It didn’t feel right to her because that’s not the way she lived and had never been what she valued. But she couldn’t help but feel cherished by the things he did without thinking. It made her want to cook him dinner—every night.
That was exactly why she said something the perfect wife or the perfect girlfriend wouldn’t say. “I’m going to order Postmates.”
“Sounds perfect.” He looked up at her, not knowing that she’d lived a whole lifetime with him in a few moments.
* * *
• • •
MATT LOOKED OVER THE dog’s prone, farting body at Bridget. Her face was lit only by the glow of the television. And she was starkly beautiful that way even though he couldn’t trace all of her freckles with his gaze.
She must have felt him looking because she glanced at him and rolled her eyes. “What?”
“I was just wondering what kind of dog you would get for yourself.” Sorry excuse, but it was something he actually wanted to know. If things worked out with them, they’d be sharing this dog.
After thinking for a long moment, she said, “I’d like one as lazy as Gus who doesn’t fart as much.”
“I think the farting comes along with the lazy.”
She smiled slightly, and it felt as though he’d won something. “You may have a point.”
“And he sure didn’t feel very lazy during our earlier interlude . . .”
Then she turned away from the TV and covered the pup’s considerably large ears. “You’re talking about my nephew, and his feelings are very sensitive.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t consensual,” Matt said. His gaze dipped down to where her T-shirt had gaped open and he licked his bottom lip. He was such a lech when it came to her. “I know how he felt. I’ve been wanting to do that to you all day.”
“Who knew that home goods were so arousing?” she asked. Her voice hitched on the word “arousing,” as though she was thinking about doing it with him again. “You’re hot. You’re rich. You’re good at it. You’d think you’d be more blasé about it by now. Why are you so horny for me?”
“Because you’re my wife.” And he didn’t even want to think about fucking another woman. Funny how that worked when he fell for a girl. He wasn’t quite done lying to himself—maybe he could fall for her without her ruining him. But doubts about that were starting to creep in.
“In name only.” She looked at him under her eyelashes. “Tonight’s not on the schedule.”
He shrugged. “I just think we’ll be more believable at the wedding if we have the sex glow of newlyweds who are fucking like bunnies.”
“You’re really grasping at straws, Counselor.”
“Is it working?” He waggled his brows so she would know that he wasn’t pressed about this. Truth was that he wanted Bridget more than anything, but he’d only go there if the feeling was mutual. He wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t attracted to him, but he was going to listen to her words.
“I’m not . . .”
“You’re everything, Bridget. Sexy, funny, smart—and your heart’s so good that I can’t stand it.”
“I never felt like I was good enough.” She sounded so lost that he wanted to leave and kill that motherfucker Chris. Tear him limb from limb. But not as much as he wanted to make it clear to this woman what she meant to him. Even if he didn’t have the words yet.
Bridget Nolan was dazzling. He couldn’t stop looking at her, thinking about her, needing just a crumb of her approval. But it was starting to feel impossible to make her see that. After the day they’d had, he would have thought that she would relax with her ground rules and stop trying to push him away with the façade she’d put on as soon as they’d gotten married.
He’d never had to work this hard for anything, and he couldn’t stand the antsy feeling under his skin that he wouldn’t win her.
“What about you?”
She finally looked away. “What about me?”
He wished he could put into words how he felt about her in a way that wouldn’t scare her off. But she’d offered him a deal. Friendship with benefits in exchange for a fake marriage for a month. That was it. And he’d seen—time and time again—how she never sweetened a deal after she offered it. Not at work. Not in life.
Still, he had to ask. “Don’t you want—more?”
“More than what?” She looked guileless, but she wasn’t fooling him.
She was the most cussedly stubborn woman he’d ever met—aside from his own mother.
He wasn’t getting any more from her, and it seemed pointless to stay. Yeah, he was being petty and immature, but this was about more than the sex. He wanted her to let him in, but she wouldn’t do that as long as she was still up in her head about not being enough for her ex-douche.
Defeated, he stood up and looked for his shoes and the garment bag that held his tuxedo. “I’d better go.”
He was most definitely imagining the wounded look on her face when she looked up at him. “But the show’s not over.”
“I have Netflix at home.” But he didn’t have Bridget, who definitely didn’t wince when he said that. That would be nothing but wishful thinking.
“Do you need me to walk you out?”
He gave her a weak smile. “Nah, wouldn’t want to disturb my new paramour. I think I tired him out.”
“Okay.” She bit her lip. “Bye.”
He didn’t respond. Just waved right before the door shut.
* * *
• • •
ONE MINUTE HE’S TRYING to seduce me, and then he’s walking out the door with barely a word,” Bridget said to Sasha, who was sitting in the adjacent pedicure chair the next afternoon.
She’d never gotten to do a lot of girly stuff with her mom, and she’d been kind of a loner in school. As a teen, she’d spent a lot more time reading a book on the bleachers at Jack’s Little League games than she had doing things like getting her nails done.
