Theo had said this was meant to be anintimatewedding. I’d expected that to meanwith a mere two hundred guests, but there really only were a dozen people milling around the courtyard with drinks in hand. I even knew most of them—at least, their names, or who they must have been.
This one, I could’ve lived without.
Unfortunately, since he was the groom, he kind of did need to be here.
“Corey,” I said, turning to face him. Theo had been dragged away by his mom a minute ago—with the intention of separating us for the hell of it, I assumed—leaving me alone.
As much as I’d never liked Corey, the feeling had been mutual. I didn’t know exactly what his problem was. Theo’s romantic partners typically didn’t care about me, treated me as though Iwas part of the furniture, but Corey was one of few I’d actuallyclashedwith.
I couldn’t argue that he wasn’t handsome. He was the kind of man who’d stop traffic—taller than me by a handful of inches, strikingly Nordic blond with cornflower blue eyes and a jawline that could cut glass. You could tell he must have been some kind of model, someone who could make a living from looks alone, from across the room.
Which was why I’d never gotten his problem with me. Our lives were too different for him tocare. The only point of intersection had been Theo.
“New suit?” he asked, looking me up and down.
A lot of people were doing that today.
“This old thing?” I asked, looking down at myself and scoffing. “I just had it dry-cleaned.”
I’d never owned a piece of clothing that required or for that matter would have held up to dry cleaning before. Corey probably knew that—he’d seen how I dressed on a normal day. Annoying him with an obvious lie he couldn’t politely point out was the absolute minimum payback he deserved for the way he’d left Theo.
Corey tilted his head, then nodded. “Well, looks good,” he said, accent mellowing from Actual Cowboy to something mellower. He put on the Southern charm for other people, but it was all an act. One that was wasted on me, since I’d seen him on a normal day, too. Theo had wanted us to get along. “I hear you’re here with Theo?”
My shoulders straightened reflexively. “I am. I hear you’re marrying his sister.”
“I am.” Corey met my gaze and held it. I let him, unwilling to look away or be the first to speak again.
“Sy,” the most welcome voice in the world broke the staring contest. The moment Theo’s fingertips touched my shoulder, it dropped four inches. I hadn’t realized how much tension had coiled in my gut in half a minute of Corey’s presence until it unraveled so fast it made me feel a little sick.
Theo passed what might have been a white wine glass or a champagne flute into my hand. I’d never learned to tell the difference. I would have liked to think I’d find out when I sipped it, but I’d never learned to tell the difference between a sparkling white and champagne, either. I wasn’t convinced there was one.
I turned and, with a shudder of nerves, pressed a lingering kiss to Theo’s cheek.
“Missed you,” I stage-whispered, peeking at Corey out of the corner of my eye to see his reaction. Something in his face changed, but it was so subtle I couldn’t work out what it meant.
As long as he wasn’t making Theo feel awful, I didn’t care.
Theo’s fingers slotted between mine, giving me a light squeeze. “Corey,” he said.
Corey broke into one of his lopsided, devil-may-care smiles. You could take the camera away from the model, but you couldn’t take the model away from the camera. Or something like that.
“Theo.” Corey nodded, eyes roaming between the two of us. “So, the rumorsaretrue.”
“Rumors?” Theo asked with what was actually pretty convincing feigned innocence. Just as welloneof us was a halfway decent actor. Especially since it was the one who had to pretend to be into the other.
“The two of you,” Corey said, tilting his head from side to side to indicate the both of us. “Actually dating.”
Theo’s fingers flexed. I squeezed back, wanting more than anything to ease the tension I could feel rippling through him.
“The two of us,” Theo confirmed. “Actually dating.”
I hated how much I loved the way that sounded.
When I’d made the split-second decision to go along with this, I hadn’t thought particularly far ahead. All I’d cared about was that Theo was asking me for something, and in that moment, I could give it to him.
It was starting to dawn on me that pretending to be his boyfriend from now until Sunday night, after the wedding, was going to kill me.
Corey looked at us again, eyes glinting in a way I didn’t like. Not that they could have glinted in a way Ididlike.
