Page 10 of The Rancher's Fake Fiancée
The difficulty is that Loukas and I have no story. We’ve a contract and a ring and a single bed and eighteen years of loathing, and at no point between his porch and this puddingdid either of us think to invent a proposal, what with me pricing trains and him not telling me things.
I feel the ease go out of him beside me, the particular held quiet of a man who’s just run the same sum I have and come up equally short. His arm’s still along the back of my chair, his hand at my shoulder, and I feel the exact moment it goes careful against me, the way your whole touch changes near a spooked animal the instant it senses the snare.
The whole table waits with him. Bettina’s eyes glitter over her folded hands.
“He didn’t kneel,” I say at last.
It’s the only true thing I have, so I grab for it like the one rung I can see in the dark.
“He doesn’t kneel. Not for anyone, not for anything, it isn’t in him, you all know it isn’t.” A small ripple of agreement goes round the table, this the most plausible claim anyone’s offered all night. “So no. There was no knee. No restaurant, no violinist, no ring hidden in a pudding like this one. What there was,” I say, slower now, and I let myself turn and look at him, and the looking comes far easier than it has any right to, “was an argument. We were arguing, the way we always argue, the way we’ve argued since we were twenty-one and he informed a roomful of strangers I was a shrew nobody could love.”
The table laughs, delighted and scandalized at once. Artie slaps the cloth so the crystal jumps. Bettina doesn’t laugh.
“And right in the middle of it,” I go on, softer still, the lie laying its own floor under my feet as I walk it out, the trick all the good ones manage, “right when I was telling him in detail exactly whatI thought of him, he stopped. He just stopped, and he looked at me like he’d never once seen me before, and he said, marry me, then, and we can argue forever.”
His fingers press once into the bare line of my shoulder at that, and I lose the thread of my own sentence for half a heartbeat, because I’m supposed to be inventing this and instead it’s coming up from somewhere underneath me, already built, already true.
“And the terrible part,” I manage, “the thing I’ll never forgive him for, is that I said yes before I’d thought it through. I said yes like my mouth already knew something the rest of me hadn’t caught up to yet.”
I’ve told the truth. I work it out a beat too late, that I dressed the truth up as a lie and handed over the entire truth of it, because that’s how it would happen with us, that’s the only shape it ever could take, and the table’s gone soft and sighing, and even Bettina has had to rearrange that lovely face, and I make the fatal mistake, the one I keep making with this man, of turning back to see how I did.
He isn’t performing.
Whatever’s on his face has nothing to do with the eight investors or the toast or the brand. He’s looking at me the way I just described him looking at me, like he’s never seen me before, like the lie I built reached into his chest and shifted something that was holding the rest up.
And the air between us pulls taut, the same as it did on the platform, the same as it did in the cabin with the country pouring past the glass, that held-breath question I keep declining to refuse.
“You’ve told it wrong,” he says quietly. For the table. For me. For the part of him I haven’t been introduced to yet.
“Have I?” The question comes out rougher than I meant it.
“There was one more thing.” He turns toward me in his chair, taking his time, his hand sliding from my shoulder to cradle the back of my neck. “There was this.”
And he kisses me.
Not the platform kiss, not the one staged for the cameras. This one he means, or else he’s the better liar of the two of us by a margin I can’t bear to think about, his mouth covering mine without any hurry at all, his hand cradling my jaw like he’s gentling something wild that’s finally quit fighting him.
And I forget the burnt sugar and the eight investors and the woman across the table watching her ambition slip its leash. I forget my own name and the better part of my principles.
I make that small sound against him again, the mortifying one I’ll deny on my deathbed, and I curl my fingers into the lapel of his dinner jacket and hold on, the floor of the lie having dropped clean away and the only solid ground left in the whole world is the mouth of the man I’ve spent eighteen years swearing I hated.
When he finally lets me go, the table breaks into applause.
I come back to the dining car one sense at a time. The cold weight of the silver. The rushing dark beyond the glass. Artie honking into a handkerchief about young love and how it takes him right back.
And Loukas’s eyes on mine, black and cracked open and not laughing at all, and I think, with what may be the last clearthought I’ll have for some while, that we’ve made a terrible miscalculation, the pair of us, that somewhere between the platform and this pudding the performance stopped being a performance, and neither one of us called the moment it turned.
Then Bettina lifts her wineglass, smiling a smile that doesn’t trouble her eyes, and says, in a voice like a key turning slow in a lock, “To the happy couple. And you must let me throw you a little party before the journey’s out. I’d so love to get to know your bride properly, Loukas. Every. Single. Thing about her.”
Chapter Seven
“HE’S DOING IT AGAIN,” Harry whispers, going pink to the ears, ducking her head over her lemonade like she’s the one who’s been caught. “Looking at you, I mean. I shouldn’t say anything, should I? It’s probably rude to point it out, only he’s been staring at the back of your head for ages and I didn’t want you thinking you’d imagined it.”
I don’t turn around.
I’ve made it a point of personal honor, over three days aboard this train, not to turn around every time I feel the weight of Loukas Karalis looking at me, the plain fact being that if I turned around every time I’d have done nothing else for seventy-two hours, and a woman has her pride.
“He’s cataloguing my flaws for the divorce,” I tell her, and Harry’s hand flies up to cover a startled laugh that escapes anyway, and then she peeks at me over her fingers like she’s worried she shouldn’t have found it funny.
