.

  Davis gave a shrug that had the teenage rebel inside her swooning. She passed the bottle back to him.

  “Cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.”

  “Even if they don’t come home until we’re broken up,” Eden said, pulling the painting of the inn out of the stack and then flipping through the rest, “you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “Sometimes I’m tired of explaining… and asking for permission,” he sighed. He leaned against the door frame, an exhaustion that had nothing to do with being tired slumping his shoulders.

  “He doesn’t trust you to make decisions?” Eden asked.

  “Ferguson Gates doesn’t trust anyone but himself to do the right thing. And if it’s something different from the way he’s been operating for the past thirty-plus years, it’s automatically wrong.”

  “So, you work around him.”

  His fingers worried the label on the whiskey. “And maybe it makes me feel like ever so slightly less of a man.”

  Davis’s words, his raw honesty hung in the room between them. She rose and crossed to him. Her fingers circling his on the bottle.

  “Maybe it’s time to stop asking for permission.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “For what it’s worth, Davis. Ferguson should be thrilled to have you at the helm. No one cares more about the winery and this town than you do.” It was the truth and he deserved to hear it.

  He studied her, his brown eyes looking into hers, searching. “I want to draw you,” he decided.

  “Ohmygod, yes!” Eden said, surprising him. She laughed at his shock. “Um, hello. Have you seen Titanic? ‘Draw me like one of your French girls’? It’s like the sexiest scene of the entire movie.”

  Eden pulled the bottle from his grasp and flopped dramatically on the tiny loveseat he’d crammed against the wall by the room’s closet. “Make sure you get my good side.”

  “You are a piece of work,” Davis said, pulling a sketch pad off the shelf and arranging his charcoal pencils.

  “No, no, Davis. I’m a piece of art.”

  38

  Loose-wristed, Davis let the charcoal move over the paper in quick, sure lines. “This is just a quickie,” he told her.

  Eden turned her head to look at him, a feline smile on her face. “I like quickies.”

  He was always half-hard around her. It was impossible not to be. Everything about Eden Moody was alluring. The lines and curves of her frame, the wicked way she used her mouth, the never-ending energy she put into life. Not to mention the fact that she was as obsessed with work as he was. He loved that she was driven, ambitious. That she lived and breathed a passion to build and grow something.

  “Mind if I run something business-related by you?” he asked, watching the way her face changed as she studied the whiskey she’d rested on the flat of her stomach.

  “Mmm, you know it gets me hot when you talk business,” Eden teased.

  He grinned. “Thinking about offering weekly art classes at the winery. Open it up to the community—and tourists. Serve wine, learn to paint or draw.”

  She lolled her head to the side, eyebrows arched. “That’s brilliant.”

  “I could teach some of the beginner classes,” he continued, capturing the curve of her lips on paper. “Bring in other artists here and there.”

  �
�And everyone would drink your wine, learn more about your winery. You’d be deepening the relationship.”

  “Exactly,” he said, shading lightly under the graceful line of her neck and jaw. “I want Blue Moon to feel connected to the winery and vice versa. Right now we’re sort of separate. We don’t do anything beyond the usual tastings. There’s nothing that draws locals, our people, in.”

  He liked the way she was smiling at him. Fondly, with an underlying desire that he doubted she even realized was there. “What are your other ideas?” she asked.

  “Private tours of the vines, the process. Bringing in a group during harvest to show them how it works. Grape stomping vs. pressing. How we choose the grapes, how we blend them, how we name them.”

  “Again. Smart. You’re building that connection between your customer and your product. Making them feel invested. They’ll come back for the vintage that they helped create.”

  “And maybe they’ll stay at your inn,” Davis mused.

  Her gaze sharpened and he drew the heavy lids, the inky lashes, liking the anything-but-aloof expression.

  “Are you suggesting a partnership?” she asked, sitting up and swigging from the bottle.

  “You’re not running and screaming in the opposite direction,” he observed.

  “What about the breakup?”

  Eden slumped back against the couch cushion. “There’s nothing that says we have to go back to hating each other after we break up.”

  He felt a single tendril of something—was that hope?—curling into his gut and taking root.

  “Are you saying we could stay… friendly?”

  She was looking everywhere but directly at him. Eden gave a surly, one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t know. Just thinking out loud.”

  Davis held out his hand for the bottle.

  She made a move to hand it over and then dangled it just out of reach. “Can I see?”

  “I’m not done.”

  Eden rose and closed the scant distance between them to peer over the top of the sketchbook. He wanted her to like it. Wanted her to see the way he saw her. All feline grace and sultry energy.

  “Mmm.” She studied the stylized sketch with an impassive face.

  “Mmm good or mmm terrible?” he asked.

  She took the sketchbook from his hand, placed it and the whiskey on the floor, and straddled him on the chair.

  “I was right,” she said, lips brushing his.

  “About what?” He was already out of breath, and she’d barely touched him. Such was the power of a turned-on Eden Moody.

  “Just as hot as it was in the movie.”

  “You’ll have to take your clothes off next time,” he suggested, hands sliding up her sides.

  “Oh, I can take them off this time.”

  He laughed softly. “You’re a hell of a girl, Eden.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself, Davis.”

  When she kissed him, he felt a slow, lingering hunger burn its way into his gut. “I thought we weren’t going to do this again,” he reminded her, lips moving over hers possessively.

  “I can’t seem to stop myself,” she whispered against his mouth. “Not sure I want to.”

  He liked the sound of that and rewarded her by gripping her hips and dragging her across his already aching cock.

  The noise she made was purely carnal, and Davis counted his lucky stars that some idiot thought to stink bomb his house, putting him in this exact position.

