Faking It to Making It

Faith pinched her fiancée on the backside on her way to the kitchen with an empty salad bowl.

Jasmine was washing down the face of a toddler with a baby wipe, calling him back when he tried to leave before he was picture-perfect. Nate found himself wincing in sympathy.

The Mackenzie women were tough, uncompromising. He felt a small, swift kick of pride at the fact, considering where they’d all been twenty years before—the way it might have all turned out so differently if he hadn’t done everything to make sure they felt safe, secure, loved, protected. If he hadn’t given every ounce of his heart and soul, and then a little more, to give them the safety net from which to leap out into the world.

He breathed into the void it had left inside him, the vacuum where empathy and love had resided once upon a time.

“Look what you did.”

Nate turned to find his mother behind him, her eyes taking in the same picture as his. He stood straighter. “I think you’ll find they’re all yours.”

“We’re all ours,” she corrected, leaning her head on his shoulder as she gave him a squeeze. Then she lifted her head to look him in the eye as she said, “I like your girl.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, She’s not mine, but he caught himself in time, offering a small smile before he brought his beer to his mouth for a swig.

“You know what I like most?”

“What’s that?” he asked, pretty sure it wouldn’t be the same thing he liked best.

“She makes you laugh.”

“I laugh plenty.”

She laughed at his frown. “You smile plenty. A mere glint in those eyes of yours and you can get away with anything. But it’s always taken a lot to make you laugh. And today you seem more...relaxed.” She tugged at the open collar of his shirt. “It suits you.” Then, after a long, slow breath in and out, she said, “Have I told you lately how proud I am of you?”

“Half an hour ago.”

“Okay, then.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek before heading into the fray with a tray of cookies.

Leaving Nate with the same sense of ruefulness he always felt when they looked him in the eye and said, Well done, you. As if it was as important to them as it was to him that he’d made something of himself. And just like that he felt a pressure headache building behind his left eye.

It was why he gravitated to women whose appeal was surface-deep. Who wanted him for surface reasons. His money, his touch, his charm. Replenishable resources all.

He glanced across at Saskia. Her motivations for being with him were simpler still, and yet far more complicated than he’d envisaged. Because compared with his usual dates, Saskia was...real.

Reality was scrappy. It was dirty, hard, complicated. It asked everything of a man and then some. His father dying young, leaving him with four women in varying stages of grief to look after, had given him a closer dose of “real” than he ever wanted to encounter again.

And yet here this woman was, real from the top of her wavy hair to the tips of her now bare feet and her short fingernails—a couple bitten to the quick. He looked at her slight figure. The way her right foot rubbed up and down the back of her left calf as if it might bring forth inspiration as she stared at the scrap of paper in her hand. She was first off the mark in Faith’s game of high-speed half-time charades.

Saskia looked up at him then. Two little lines showed above her brow, her bottom lip was disappearing and reappearing from between her teeth. There was entreaty in her gaze.

He tilted his head in question. She flicked the paper in her hand. Two weeks they’d known one another, yet there was a shorthand there. An understanding that he couldn’t remember having with another woman.

Maybe it was because there was no pressure. No demands.

Maybe it was because they both knew it was a few weeks, a wedding. And out.

But even while he felt his twin sisters’ eyes swing to him at the same time, even while he knew they were smart enough to know there was something different about this one, Nate put down his drink and went to her.

And he had to admit, as Saskia threw herself into the game with gusto and a complete lack of success, that those twenty odd minutes were some of the most fun he could remember having in that house in a really long time.

* * *

After lunch Nate found Saskia looking out of the French windows in the library, watching Jasmine’s husband and kids playing chase in the backyard. She was leaning over the back of a couch, her backside pointing nicely his way.

He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets.

“Come here often?” he asked.

She came to with a start, as if from a million miles away, before a smile stretched across her face—which had his eyes zeroing in on her mouth, making him wonder when they could get the hell out of there.