My stomach drops. “Are we in the background?”
“Front and center in at least three,” he says sheepishly. “You’re feeding me cake. I’m licking frosting off your ring finger. It’s a whole thing.”
“But no one knew our real names.”
Maverick laughs. “Babe. We won the Super Bowl last year.”
We won the Super Bowl last year ...
“Anyway,” he continues. “My agent called.”
His agent called. Of course he has an agent—duh. And probably a publicist. And a manager. And ... and ...
I stand and pace the deck. “Okay. So your agent knows. Does hehateme?”
“It’s a she, and no. No one hates you. Yet.”
“Yet?” My eyes bug out of my skull.
“I’m kidding!” he says. “She wants to chat. Said something about ‘narrative control’ and ‘capitalizing on momentum’ and ‘Instagram strategy’—I tuned out.”
“Capitalizing?” My voice cracks. “Like—this is good for your career?”
“Could be,” he says with a shrug. “Depends how we spin it.”
Spin it?
Spin It?
I whip around toward him. “We’re notspinninganything! I’m a small-town wedding planner who accidentally fake married a professional athlete, who banged him on the beach in the middle of the night and has photos of myself getting licked!”
Maverick barks out a laugh. “Youhaveto put that on a business card.”
“Oh my God—are you enjoying this?”
“Obviously.” He laughs again. “The world knows, Annabelle. We might as well make the most of it.”
“Make the most of it?How?” I’m stunned for various reasons, the main one being: This man wants to stay fake married. ToMe?
Little me from the middle of nowhere?
“Come to Arizona with me,” he goes on. “Thirty days. You can work remotely and do video appointments. And after those thirty days we either never speak to each other again or we make it official.”
Official.
I stare at him, doing my best to keep my jaw from dropping open.
He wants to pretend we’re actually married? Because the media caught wind of it?
I can hardly wrap my brain around that, to begin with. Me, Annabelle Franklin, all over the sports news. Like—what?What planet am I living on?
As if Maverick senses my hesitation, he continues. “We’ll go to your apartment tomorrow, pack enough of your things for a few weeks and get you situated. Then you can come to Arizona.”
“Get mesituated?”
Maverick shrugs, like he didn’t just suggest uprooting my entire life—not that there’s a ton to uproot. “You’ll need your laptop, chargers, favorite pillow—whatever you can’t live without for a month.”
“My sanity feels like a top contender ...”
