From Fake to Forever (Newlywed Games 2)

Despite her show of bravado, Meredith’s hands started to shake. Houston sounded mighty nice, and all at once, she longed to escape the politics and threats and manipulation.

Jason escorted his sister out and immediately came back to engulf Meredith in his embrace, murmuring reassuring phrases into her hair. Burying her head in his shoulder, she let his touch wash through her, calming her, warming her. And now he was the composed one. Apparently they were going to tag-team.

She sniffed and choked off a flood of emotionally laden words that she wouldn’t be able to take back.

“You okay?” he said softly and pulled back to caress her cheek. “I’m sorry she upset you. Avery doesn’t pull punches.”

Normally, Meredith didn’t pull punches, either, but Jason had her all messed up and emotional over every little thing. “That’s the reason I’m still here. You can’t take her on by yourself.”

His smile settled her in a way she’d never have expected. “Maybe not, but I can take you on by myself.”

With that, he swept her into his arms and carried her upstairs to his bed, where he undressed her so carefully and reverently, she couldn’t speak. Once she was naked, he palmed the remote and clicked open the curtain. It whirred up to let in the neon night and he stared at her, worshipping her with his gaze.

“Jason, I—”

“Want me to make love to you? That was the plan.”

And then he did exactly that, silently ministering to her pleasure with such exquisite care that genuine tears rolled from her eyes when he finally pushed into her. As before dinner earlier, he didn’t bother with a condom and it took on new significance. Real marriages—ones with no divorce on the horizon—didn’t require condoms.

Was this his way of communicating with her? Of proclaiming his feelings about her and their marriage?

Afterward, he spooned her against him, murmured her name and he fell asleep as she stroked his leg. And that was when she realized she didn’t have a choice. She loved Jason Lynhurst and wanted to be his wife forever. All of the confusion over her feelings and the job offers and everything else blew away.

She loved him. Nothing else mattered. Except for the fact that she still had to figure out how to tell him.

* * *

In only a matter of days, Meredith had taken over Jason’s condo.

It was the only phrase for it. She had almost no stuff. Basically just the clothes she’d packed from home and the new wardrobe he’d given her. But a simple pair of stilettos in his living room felt more invasive than a military coup.

Her perfume lingered in the air, even after she left.

Their relationship had evolved into something he didn’t understand. Somehow. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d been trying to keep to the status quo; Meredith did her own thing. The shoes proved the point and he didn’t like it.

The front door opened, startling him out of his dead stare at her sandals on the floor.

And there she was in the entry of his condo, hair wild and windblown around her shoulders and a bag of groceries in the crook of one elbow. His heart lurched, a live thing attempting to break free. How had he gotten to the point where simply gazing at Meredith caused all these things to happen inside?

“Hey,” she called. “I thought you were going to the office.”

“It’s Saturday,” he reminded her needlessly, since they’d had a conversation about that very fact forty-five minutes ago as she’d sailed out the door to pick up a few things. “And you left your shoes in the living room again.”

This was the kind of stuff he’d imagined going over with Meiling and reaching a civil agreement about how their life would go. The less change, the better. Meredith ignored him when he tried to explain that the vanity wasn’t a catchall for her cosmetics. Actually, that conversation hadn’t even made it past the opening argument because she’d dropped her towel with a provocative arch of her eyebrow.

“So?”

Meredith swished into the black granite and stainless-steel kitchen that he’d have sworn was masculine two weeks ago. With his wife in it, the sharp angles softened and the hard glass took on a feminine sheen he’d never noticed before. It was like everything else in the condo; Meredith changed whatever she touched, looked at, breathed on.

Including him. He couldn’t keep letting that happen or he’d wake up one day and realize he’d turned into his father overnight. “Someone might trip over them.”

She shot him a look over her shoulder as she put some kind of wrapped meat in the refrigerator. “Like the elves that come in during the night?”

He bit back a smile. He didn’t want to laugh. This was serious.