“If you have to give me a peck on the cheek or something in public, that’s fine,” I say. “It’s not like we’ll be married at home, right?”
His smirk deepens. “Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Tell me what you’re really saying.”
I immediately regret going down this road with him. It probably didn’t need to be addressed, anyway. But by the look on his handsome face, there’s no detouring around it.
“Fine,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest until his gaze drops to my cleavage. “No sex.”
He lifts his gaze to mine, not bothering to hide his smirk. “I’m glad we got that out of the way.” He grabs a water bottle from his truck and takes a swig. Then he offers me a drink, but I pass. “What about your things in Kentucky?”
“Heck if I know. I only brought stuff to get me through a week here, tops. There are things I need from my apartment.”
“We could run up and get them.”
“Maybe that can be our honeymoon,” I offer.
He nods. “What about your lease? I’m assuming you lease a house or an apartment. Would you keep it since you won’t be staying here indefinitely?”
The tenderness that softens his words catches me off guard. He’s right, of course. But the fact that he knows it so confidently, even though I’ve gone out of my way to make it clear that I’m not staying beyond the marriage, is still awkward somehow.
“My lease is through a friend,” I say. “If I leave, he’ll just lease it to someone else. But it’s about up, anyway. He won’t care if I tell him I’m moving.”
His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t respond to that. I don’t bother explaining that my friend, Jeff, has a boyfriend named Clint. Hartley and I might be getting married, but the more we start explaining things like that, the foggier things might get.
And God knows we don’t need that.
“What are we going to tell people?” Hartley asks. “They’re gonna have questions, and we can try to blow them off, but you know how it goes. They’ll either hound us to death or make up their own stories.”
I frown. “I don’t know. Do we just say we reconnected?”
“And decided to get married?” His brows arch to the sky. “That’s quite the leap.”
“It’s no leapier than saying that my grandmother is manipulating us into it.”
He runs a hand over his forehead. “Let’s say we’ve been talking for a while. And once we saw each other again, we just clicked and decided it’s pointless to waste more time.”
My body stills as his attention refocuses on me,because that description?It’s an easy sell. It would be possible because Hartley and I have always had a gravity around us that brought us together—and everyone in town knows it.
And now they’ll think we’ve fallen in love. And rather than living apart or even moving in together, we’re going all the way and saying I do.
I gulp. “That sounds like a plan.”
“Should I call Lolly and tell her?” I ask, my stomach beginning to flip.
“Might as well.”
I grab my phone again and call her on speakerphone. She answers on the first ring.
“Hello,” she says happily.
“You sound happy for someone at the hospital with an injured friend.”
“She’s fine. I mean, broken arm but what do you expect when you’re seventy?” she asks as if she’s not older than that. “So are you calling me with news?”
I glance at Hartley, silently pleading with him to take the reins. He smiles reassuringly.
