“Sorry.” She gave him a wan smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “I just hate this.”
“My masculine pride is taking a real kicking here, you know.”
“I didn’t mean…” She waved a hand, gesturing at him. “Obviously. I mean, I’m tired of all this pretense.”
He looked at her; stretched out on his bed, wearing his shirt. Despite her earlier complaint, it was too big for her, slipping down over the curve of one shoulder. Her lips were parted a little, pink and soft. She’d closed her eyes. She looked tired and disheveled and so damn perfect that his whole body hurt.
“Yeah,” he said thickly. “Me too.”
“Sometimes,” Honey said softly, eyes still closed, “it feels like my whole life has been a lie.”
“I’m…” he started, and stopped.
He couldn’t tell her he was sorry for dragging her into all this. Couldn’t tell her he wished it hadn’t been necessary; that he wished she was a shifter, or had never come to the camp in the first place. Because he didn’t, and he wasn’t.
While he was still trying to figure out what hecouldsay, Honey opened her eyes. She pushed herself more upright, squaring her shoulders.
“Oh, no need to look at me like that.” She offered him another smile; a brighter one this time, but no less fake. “I’m just tired. I’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep. Don’t worry, I’ll play my part. I know we have to keep up the charade.”
“Honey,” he said, and had to stop, swallowing. “What if we didn’t?”
CHAPTER29
“What?” Honey shook her head. “Don’t be silly, Buck. We can’t possibly tell the kids that we’renotmates at this point. Especially not with Ignatius already suspicious. It would be as good as admitting that I’m not a shifter.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Buck’s throat worked again. If she didn’t know him so well, she would have thought he was nervous. “What if we didn’t have to pretend?”
She frowned, still not seeing where he was going with this. “But you can’t turn me into a shifter. You’d have to bite me in your animal form, and you don’t have any control when you’re shifted.”
“No.” There was something odd about the way he was watching her; a kind of taut focus, like she was some wild creature who might bolt at any moment. “I mean, what if we didn’t have to pretend that we’re together, because we actually were.”
She’d seen him plummet from the sky on lightning-wreathed wings. She’d seen him shapeshift from wolf to man. She’d found him naked under her bed.
All of those events slipped down a place on her personal ranked list of ‘Buck Surprises.’ She stared at him, completely, utterly floored.
“You?” she said stupidly, reduced to single syllables. “Me?”
“You,” he said, as though there was no one else in the entire world. “Me.”
“That’s…” Honey stalled, unsure how to complete the sentence.
A fantastic idea,some idiot part of her brain tried to shove into her mouth.Exactly what I want too.Take off your remaining clothes immediately.
She settled on, “That’s ridiculous.”
From the way Buck’s eyebrows lowered, she might as well have responded in Swahili. “Why?”
“Because…” She flapped her hands at him, words failing her again. “Because it just is! Isn’t that obvious?”
“Still not seeing the problem.” He frowned abruptly. “Unless this is you trying to say that it’s me.”
“No!” The word shot out of her mouth with rather more vehemence than she’d intended. “It’s, um, definitely not you.”
“Glad to hear it. Otherwise, I really would have had to take my masculine pride out behind the barn and put a bullet through its head. So why are you acting as though this is the worst idea I’ve ever had? You have to admit, it would make everything a hell of a lot more straightforward.”
“You think real dating to hide the fact that we’re fake dating is more straightforward?” She was beginning to wonder if she’d hit her head on a low-hanging branch in the woods and was actually hallucinating this entire conversation. “For someone who claims to avoid drama, you seem to have an extreme commitment to method acting. Buck, I know you’ll do anything for the kids, but I can’t ask you to gothatfar.”
Buck dropped his gaze to her feet, still resting next to him on the bed. Suddenly conscious of her bare legs, Honey started to draw away, but Buck put a hand on her ankle. Slowly, his fingers moved down, over the arch of her foot.
