“I feel like I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” She still didn’t look at him. But her lips did twitch a tad.
Drat. He needed to get a read on how she felt about this when he pitched what was either one of his worst ideas or his best. No middle ground on this bloody mess.
But Em held the power to help him.
Gorgeous Em who came to the park with her hair pulled back, a couple of pencils sticking from the locks tucked up top. She looked a real mess. An adorable mess. The perfect fake girlfriend mess. An authentic pretend girlfriend.
“Look, this is where we are,” he said. “You’re not interested in me, and I have women wanting to be Annie’s mum all day, every day. Jack—he’s my manager—he said if I had a girlfriend, then this will all quiet down.”
“You don’t like the attention?” Em asked, eyeing him like he’d turned on the gas stove but forgot to light the flames.
He ran his hands over his hair. “It’s driving me nuts. All the women all the time. I mean, in another life maybe it would’ve been a dream, but I can’t even go to the pisser without my phone blowing up. I can’t go into the restaurant through the front any longer. Drop off at the school is a right nightmare. Everywhere I go there’s the stares—and not because they like my food and want to learn some culinary skills from a fun bloke. It’s because they want to eat me.”
“I could see that,” Em agreed. “This Jack is a smart guy. If you want it to quiet down, then you should listen to him.”
“Yes, exactly. So what do you say?” He pinched his lips together because he didn’t want to say it. But he had to say it. “Help a bloke out?”
She looked at him now like he’d forgotten how to play toss the potato.
“Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?” she asked, slowly like this wasn’t possible. “Because I thought I made it clear, that’s not—”
“Bogus girlfriend. Not real. For the pictures. That’s all.”An easy experience for them both.
“Are you feeling okay?” Em asked, her eyebrows pushing together.
“‘Course. Why?”
“Because this is an awful idea,” Em said. “Terrible. Like…bad.”
Yes, he understood the possibility of that. “I said as much to Jack when he made the suggestion. But then I realized you and I trust each other with our kids. We live close. It makes sense for this to go down. So… what if it’s not a bad idea?”
“I’m so sorry, Ethan. I cannot be your imitation girlfriend because…I’m divorced.” She said this like it was a solid reason and not a wobbly one held up on stilts.
“I don’t mind that you’re divorced,” Ethan said, hoping to smooth things over becausethisactually could work. “Better divorced than married to be my—how’d you say—imitation girlfriend?”
“I have a daughter,” Emmaline said, not like she was out and out rejecting his idea, but going down some kind of list in her head.
“Me, too.” He ran the pad of his thumb over his lower lip. “It adds a little something to the ruse, I think.”
“And boxes.” She gestured toward her house. “I have so many boxes in my living room. I’m not remotely unpacked from the move.”
“Do you need help? Want help? I can help. Just a friendly fake boyfriend helping out his not-a-real-girlfriend.”
“I would never ask a bogus boyfriend to do that. No one wants to unpack. Even me.”
His eyebrows dropped together a little. “Well, I’m around and I’m good at lifting things. Bogus boyfriend or not. We are being friendly, yes?”
Her eyes fell to his biceps, and the apprehensive glimmer in her eyes only intensified as she stated, “You arenotnormal.”
Uh…what? His eyebrows seemed to raise right up on their own a bit.
“Is that so?” He thought he seemed normal enough. He didn’t collect toenail clippings or anything wicked weird.
“Okay, I don’t want to say yes because this is ridiculous,” she said. “I know I owe you. But I kind of meant… dinner or housesitting or lending you a cup of sugar.”
“Grand scheme of things this isn’t all that different,” he assured her.
“The thing is,” she continued. “I swore to myself when I started dating again it would be with a man who has stability. Someone stable with no sparkle at all.”
