You put up with a lot, I reminded myself. Along with counting all my purchases as a business expense and putting it on his credit card, shouldn’t I also partake in everything that this fake relationship had to offer? I mean, I had to spend every single Friday night with someone else’s in-laws. That had to earn me at least one round of oral.
I tugged at the collar on my dress.
Ethel had said she was having a theme night to introduce the girls to their heritage. Since, in her words, the Goodman family had helped build America, she was doing a whole Early-American theme for our dinner.
I, of course, had to channel my inner twelve-year-old that had wanted literally everything in the American Girl catalogue and was cosplaying Felicity, complete with a stay, multiple layers of wool skirts, and a white bonnet.
You just need a horse to ride… or Beck.
The door swung open. The butler took one look at me, and his face fell.
“Cards?” he asked, holding out the silver tray.
I had come prepared. Last week I had made everyone Victorian-style calling cards, which I proudly placed on the tray. Then we followed the butler into the sitting room.
“Oh,” Ethel said, when we walked into the room. “You dressed up.”
“Happy American History Day!” I curtseyed, wobbling slightly. I was wearing historically appropriate shoes, which really were not meant for feet as wide as mine.
Ethel was obviously horrified when I straightened.
Then I saw the other people in the room—the other well-dressed, very high-society people in the room who were not costumed as Early-American colonists.
Beck cleared his throat.
“I thought—” I said, licking my lips and wishing I had brought a change of clothes. “I thought we were doing a fun living-history event?”
“I invited several members of the Daughters of the American Revolution for dinner,” Ethel said. “We’re having food inspired by the colonial period and engaging in an enlightened conversation.”
I clasped my hands and tried not to seem like a crazy person, which was difficult with my seventeenth-century housewife getup.
“We have my dear friend Bunny, who has a degree in Early-American art history, along with Penny, who works in an auction house specializing in Early-American furniture, and her granddaughter Cressida, who works as the human resources director for—”
“Quantum Cyber,” I finished.
Cressida peered at me, then her eyes narrowed.
“Why is Beck’s assistant at dinner?”
She looked between the two of us as the gears in her brain put it together.
“This is his girlfriend,” Ethel explained. “They met in the Harrogate train station when Tess was drunk and confused and lost her shoes and purse.”
Cressida’s nostrils flared.
Beside me, Beck was tense.
Cressida could derail our whole fake relationship. While the only thing on the line for me was excruciating embarrassment, which, to be fair, would not be my first humiliation rodeo, Beck could lose his sisters if Cressida raised a stink.
“These are mead cocktails,” Ethel explained, “made with honey. The Farmhouse Inn restaurant catered.”
“They were just awarded three Michelin stars,” Bunny told us.
Ah shit. Guess I should not have brought my rabbit pudding.I tried to subtly gesture to Enola to stand down with the pudding.
She didn’t get the memo.
“Tess made a pudding,” Enola announced, holding out the container I’d brought. “For the appetizer.” She whipped the tea towel off of the dish.
