“There you are,” she looked me up and down then looked me straight in the eye. “I hear you’re the reason I can’t bid on Damien D’Amico at this year's bachelor auction?”
I looked at Bella, unsure of how to reply to the octogenarian.
“Oh Sylvia, I told you last week, Damien will come over and fix the downstairs bathroom for you anyway.” Bella dismissed her.
“Yes but I was gonna make him do it shirtless if I won him for my date!” She huffed and I laughed, Sylvia was notorious for bidding on young men at the bachelor auction just so she could get them to do chores around her house.
“Speaking of Damien,” Donna handed me a long black, “now that his family isn’t around, we need the gossip.”
“Alright, fire away,” I pretended to be confident and took a sip of the coffee.
“Brave girl,” Bella laughed and I got nervous.
“Oh don’t be like that,” Donna chastised her daughter. “I’ll go easy on her.”
I watched my boss's mum, almost certain I was being lulled into a false sense of security, then took another sip of my drink as something to do, afraid that my anxiety would be showing.
“So Zoe,” Donna raised her eyebrows. “Does Damien have a big dick because he really does give that BDE.”
I choked on my coffee, I really shouldn’t have been drinking with Donna interrogating me.
“Mum!” Bella shouted.
“What? I didn’t ask when she was gonna give Giovanna a grandbaby, because clearly,” Donna pointed at Bella’s baby bump. “She has one on the way. I just need to know she’s being satisfied.”
“Mum, you know it’s not all about size…” Bella said as she draped a cape around Sylvia.
“True, so Zoe, if Damien doesn’t have a big dick, does he at least know how to use it?”
Quinn burst into laughter as she rinsed the dye off her clients hair. “Bella, you don’t pay us enough to put up with your mum’s interference in our love lives.”
“You say that now, but if I hadn’t talked to Wade, he’d still be trying to work out where he went wrong with that disaster of a grand gesture at your birthday party,” Donna defended herself.
In the year that I’d been in Hartwood Bay, I’d watched Donna Steele meddle in the love lives of her friends' kids, having already intervened in her daughter's relationships before I’d moved. Funnily enough, if she were a matchmaker, her success rate would be high because each time she’d intervened, the couples overcome their barriers fairly quickly and they all appeared smitten. She was equal parts awesome and scary.
“Mum, she doesn’t need to answer your questions.” I mouthed Bella a silent thank you.
“Well that’s just a waste of Tim Tam cheesecake,” Donna sighed as she opened the box from The Bean and Bushel cafe with slices of its signature dessert.
“No it’s not,” Bella replied. “We still need to ask Zoe why she’s been letting Damien keep her as his dirty little secret for the last few months. Don’t worry, I’ll be having words with my future brother-in-law shortly.”
And that was the gut punch. I really didn’t want Damien to cop any grief for this, afterall the fake relationship was supposed to help him. It was like I’d made up this lie to stop him from getting hassled about the auction but his family just switched gears and started hassling them about me.
“But now that it’s out in the open, there’s nothing to hide!” Audrey said brightly. “Why don’t you guys go on a date?”
I could both hug and kill my cousin but she was right, to sell this relationship, Damien and I would need to go on some dates.
Chapter six
Damien
Iwas not a good liar. The remainder of the family barbecue was painful. I was paranoid that everyone would figure out that we were faking things. The only thing that got me through was that for the first time since I’d met Zoe, I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t checking her out.
The blue sundress she wore floated over her curves rather than hugged them, but I could see the outline of her full hips and all I wanted to do was grab them and pull her onto my lap. I used Mariah as the excuse why we weren’t visibly affectionate, but I knew that would have an expiration date since my parents had always been openly affectionate with each other my whole life.
Bella had made it clear to me that she was expecting me to date Zoe openly and not treat her like my “dirty little secret” and that hit me deep that she thought I would ever do that. The fact that Zoe was OK with people assuming that I was hiding our relationship told me more about her past relationships than any words could. I didn’t know much about her life in Melbourne but I knew enough to guess that it was toxic enough to make her fleeto Hartwood Bay, and my heart ached at the thought that she would be going back to that soon.
The biggest problem about fake dating Zoe? How do I fake it well enough that my family was convinced, but still hold back enough that my heart didn’t start believing the lies. It was hard enough keeping it in check each time I saw her over the last few months but once she moved into my house and started fake dating the organ I once thought had stopped working, the one I thought only had room for my daughter and my family, it started melting. Melting for her smiles, melting for those deep blue eyes and melting for the effortless way she had with Mariah.