And then she’d had Chris.
Having girlfriends she could talk about boys with was a relatively new experience, and she was grateful that Hannah and Sasha had welcomed her into their coven. They hadn’t balked that she’d been the kind of girl who didn’t have a lot of women friends until relatively recently, even though Bridget was slightly shamed by it.
Bridget wondered if she’d been reticent to let other women get too close because the pain of having her mother drop out of her life had scarred her there. So she’d clung to the men in her life and kept herself aloof for years. After all, she had Chris—he really had been her everything.
“Wait a second. Why would he have to seduce you? You’re married to him.” Sasha really didn’t keep her voice low enough, and now the whole salon knew she wasn’t fucking her husband. “Why on earth not engage in some state-encouraged nookie at every opportunity?”
Because she didn’t want to lose her heart. She had to keep it on lockdown. She couldn’t let Matt get close because he would inevitably see all the pieces she was missing.
“I can’t believe you called it nookie.” The only option was to deflect.
“Don’t do that.” Sasha pointed over at Hannah, who was being led to the waxing room because her hoo-ha was starting to look like a cottage a cursed hag might emerge from. “She does that all the time.”
Bridget tried to look innocent. “Do what?”
“Deflecting instead of telling me why you’re not fucking your husband.”
“Because it’s a weird situation.” Bridget looked away lest Sasha see any hint of whimsy on her face. “I mean, we’re married and might not last. I don’t want to get too attached. I think I married him just to make Chris feel like a douche.”
Bridget looked at the nail techs, who were very professionally ignoring their conversation, for which she would probably tip forty percent.
“Chris already feels l
ike a douche.”
“So much of a douche he had to act like a petulant child in Vegas.”
“That’s because he saw how Matt was looking at you, and he was threatened.”
“Matt looks at me like he wants to do it.”
“True story.” Sasha smiled dreamily. “It’s vaguely worshipful, and I would jump on that train . . . again . . . if I were you.”
“It’s not that—”
“Was he bad in bed?”
“No!” If anything, he was almost too good. “I just don’t want to get too attached. So, I sort of put it on a schedule.”
“Is this because he used to work for you?”
She’d been friends with Sasha for long enough to tell her the real reason that she couldn’t let herself fall in love with Matt. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to. The other night, she’d been close to breaking before he stood up and left.
“You know, I only had sex with him in the first place to prove a point.” She shook her head. “I wanted to prove to myself that Chris was wrong, that someone like Matt would want me.”
Sasha wrinkled her brow and was silent for a few moments. Bridget thought she might let the subject drop until she said, “And he does want you?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Bridget then confronted the infrequent phenomenon of searching for words. “It’s just—he never says he wants more than a fling. And this all feels so—dangerous.”
“Danger can be good.” Strange words coming from Sasha, who carried mace that looked like a lipstick in her bag. “What makes you think that he wants more?”
“Well, we were watching Gus last night.”
“That is so adorable.” Sasha clapped her hands together.
“And we were flirting.”
“All very promising.” She made a motion for Bridget to continue.
“We’d spent the whole day together, and it was so much fun. It felt really—intimate. And I was thinking about how it would feel like we were really together if we started making out on my couch. He was looking at me like that was going to happen.” She paused. “And then he just got up and left.” Bridget was still confused about it. She’d been this close to jumping into his lap and kissing him. Sasha just nodded.
“What?”
“I think you broke him.”
Bridget almost laughed. He wasn’t the one who would break if they weren’t very careful. “I don’t think so.”
“Think about it.” Sasha grabbed her arm. “This is a man that I am very familiar with. Not this specific man, but this type of guy, who has everything—including sex—handed to him on a silver platter.”
“Sex on a silver platter sounds very unsafe. Someone could slide right off.”
Sasha ignored her and continued. “But you put him on a schedule. And you might be telling me that it’s because you don’t want to get attached, but he doesn’t know that. He probably thinks that you resent having sex with him, but then you’re flirting with him. And it’s driving him insane. Like, his brain is actually broken.”
“He doesn’t think that I resent it.” At least he shouldn’t. She didn’t resent it. “He’s not that simple.”
Seemingly assured that she had the situation handled, Sasha went back to scrolling through Twitter on her phone. “Trust me, they’re all that simple.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BRIDGET HADN’T FELT GUILTY about lying to Chris about her marriage because that was just about being petty. But for some reason, she felt guilty about lying to Matt’s parents. And that guilt was compounded by the fact that she was still up for a fellowship from their family foundation.
A week after Matt had rushed out of her apartment, saving her from jumping his bones and falling halfway into love with him, she was going to have dinner with his parents. She was going to have to lie to their faces.
Not about being enamored with their son. She was hanging on by her fingernails to infatuated instead of butt-ass-crazy in love. It wouldn’t be putting on a show to pretend to have all the newlywed feels.
But pretending that this thing between them was forever might be a problem. If she did that, she’d want to believe it. If she believed it, she would never heal from the aftermath.
