Fake Vow (For Now) (Big Men of Blue Mountain 2)

My dress and bra from yesterday are dry, and I pull them on. Even without underwear, it feels like armor to wear my own clothes. I’ll take what I can get.

In the kitchen, there’s the vague smell of fruit and baking bread. He’s standing at the stove in nothing but jeans. Even after seeing him in all his naked glory, the sight is as distracting as hell.

I shouldn’t be attracted to the man that married me when I was too drunk to remember. But my body is, and reminds me of the exquisite pleasure that he can offer. But that doesn’t matter right now. I have to remember that.

I also know that even though he’s fucking pissed at me, he still wants me, too. Before he left the bedroom he was hard. It’s a little comforting that I won’t be the only one struggling to keep control of myself. My…husband.

I can’t believe that’s real.

I can’t believe I did that.

If and when I actually get married, I hope my husband is as sexy as Asher. If he is, I would be lucky. There’s a sadness in my chest when I think about getting an annulment, and I can’t quite place why. I can’t be married. Marriage means responsibility, and I can’t have that yet. I want the career that I’ve chosen. I want to follow my dreams.

No part of me wants to be a wife now.

“I hope you like oatmeal,” Asher says, pouring some from a pan into a bowl and setting it on the table in the breakfast nook.

“It’s fine.”

He sits in the chair across from me and crosses his arms. “Talk.”

I take a bite of the oatmeal and dare to meet his eyes. “I’m a student. Journalism. I had a scholarship, but it’s disappearing because the school is reorganizing and there’s less interest. I’m not exactly sure why, but there’s no more money there. So for my last year, so I asked my dad for money.”

“Your dad is Gary Brandt?”

Fire burns my cheeks. “Yeah.”

“Keep going.” He shakes his head.

“You know my dad?”

“Finish first,” he says.

I take another bite of oatmeal to give myself a couple seconds to breathe. “He said he’d give me the money for tuition if I worked for him this summer. There are worse deals, so I agreed.”

Asher doesn’t look angry right now; he’s just listening intently.

“All this summer I’ve been going wherever he tells me and taking pictures. All these places that he thinks are doing things wrong. But he’s…he’s getting frustrated because none of the pictures I take ever really show what he wants them to. Either I don’t take a picture of the right thing, or they’re just not doing what he thinks they are.”

A dark laugh comes from across the table. “Yeah, I kind of thought as much. Rose, your father isn’t a good guy.”

I blush again. He’s not perfect, but I’ve never heard anyone call him a bad person before. Misguided, maybe. Asher didn’t say it with any unkindness. He said it gently. “What did he do?”

“He’s been harassing me and the other owners of Blue Mountain to come over to him and be his client for our insurance. We’re happy with our current insurance, so we keep telling him no. And every time we do, he gets angrier.”

“But…why?” Asher stares at me and I rush to clarify. “I’m not close with him. He left my mom when I was little, and by the time my mom died I was an adult, so I’ve never lived with him. He’s always been distant, but he’s never seemed shady. Not really. I felt kind of weird about what I was doing, but I didn’t think his intentions were bad. And if they are and I’m supposed to be a fucking journalist, I must not be very good if I couldn’t see it.”

“On the contrary. Family fucks with your head. Even family you’re not close to,” Asher says, leaning forward onto the table. “You didn’t have a reason to think he was doing anything shady, but there’s also a reason that we keep telling him no.

“When your dad first came to us, we did our due diligence. He has a history of selling insurance to clients that have had to use it and then have all their claims denied. Not exactly a good sign, so we passed.”

He looks a little uncomfortable having to tell me this. But not sorry.

Asher sighs. “If he’s sending you around to take pictures, he might be trying to falsify insurance fraud.”

“What?” I gasp. “How?”

“By showing that the businesses aren’t holding up the standards they agreed to keep. If you manage to prove it, it can be…lucrative. I hate to say it, but maybe that’s where he was planning on getting the money that he promised you.”

I feel sick. That’s not—that’s not even close to what I thought was happening, but now that he says it, it all seems so fucking obvious. “I’m so sorry, Asher. I didn’t know.”