Jane grins.
I squeeze Summer’s arm tighter, then drop a kiss onto her cheek. “Leather. Bacon. Sometimes it’s one and the same.”
“I love bacon,” Summer blurts out. “That was a compliment. Bacon is awesome. They should make bacon wine.”
Geneva tilts her head, considering us for a beat. The woman is more skeptical than I’d like her to be, and it’s much harder to play pretend than I anticipated.
Time to prove it’s real. I draw Summer close and plant a quick kiss on her lips that’s not so quick after all. Because she’s delicious and the taste of her lips goes to my head, making me want more of them. So I linger just a little bit longer. “Your lips taste like cupcakes,” I murmur.
And Summer breathes out hard.
That makes Geneva smile bigger.
“Such an affectionate couple. I swear, some days you can’t pry them apart. Now, let’s go try that Syrah,” Jane says, steering Geneva away while shooting me a get it together look.
I turn to Summer. “‘Sport’? I would never call you ‘sport.’”
She swats my arm and chides in a whisper, “And I never would have said I didn’t like wine if I’d known I’m supposed to love it. Maybe if you had told me that instead of spending all that time on the fictional first time we shagged.”
“Fair point. But also, bacon wine?”
“Someone should make it.”
“No. No one should make it.”
“If someone made bacon wine, I might like wine.”
“Stop. Just stop. Bacon wine sounds horrid.”
“Bacon wine, bacon wine, bacon wine,” she whispers, taunting me, and I can’t help but laugh.
“Woman, you need to get a grip.”
She bonks my shoulder. “And you need to brief me properly.”
“Fine. On the way home, we’ll work on our cover story for next time. But for now, I have a solution.”
“What’s that?”
I waggle my hands. “Did you know I’m incredibly affectionate?”
“Is that so?”
She raises her eyebrows flirtatiously, and I tempt fate. I run my fingers over her leg.
Her breath catches the tiniest bit, and if she wasn’t my fake girlfriend, my fake fiancée, I’d think it was sexy.
But this is all pretend.
It’s a lucky thing I’ve always been so good at make-believe. For instance, I know that if your pretend love affair comes into doubt, you should touch your fake fiancée as much as possible.
At least, that’s my rule and I’m sticking to it.
19OLIVER
This is weird.
It shouldn’t be, and yet it is.
I take a drink of my IPA, set the glass down, and try to focus on whatever Logan is going on about—something vitally important, judging by the sound of his voice.
“So it lets you take down the enemy faster,” he says, staring intently at us. “Make sense?”
“Right,” I say, but I’ve missed how we’re taking down the enemy or even why we want to. I don’t even remember who that is exactly.
At this moment, my libido is my most obvious foe, taking over a larger portion of my brain than it normally controls, say, 99 percent instead of the usual 95 percent.
Thank fuck our mates are here with us at Gin Joint on Wednesday night, because I need the buffer with Logan.
Which is another thing that’s unusual—I’ve never needed a buffer with Logan when it comes to his sister because we’re all friends.
But this is the first time I’ve seen him since I kissed Summer. Since I had my hands all over her. Buffers are absolutely necessary because I’m thinking about his sister naked.
“So, that’s the plan, guys. Can you do it?” Logan asks, looking at me, then at Jason, then at Fitz, who rolls his eyes as he downs the rest of his drink.
“Dude. I knocked out Blake MacAvoy from Ottawa the other night. Yes, I think I can take out this fucker from Lehman.”
Yes! Paintball. Sneak attack strategies. That’s what we’re talking about. I can focus on that, not on how insanely strange it is to be sitting across from Logan after thinking about the huge boner his sister gave me last night.
