Best Fake Fiance (Loveless Brothers 2)

“A quickie before your mom gets home,” I say. “How’d we go from you are the sun to that?”

“Maybe a quickie,” he corrects me, his smile lighting up his eyes. “Depending on traffic.”

“How could I forget the most erotic part?”

“Beats me,” he says, shrugging. “But we should hurry up if we want to make it.”

He kisses me again: brief, thorough, hungry. He takes my hand and we descend the rest of the stairs.

“What happened to your phone?” he asks as we walk slowly through the courthouse, since I’m a little iffy in these heels.

“Why do you ask it like that?” I say, my voice totally neutral.

“Did you lose it?” he asks. “Or drop it in the toilet? Or did you saw it in half or something?”

I give him a quick sideways glance. He’s laughing.

“It got stolen,” I say.

“From where?” he asks.

“You’re supposed to say that’s terrible, what a pain in the ass, I’m so sorry,” I correct him.

“Charlie, where’d your phone get stolen from?” he asks again.

There are times I wish he didn’t know me so well.

“The cereal aisle at the grocery store because I left it on the shelf for six hours,” I admit.

Daniel just starts laughing.We get back to his house with twenty minutes to spare.

They’re twenty minutes well-spent.Chapter FortyCharlieDaniel turns his Subaru onto a gravel road, though road is a generous term. It’s more like two gravel ruts pointing into the forest and then disappearing behind trees.

“Now you’re definitely not trying to find a McDonald’s,” I say.

He just grins, not taking his eyes off the road.

It’s Friday, two and a half weeks after his court hearing, and this afternoon he told me to pack whatever I needed for a weekend away and be ready by six, because Eli and Violet volunteered to take Rusty all weekend.

I didn’t need to be told twice, though I’d imagined more of a… location. You know, a nice little bed and breakfast, a hotel, even a motel.

Frankly, I don’t care as long as it’s got a bed and the sheets are clean.

You know what? I don’t even need a bed. I’ll take any flat surface where pine needles aren’t jabbing me in the ass.

“You’ll see,” he says, carefully rounding a bend in the road, the car jostling.

“Glamping?” I guess, peering between the trees. Since it’s summer, the sun still isn’t down, but the light is slowly fading. Regardless, I can’t see anything besides brown trunks and the bright, nearly day-glo green of summertime Virginia woodland.

“What’s glamping?” he asks.

“Glamor camping,” I say.

“Okay,” he says after a moment, clearly waiting for more explanation. Guess I was wrong about glamping.

“You’re technically in a tent, I think, but it’s a permanent tent, with a floor and a bed and stuff. And heating. And air conditioning?” I say, trying to remember the details of something I read once.

“So glamping is just a flimsy cabin with no windows,” Daniel says. “Unless the tent has windows.”

“Some probably do,” I say as he goes around another bend in the road. “I don’t know, I’m not a glamping expert. I think there’s usually also kombucha. It’s that kind of thing.”

“I tried kombucha once,” he says, reflectively. “Some lady kept calling the brewery and insisting that we should start making it to sell, but honestly, it just tasted like I ruined some perfectly good iced tea. Maybe I was doing it wrong.”

“No, kombucha’s kind of gross,” I agree. “And it’s got that big weird fungus — is that where we’re going?”

Daniel doesn’t answer, just grins as he pulls his car into a clearing next to a cabin and parks.

“Hopefully it’s better than glamping,” he says.

It’s a log cabin perched above a creek in the middle of a small clearing. I hadn’t realized we were going uphill, but clearly we were, because even the parking spot has an incredible view of the unspoiled valley below, the mountains beyond, blue and purple and green. I feel like I can see straight to West Virginia, or Tennessee, or Kentucky or whichever state I’m facing right now since the geography way down here gets a little confusing.

“How’d you find this place?” I ask as we get out of the car, still staring around.

“I know a guy who knows a guy who rents it out,” Daniel says, pulling out his phone. “Okay, he says the key is under the ceramic frog with the bowtie…”

I peek through the window in the front door while he finds the key. There’s a curtain in front of it, so it’s hard to see, but I’m fairly sure there’s a big stone fireplace, a high vaulted ceiling, and a light fixture that’s not even made from deer antlers.

“Did you want to actually go inside, or just peek through the window all night?” Daniel teases from behind me, and I move. He unlocks the door, then pushes it open so I can go in first.