  She tasted like whiskey and sin. Better than any wine he’d sampled. She grinded against him, both of them desperate for the friction that would take them to the top. Davis slipped his hands under the hem of her sweater finding her skin, soft and warm to the touch.

  “God, I love it when you touch me,” she said, biting his lower lip.

  Davis’s vision started to gray. This is what was missing in his life. This raw need and Eden willing to fill it again and again.

  He coasted his palms up and over her breasts reveling in the sharp rasp of her breath. He memorized the texture of satin skin and lacy bra. Her busy fingers were plucking at the buttons of his shirt with a charge of desperation. Matching her, he shoved her sweater up and over her head, swiping the straps of her bra down her shoulders.

  “You are so fucking sexy, Eden,” he breathed.

  “Gah” was the only response she could manage, and Davis loved it. He buried his face in her breasts as she boosted herself up to release him from his pants. Together, they wrestled their clothes into submission, freeing enough flesh for contact. Once freed, they no longer had all the time in the world. It suddenly became a matter of life and death to be inside her.

  Reading his mind, Eden hovered over him, notching the head of his cock against her sex.

  “Condom, condom, condom,” he chanted, sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  “Shit. All I brought was whiskey.”

  “I don’t have any in the house.” Davis imagined his teenage self shooting him two middle fingers before curling into the fetal position and weeping.

  Eden stared into his eyes. “I’m on birth control,” she said, teasing her lower lip between her teeth. “Diligently taken at the same time every day.” Since she found out Eva got knocked up.

  “What are you saying?”

  “You don’t have any festering diseases, do you?”

  He was so busy staring at her cherry red lips that he could only shake his head.

  “Neither do I.”

  “So, we…” His fingers flexed on the sexy ass curves of her hips, demanding that he yank her down onto his shaft.

  “If you’re okay with it.”

  His control was slipping through his fingers like grains of sand.

  “I’m okay if you’re okay.”

  She lowered herself down, taking the first inch of him. Heaven. Perfection. Ecstasy. He meant to let her set the pace. Meant to let her have control. But that small taste of what awaited him was too much.

  Gripping her hips, he pulled her down, thrusting up.

  Her head fell back, mouth open on a soundless cry.

  There was no relief. Now the need was fiercer, cutting at him like jagged glass.

  Go slow, he cautioned himself. But his body wasn’t interested in listening. Davis shifted his grip to hold Eden by the hips and ass. He lifted her and drove home again. This time she rocked against him, and they both were lost.

  Nothing could compare to the wet glove of Eden clutching his cock as she panted his name in his ear. In this moment, he wanted to personally write thank you letters to every member of the Beautification Committee. Because without them, he wouldn’t be slamming into Eden’s body like his life depended on it.

  Her breasts heaved and bounced with each powerful thrust. He couldn’t take the temptation, letting his tongue snake out of his mouth to lick her.

  “Ohmygod,” Eden chanted. Her fingers bit into his shoulder with a shock of pain.

  The finish line, what they were both recklessly racing toward, shimmered on the horizon.

  Davis shifted in the chair, changing the angle, and Eden choked out her appreciation. “Why do you feel so damn good?” she hissed. “Why?”

  He hoped she was being rhetorical because there was no way he could answer her. There was something here. People who didn’t like each other didn’t get to heights like this. Their connection was deeper. He didn’t just want her. That much was clear.

  “Davis?”

  He could feel her quickening around him, knew she was close. The slick slide of her around his shaft was systematically driving him insane.

  The groan that tore its way free from his throat sounded inhuman, primal. His balls tightened, and he tensed feeling the tingle at the base of his spine. He was taking her with him, forcing her to the edge so they could fall together.

  She was chanting incomprehensible things, her eyes squeezed shut. He latched on to one perfect pink nipple and drove into her. Harder. Faster. That sweet nipple pebbled in his mouth against the ro
ughness of his tongue. She rode out his thrusts until he felt her clench around him. There was no surviving that. He poured himself into her as she came.

  “God, yes! Davis!”

  He released her nipple with a pop and took her mouth as they rode out their releases in sync wrapped around each other. Partners.

  Mom: Just saw The Monthly Moon’s article on your cousin setting the fire at the Gates house. Why didn’t you tell us it wasn’t you?

  Eden: I did! You didn’t believe me!

  Mom: Well, whose fault is that?

  Eden: Yours!

  Mom: I guess I never gave Moon Beam enough credit for family loyalty. I owe her an apology. You’re retroactively grounded.

  Eden: head desk GIF

  39

  Thanksgiving followed suit with the rest of November in Blue Moon—fifteen degrees colder than it should have been with a mess of snow flurries that flirted with freezing rain.

  The shit-tastic weather was tempered by the town’s reaction to the special edition of The Monthly Moon. Eden lost count of the number of neighbors who came up to her on the street and lied sweetly to her face, claiming that they never believed she’d set the fire to begin with. But Eden was feeling magnanimous—or maybe that was orgasmic—and graciously accepted their sort-of apologies.

  Moon Beam was enjoying her newfound notoriety as an accidental teenage fire-starter. “It gives me a bad girl edge without the fear of being packed off to the commune,” she’d insisted.

  With the weather and the extra workload of planning HeHa festivities, Eden had considered backing out of the Pierce family invitation. Her fireplace and sweats would have made up for missing out on turkey and homemade gravy, but the Pierces were a tenacious lot.

  On Thanksgiving morning, an inch of snow fell, and Summer and Phoebe had both texted Eden to make sure she and Davis were still coming. To drive the point home, Joey had called her on speakerphone shouting above what sounded like a wrestling match between Jax, their foster son Caleb, and Waffles the family dog and issued the ultimatum that they “better get their asses over to the farm.”