That made her stop in her tracks on the way up their semicircular driveway. Jesus, she was such a fraud. She didn’t belong here at all, and definitely not under false pretenses. Matt was American royalty, and she was just a girl from the South Side.
Both of them were privileged, to be sure, but they didn’t belong in the same circles.
“Are you sure you want me here?” She tugged on Matt’s arm when he waited patiently for her. Damn, she liked that about him. She’d come to realize that Sasha—as usual—had probably been right about the other night. He was trying to respect the fact that she’d laid out ground rules about them having sex.
But those rules hadn’t kept her heart safe. The only way she could have done that would have been to cut things off. Maybe never take him for that first happy hour. Never take him up on his offer to fly her to Vegas. She never should have kissed him that first night in the hotel room. Never should have gotten drunk-married by an Elvis. And she absolutely never should have come back to Chicago still married to him. They should have gotten a drive-through divorce before heading to the airport.
Still, Matt looked at her as though she’d lost it, squeezed her hand, and said, “Of course I want you here.”
“But is your mom going to hate me?” Bridget had no idea how to be with moms. Chris’s mom had died while they were in college, and she’d been more like an aunt than an in-law before that. Her own mother didn’t like her all that much. And Matt’s mom traveled in the same circles as hers.
Matt laughed. “My mom is going to be fine.” He tugged on her hand, and she let him lead her into the house.
“How do you know that?”
Even though Matt was a step ahead of her, she could see the side of his face crinkle a bit. “Because you’re just alike.”
“Oh great,” Bridget said, imagining his mother as even more terrifying now, given how she’d treated Matt when they’d first met. His mother probably already had a dossier on her and was clicking her fingernails against a table, waiting to tell her that she was trash.
Matt must have sensed her upset, because he turned and said, “You’re both wonderful.”
* * *
• • •
BRIDGET FOLLOWED HIS LEAD and took her shoes off when they entered the house. Sometimes it felt like his parents identified more as rich than Japanese American, but they’d preserved the no-shoes-in-the-house rule from their parents’ homes. And doing it reminded Matt that he was bringing a girl to his parents’ home who felt like more than a fling. He was way more nervous than he’d let on when she’d frozen up before entering the house.
He’d never had to really introduce his mom to a woman before. All the other girls he’d dated seriously hadn’t been girls he would introduce to his mom or they’d been girls he’d grown up around. Rich people really were quasi-incestuous that way.
And if his mom didn’t like her, this whole dinner could be a nightmare. He didn’t want that for Bridget, given her fraught relationship with her own mother. It wasn’t like she’d said anything, but he felt as though his mother freezing her out could be more painful for her than it would be for someone else. His father was easy and admired tough women—that’s why his parents’ marriage worked. And his father would see how Matt felt about Bridget because he was perceptive, and he would immediately accept her.
His mother didn’t just accept things because they were. She changed things through her iron will. And he didn’t have any idea of how his parents would react to this, now that they were past the stage where they could get an annulment. Changing his plans for the summer had been the first time that he’d done anything to really defy their expecta
tions and ambitions for him. They might blame Bridget for that. Or they might see the fact that he was in love with someone emotionally sturdy like Bridget as a sign that he was maturing.
They’d accepted Naomi because she was a Chapin, but he’d never gotten the sense that she was really their favorite person to have around.
So, yeah, he was nervous and almost hypervigilant when they entered the formal living room where his mother served cocktails.
And then he stopped in his tracks. Naomi was here with her parents. He’d thought it was just a family dinner, and he felt ambushed. His hand tightened around Bridget’s.
“What is it?” she asked quietly, looking up at him with concern.
“Naomi.” Bridget’s eyes widened at that one word.
“Well, shit.” Bridget verbalized Matt’s thoughts perfectly, and that gave him a measure of courage. It was nice to feel like he had someone on his team. He’d never felt that way before.
That was when his mother noticed them and approached. He tried to see her as Bridget would. Jane was tiny, about five one, but completely formidable. Her skin was smooth and poreless. The only sign that she was north of thirty-five were the three strands of gray hair in her blunt-cut bangs. When they’d grown in, she’d told him that it was considered a sign of wisdom in Japanese culture. So she’d decided to let them stay.
She didn’t hug Bridget in welcome, but he didn’t expect her to. She tilted her head slightly to the side in welcome, and Bridget extended her hand. His mother didn’t rudely stare at it, which was a good sign. Instead she enveloped Bridget’s hand in both of hers—a power play. “You must be Bridget. Matt has told me all about you.”
Bridget gave a nervous laugh. “All good things, I hope.”
“Well, he married you after knowing you for less than three months, so I would hope he hasn’t discovered the bad things about you yet.”
“Oh, he has,” Bridget said, more mettle in her voice this time. “He just has the good judgment to ignore my bad qualities or use them to his advantage.”
Not That Kind of Guy Page 17