"Good. I apologize in advance for messing up your hair, though."
To be fair, Sabrina could think of a lot of ways he could mess up her hair that she would like better than wearing a motorcycle helmet, but she also liked her brains where they were, so she only laughed and said, "Pretty sure it's okay. This braid is pretty sturdy."
"Good. It looks cute," Luke assured her as he swung onto his motorcycle and twisted to pat the seat behind him. "Saddle up?"
"I don't think my legs are long enough to do that even if you weren't already on it," Sabrina said hesitantly. "Are there, like…stirrups?"
"Runner boards." Luke kicked his heel against one, then offered his hand to help her balance as she stepped up on it. "Go on, be as awkward as you need to be, I can't really see you anyway."
Sabrina gave a startled giggle. "That was way more reassuring than you probably meant it to be." She climbed on very awkwardly indeed, and then, although she'd had a very vivid fantasy about wrapping her arms around his midriff, she suddenly didn't know what to with her hands.
She could, however, almost hear his grin as he reached for one of them and wrapped it around himself. "You want to hang on tight. Thighs practically under mine. After all," he said, still grinning, "I'm your boyfriend."
"Hah! Okay, boyfriend." Sabrina snugged herself up tight against Luke's back, extremely aware of his body heat and warm summery scent, even above the faint smell of gasoline and whatever the helmet was made of. Then he kicked the big bike on, its engine roaring, and she bit back a shriek at the noise. He pulled out of the yard slowly, and she fought down giggles at the vibrations and the warm air cooling on her legs as they picked up just alittlespeed. Belatedly, she yelled her address at him, and he gave a thumbs-up before dropping his hand back to the handlebar.
It only took a few minutes to get to her apartment complex, but it was long enough for Sabrina to gain an all-new appreciation for his physical strength. Not that she'd known him long enough to have dismissed it in the first place, but it was abigbike, and she was absolutely certain she wouldn't have been able to keep it under control. Her thighs were quivering as sheclimbed off, and she laughed as Luke put the kickstand down and swung off it himself. "My legs are jelly!"
"Do I need to carry you across the threshold?" Luke asked lightly.
Sabrina's knees abruptly went so weak she had to lock them to keep from falling, which wasridiculous. He wasjoking. She was not to take things that sounded like marriage proposals seriously in thisfake relationship. She put extra effort into taking her helmet off so she had a moment to recover, and managed a flushed smile at the big man once she had it under her arm. "We've only been fake dating a couple of hours. Maybe we should save that for day two."
"Right, of course." Luke made a show of taking notes. "I had no idea there was so much to keep track of when fake dating."
Sabrina couldn't help laughing. "Me either. This is completely insane, isn't it?"
"Maybe a little. At the very least I'vegotto know why you need a fake boyfriend, both in the sense of why you don't have a real one and why it's important."
"Right. I did promise I'd tell you that. Let me change clothes and grab some stuff and we'll go out to the fair for some pictures and you can hear the whole sordid story. Which isn't actually sordid, but whatever." Sabrina ran inside to put on another dress, a dark blue one with big sunshiny flowers, and pulled her hair into a soft ponytail before grabbing a couple more outfits and hurrying back outside. "I do have a car," she offered. "Maybe better than the bike, for today?"
"Much easier to talk," Luke agreed easily. He did have to sort of fold himself into a smallish pretzel to fit into Sabrina's Mini, which was built on a scale for somebody her size, not his. Once he was in, he laughed. "I should've borrowed Emmy's car after all. Or a large, masculine truck. I may never unbend."
Several ways to get him to unbend leaped right to Sabrina's mind. Not a single one of them was appropriate to say to a man she'd just met, even if he was being her fake boyfriend. Instead, trying not to blush at her own thoughts, she said, "I'll get you a business class ticket to Vegas to make up for it. Sorry. I didn't expect to accommodate a six foot seventy boyfriend."
He flashed a smile at her. "Howwereyou going to explain the boyfriend not coming with you?"
She groaned as she pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the fairgrounds. "I don't know. An emergency business trip, I guess. I don't know what I was thinking, saying I had one!"
"I bet you do," Luke said in an oddly gentle tone.
Sabrina glanced at him and sighed. "Yeah. I was thinking I'm tired of hearing about how awful it must be to be so wedded to my job and how I probably never get laid and that I'm letting my best years go to waste and just all of that crap. I just wanted…I don't know. A weekend without hearing that. And you'd think I'd get that by going to somebody's wedding, but no, the wedding makes it all the more reason to remind me how much it must suck to be single."
"Does it?" Luke sounded genuinely interested, and Sabrina glanced at him again.
"No. I mean, yeah, I'd like to have somebody in my life, but not enough to compromise my entire lifeforsomebody."
"And what is your life? What do you do?"
"Oh." Somehow Sabrina forgot she hadn't mentioned that already. It felt somehow like she'd known Luke forever. Like it was natural that hewouldknow what she did, because…because of course he would. Which was silly, but then, so was fake dating. "I'm an architect," she said with a smile. "I'm designing the new train station."
Luke sat up so fast he bonked his head on the low Mini ceiling. "No way! Really? That's you? I saw the plans they posted at the site back in May. It's going to be gorgeous!"
A warm glow of pride swept Sabrina. "Thanks. I'm excited about it. It's my first really big lead project."
"Virtue is lucky to have you." Luke sounded absolutely sincere.
"I'm lucky to have Virtue. It's a great town and I'm going to miss it when the project is over." Sabrina had the absurd feeling she was going to miss Luke Jones, despite meeting him only a couple of hours ago.
She swore that from the corner of her eye, she saw his face fall. "Oh, right, yeah, I guess this isn't a permanent thing for you, is it. No wonder you only need a short-term boyfriend."
