“I don’t know. Handshakes? High fives? None of the … other stuff.”
Touching was the last thing I needed. Heck, half the time when she was arguing with me—chin tilted up, eyes blazing, talking with her hands like she wasconducting a very aggressive orchestra—I had to physically plant my feet to keep from grabbing her wrists, pulling her in, and shutting her up in a way that had nothing to do with winning the argument. Being around her that much, in the same apartment, pretending to be married? Yeah. The less contact, the better. For both of us. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.
She raised a brow. “You think we’re going to be tempted to?—?”
“No,” I said too fast. “Absolutely not.”
Her smile was both infuriating and … something else. “Noted.”
I shifted in my chair. “Rule three: This is temporary. As soon as your trust fund activates and I get stable, we’re done.”
She nodded. “Agreed. We dissolve the marriage as soon as we both get what we need.”
A knot twisted in my stomach, tight and unpleasant.
Temporary.
Right. That was the point.
She tapped her pen against the pad. “Anything else?”
A dozen thoughts fought for space in my head. Most of them were things I couldn’t say out loud. Like how standing in front of her at the café, something inside me had felt too exposed. How I hated that she could read me. How I hated even more that she cared.
“How do we tell people?” I asked instead.
Her lips parted, but she didn’t answer immediately.She looked down at the notebook, then back up at me with something that almost resembled honesty.
“With our friends?” she said. “There’s no way we can hide this from them. Talon will sniff it out in five minutes. Ridge will sniff it out in three. And Livvi …” She gave a dry laugh. “She’ll probably figure it out before we even say anything.”
A sound escaped me—half groan, half laugh. “Great.”
“But anyone else?” she continued, shrugging slightly. “We make it believable. Contracts get signed. Rings get bought. Pictures get posted. We fake it.”
We fake it.
I nodded, trying to swallow around the tightness in my throat. “Coach mentioned something,” I added. “There’s a sponsorship fund the university gives to married athletes. It’s small, but it would cover some of the training expenses I’m losing.”
She blinked, her pen stilling. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t think it mattered,” I said quietly. “But it could help. If we do this.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay. Then we put it on the list.”
The list. Because we were apparently people who made lists to plan fake marriages now.
Her eyes flicked toward me again. “You know this means we’ll have to live together, right?”
My stomach tightened. “Yeah. I know.”
Living together was one of the reasons I’d fought sohard to find another option—anyother option—before I walked over here tonight. Sharing a roof with Roxie Montgomery wasn’t just a logistical complication; it was a guaranteed disaster. She already got under my skin at a distance. Putting us in the same apartment? The same kitchen? The sameair? It felt like signing up for a year-long test of whether I could keep my sanity—or my hands—to myself.
“And you’re okay with that?”
Absolutely not.
She drove me insane. She had since the day we’d met—sharp tongue, sharper glare, all edges and fire. Half the time she made me want to argue with her. The other half …
Yeah, I wasn’t going to finish that sentence.
