The Spanish Love Deception

“No. Ew. Yikes, woman. He is a barbarian, a brute. He has no manners. Stop daydreaming of my cousin.” I took a cleansing gulp of water. “Stop, or I’ll be forced to tell you some horror stories from our childhood, and in the process, I’ll probably ruin the male specimen for you.”

My friend’s shoulders fell. “If you must … not that it woul

d help my case anyway. I don’t think I need extra assistance for that.” She paused, sighing sadly. Making me want to reach out again and tell her that her prince would eventually show up. She just needed to stop picking up only the assholes. My relatives included. “But before that, we can actually talk about your horror story.”

Oh. That.

“I already told you everything about it.” My gaze fell to my hands as I played with the label on the bottle. “I gave you a play-by-play recap. From the moment I blurted out to my parents that I was dating a man who doesn’t exist to the moment I somehow made my mom believe his name was Aaron because of a certain blue-eyed jerk who had appeared out of thin air.” I scratched harder, ripping the label completely off the plastic surface. “What else do you want to know?”

“Okay, those are the facts. But what’s on your mind?”

“Right now?” I asked, to which she nodded. “That we should have picked up dessert.”

“Lina …” Rosie placed both arms on the table and leaned on them. “You know what I am asking.” She glanced at me sharply, which, when it came to Rosie, meant patiently but without a smile. Or a smaller than usual one. “What are you going to do about all of this?”

What the hell do I know?

Shrugging, I let my gaze roam around the coworking space, taking in the chipped, old barn tables and the hanging ferns adorning the red brick wall to my left. “Ignore this until my plane touches Spanish ground and I have to explain why my boyfriend is not with me?”

“Sweetie, are you sure you want to do that?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Yes.” Bringing both hands to my temples, I tried to massage away the start of a headache. “I don’t know.”

Rosie seemed to take that in for a long moment. “What if you actually consider him for this?”

My hands dropped from my temples to the wooden surface, and my stomach plunged to my feet. “Consider who?”

I knew exactly who. I just couldn’t believe she was even suggesting it.

She humored me by replying, “Aaron.”

“Oh, Lucifer’s favorite son? I don’t see how I should consider him for anything.”

Watching how Rosie clasped her hands together on the table, as if she were readying herself for a business negotiation, I narrowed my eyes at her.

“I don’t think Aaron is all that bad,” she had the nerve to say.

All I gave her was a very dramatic gasp.

My friend rolled her eyes, not buying my bullshit. “Okay, so he’s … a little dry, and he takes things a little too seriously,” she pointed out, as if using the word little would make him any better. “But he has his good traits.”

“Good traits?” I snorted. “Like what? His stainless steel interior?”

The joke bounced right off. Ugh, that meant serious business.

“Would it be that bad to actually talk to him about what he offered you? Because he was the one who offered himself, by the way.”

Yes, it would. Because I still hadn’t figured out why he had done that in the first place.

“You know what I think of him, Rosie,” I told her with a no-nonsense expression. “You know what happened. What he said.”

My friend sighed. “That was a long time ago, Lina.”

“It was,” I admitted, averting my gaze. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t mean that just because it happened a handful of months ago, it’s now somehow been written off.”

“It happened over a year ago.”

“Twenty months,” I corrected her far too quickly to hide that I had somehow kept count. “That’s closer to two years,” I muttered, looking down at the crumpled paper sheet that had wrapped my lunch.