Page 3 of Fake Fiancé, Real Wedding
Fuck.
Heart smashing against my ribs, I throw myself out from behind the wheel and run toward him. “You okay, mate?”
He spins to me, still clawing at his throat, eyes bulging.
Fuck, he’s choking.
I grab him around his abdomen and plant my locked fists just above his navel. “I’m going to help you, mate,” I say, keeping my voice calm. “Ready?”
For a fleeting second, I swear I hear a duck quacking somewhere, followed by a lamb bleating, and just as I deliver a series of sharp pumps under the man’s ribcage, my stare falls on the truck’s signage:
Pete’s Mobile Farmyard Petting Zoo.
”C’mon, Pete,” I grunt, delivering another pump into the man’s abdomen. “Do it for the?—”
A hunk of something pale and glistening launches from the man’s mouth like a dart from a Nerf gun.
Relief rushes through me, and I loosen my grip around his girth...at the very second the faded blue Mini Cooper comes hurtling around the corner.
For a frozen beat, I lock eyes with the Mini’s driver—a woman with masses of blond hair and eyes the most incredible shade of icy blue—and then the crunch of heavy tires on dirt and gravel snaps my attention away.
“Fuck,” I growl, as the petting zoo truck creeps toward the drop-off.
The kill-all-the-animals-inside-the-truck-it’s-that-sheer drop-off.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Chapter Three
Del
Slamming on the brakes, I gape at the tattooed giant—no, the tattooedman—lobbing aside a smaller man in the middle of the road. The 4x4 that overtook me earlier, dust spewing out from its wheels, is parked on the narrow road’s almost non-existent shoulder. A few yards further along, a truck sits motionless in the middle of the road.
Who belongs to what? What thehellhave I stumbled upon? What is going?—
“Oh shit,” I squeak, scrambling for the door latch as the truck—is that a collection of baby animals painted on its side?—begins to roll straight for the ravine’s edge beside the road.
“Shit!” I shout, fling my door open, and try to throw myself out.
Except my seat belt stops me, an unyielding band dissecting my chest between my boobs and slicing at my neck.
“Shit!” I rasp, stare jerking from the truck to the man with an amazing arse and incredible thighs and shoulders and— Holyshit, is he running for the truck’s open driver’s door?
Popping my seat belt buckle, I scramble from my car, watching him grab the swinging driver’s door with one hand. Muscles bulge and ripple under a white T-shirt that was never meant to be stretched that tight, and in one fluid move, he pulls himself up into the cabin.
“Whoa,” I whisper. A tingle of sexual appreciation prickles my clit. Talk about impressive.
The smaller man wobbles over to me, arms outstretched, face red, watery eyes bulging in his head. “My truck,” he wails.
“Youranimals,” thunder pretending to be a voice cracks back from the truck a heartbeat before brakes squeal and it shudders to a halt.
From inside the colorfully painted cargo box, with its cheery collection of painted lambs and goats and chickens and—dear God, is that an alpaca?—a duck quacks.
I blink and flinch as the truck’s engine splutters into life.
“What the?” I whisper, staring at the truck. Is the giant—no, Del, he’s a man, a goddamn hot-as-sin man—stealing the petting zoo?
A sharpbeep-beep-beepstabs at the air, and then the truck reverses away from the drop-off, inching backward until it’s completely on the road again.
