Four
She tried to feel triumphant about the fact that she’d gotten him over the first hurdle. But of course it was difficult to, when the second and third and fourth hurdles were looming. And hoo wow, they were big boys. He wasnotgoing to like them, and she knew it.Shedidn’t even like them, and she had come up with every one.
But it had to be done.
If you wanted the public to forget what they were feasting on, you needed a better meal for them to eat. Something juicy, something they were hungry for, something believable. Something massive, considering he’d committed the mortal sin of insulting romance on national television. Hell, he’d called romance readers fools for believing in it. She was honestly surprised they hadn’t surrounded his survivalist compound with pitchforks and torches.
But she had just the thing to match the size of his mistake.
Not only a smoothing over with some well-placed sentiments.
But a true distraction. A gift all his fans had always clamored for.
She just needed to present it in a way that sounded reasonable.
Instead of absolutely bat-fuck nuts.
“So all we need to do now,” she said, as they finalized travel plans and logistics over another meal at the only place he apparently ate at, “is decide who we are going to hire to be your immortal beloved.” Then to add to the cherry on the top of this faux-casual cake, she set about sawing a hunk out of something called a country-style ham steak, and stuffed it into her mouth.
It tasted like bacon wrapped in a pancake.
Delicious, but of course not delicious enough to distract her from his reaction.
She saw his fork pause midway to his mouth out of the corner of her eye. It hovered there, close enough to trembling with tension that she couldn’t call it anything else. And thesilencethat followed. It was dark, man. It was deadly. The kind of thing you could imagine someone killing you in.
Third act of a horror movie. Caleb Miller with a piece of cutlery.
Though when he finally broke the excruciatingly tense quiet and spoke, he didn’t sound murderous. He sounded like a faint echo of himself. “This has to be a joke. Emmett, tell me that you are joking.”
“Sure I will. After you’ve looked at these headshots of your fake girlfriend.”
She leant to one side and reached into her satchel as she spoke.
Much to his extreme alarm. “You haveheadshotsof people? To be someone that doesn’texist?” he managedto squeeze out, from what she could only imagine were teeth so gritted you’d need a crowbar to prize them apart again.
She couldn’t placate him however.
She was too busy thinking about that last part.
“So she definitely doesn’t, then,” she said.
And he didn’t even pause.
“Of course not. I’m not that pathetic.”
“There’s nothing pathetic about being in love with someone.”
“Yeah, and who am I in love with? You know there is no one, you can see for yourself there isn’t. So what does that leave? Some woman who barely likes me, and me watching her like a creep from afar? Tell me you wouldn’t think I was a loser for something like that. Maybe not even just a loser. Also an asshole stalker.”
She’d been shuffling the photos, half to avoid showing them to him. Half to avoid eye contact. But now she couldn’t resist snapping a look in his direction. Because honestly. What did hemean? It had never occurred to her that he could think of it that way. It had never occurred toherto think of it that way.
The last thing Miller could ever be was astalker.
That would require things like being interested in another person, and a willingness to press himself on them. When interest in other people and pressing himself on them seemed like the most unpleasant things in the world to him. She had once seen him move seats in a lecture hall because his ice-breaking-activity skills had seemed to bore the person next to him, and he clearly hadn’t wanted to continue.
At the time, she had thought he just hated doing it.
But his discomfort, with not just other people sharing with him, but him sharing with them, had gotten plainer over time. Sometimes it even resonated in her—that unpleasant sense of pushing yourself on someone who wasn’t interested. No, no, he could never. If he had loved someone from afar somehow, there was no way that person even knew. Or thought they still meant something to him.
