“Or you can just ride with me, and I’ll bring you back to get your car later,” he told her as they walked to his truck. What the hell? It wasn’t like he was breaking any pack rules. He was just taking his fake girlfriend to dinner. Check that. Fake fiancée.
Yeah, they needed to talk about that.
Faye gave him a shy smile that seized his heart. “That’ll work too. I live close to here.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
She glanced over at him, and he had the feeling she was weighing the risk of telling a practical stranger where she lived. But in the end, she decided to trust him. “I live at the RV park just up the road toward town.”
Adam stopped as they reached the truck. “That’s kinda out in the middle of nowhere.” He didn’t know that he liked the idea of her living out there by herself. “Do you live alone?”
This time, she just smiled and didn’t answer him. “Are you going to unlock the truck so we can go get that dinner, or are we just gonna do our talkin’ out here in the cold?”
Reaching up and grasping the door handle, he waited for the telltale beep and heard the locks, then he pulled the door open for her. “In the back, Rocky,” he ordered when the wolf dog tried to follow her into the cab. With a huff, he did what he was told and went to the back to wait for Adam to lower the tailgate for him. Normally, he didn’t like him riding back there. But this town was so small, there wasn’t a road with a speed limit over 45 mph. And Rocky liked to ride in the back. Usually.
“There’s a sticky roller in the glovebox,” he told Faye. “To get my dog’s fur off your clothes.”
“Thanks.” She found the roller and he closed her door, then walked around the back of the truck, opening the tailgate for Rocky and closing it behind him before going around to the driver’s side.
Once she was de-furred and he had the heater going, she told him how to get to the museum. “Make a left here.” She pointed down 4th street. Adam did as he was told. “Pull a U-turn at the end of the road and then you can park anywhere along the road here.” Again, he did as she directed. Then he put the truck in park and looked out his window at a bunch of old buildings that lined the road on the other side of a small fence. “All I see are a bunch of run-down buildings.”
“Not just any run-down buildings,” she told him. “There are forty-four authentic mining town buildings that are filled with thousands of artifacts and represent a mining town between 1860 and 1900.”
“This was an old mining town?”
“Yup. Some of the buildings are on their original sites. But most of them were moved here from abandoned camps in the area.” She paused and stared past me out the window. “It’s not the kind of museum I’ve always dreamed of working in, but I like it.”
“You wanted to work in a museum?”
“Yeah. It’s always been my dream job. I’m working on my Master’s degree in fine art.”
Adam stared at her as the sun set over the horizon and the streetlights flickered on. There was more to this small-town girl than he knew.
“Anyway, I’ll just be a minute.” She opened the door and hopped out.
“Wait,” he called. “I’ll help you.” Adam told Rocky to stay in the back of the truck and followed her around the fenced-in buildings to what looked like a storage building.
Faye pulled a set of keys out of her coat pocket and unlocked the padlock on the door. She put the keys back in her pocket and swung the door open. Inside, the room was temperature controlled at what felt to be about sixty-five degrees. She flicked on the lights, and Adam looked around at a room full of boxes and shelves filled with what appeared to be old artifacts. “What is all this?”
Faye followed his gaze. “It’s a bunch of old things that we aren’t using in the buildings right now. We swap them out every once in a while…” She let the sentence fall and turned to look at him. “Look, I’d like to explain what happened.”
Adam crossed his arms over his chest as his eyes found her in the dimly lit room. She looked so contrite, it was all he could do not to close the distance between them and hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay. However, he knew if he did that, she’d never have the chance to explain herself with his mouth covering hers. And he really shouldn’t do that. This fake relationship was exactly that—fake. And that’s the way it needed to stay.
“I’d just finished up the morning rush at the coffee shop,” she started. “When Jeff came in.”
Immediately, Adam’s skin began to crawl with the urge to shift. Dropping his arms, he took a step toward her and stopped. “What did he do?”
“Well, nothing really,” she told him. “I mean, nothing physical, if that’s what you mean. He just leaned over the counter and kept throwing questions at me.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “What kind of questions?”
“Questions about you. And me. And how we got together. He still doesn’t believe we are. Together, I mean. And next thing I knew, I’d blurted out that we were engaged just to shut him up and get him out of there.”
“Did it work?”
She nodded, and the tension slowly seeped from Adam’s shoulders.
“I think all I did was piss him off, though.” Then she sighed. “Anyway, I’m so sorry. He must’ve run off and blabbed to Margo, who, of course, told the entire town in record time.” She paused again. “I don’t know why I said something like that to him. I just panicked. But I’ll fix it. Actually, I’m going to tell everyone that we’re not really together at all. It’s not fair of me to ask you to do something like this. You don’t even know me.”
