Page 9 of The Rancher's Fake Fiancée
That’s the part I’ll have to answer for later, alone, on my half of the one bed. Not that I leaned in. That I wanted to. That after eighteen years of bracing every muscle I own whenever this man came within ten feet of me, my body has gone and decided, tonight, in front of an audience, that the weight of his hand is just where it intends to stay.
And the touch is meant to be theater and it isn’t, it never is with him, it goes through me low and sure and entirely off the script we agreed on, and I take a long drink of wine I don’t taste and blame the wine.
Behave,Sensible Blythe says.You agreed to this.
I’m behaving. That’s the whole problem. Behaving means sitting here in his arm being adored, and being adored by Loukas Karalis turns out to be a quiet form of ruin I hadn’t budgeted for,that idle touch mapping one small stretch of me over and over while I smile at a table full of strangers and try to remember how breathing is meant to go.
I watch her watch us. That’s my entire evening, the soup and the fish and the endless courses going by untouched while I run a quieter sum underneath, and here’s the total I keep reaching.
Bettina Kraus doesn’t look at Loukas the way a married woman looks at her husband’s old friend. She looks at him the way I look at the field behind my property, the one I’ve decided is mine in every way but the deed. She looks at him like a thing she’s already chosen and is only waiting out the paperwork on.
And every time her husband laughs his big warm laugh and pats her hand and tells the table how lucky he is, she smiles down at him fondly and lifts her eyes back to Loukas over the top of his silver head.
So that’s it. That’s the why he wouldn’t give me on the porch.
He didn’t hire a fiancée to charm investors. He hired a wall, and I’m it, a body to stand between himself and a woman who’s marked her husband’s oldest friend as already hers, a woman who can’t be told no in any language that won’t blow up the friendship he’s spent thirty years building.
I’d be insulted, if I weren’t so busy being impressed by the sheer economy of it. He went and found the one woman alive who’d take his money, loathe him start to finish, and never once be tempted to want what Bettina wants.
Except.
Except he hasn’t stopped, his fingers idle at my collarbone like he’s forgotten they’re there, that slow unhurried touch going onand on while the table talks, and I haven’t forgotten, I’m aware of it like a struck match held a half-inch from dry grass.
And I think, with some alarm, that he may have chosen wrong. That the one woman alive who wasn’t supposed to want him is sitting in the curve of his arm tasting nothing on her plate, counting the seconds between each slow stroke like a woman keeping time to a song she swore on everything she’d never learn the words to.
“You’re very quiet, Blythe,” Bettina observes pleasantly, turning the full beam on me, and the table’s attention swings to follow. “I do hope Loukas warned you what you were marrying into. We’re a demanding little family, the people on this train. We don’t share well.”
“Funny,” I say lightly, lifting my heavy silver at last. “Neither do I.”
And then I go off-script entirely.
I bring my own hand up to cover his where it rests on my shoulder, lace my fingers through his, and lift our joined hands a few inches so the old river-ice stone catches the lamplight for the whole table to admire. I feel the breath catch in him, the small surprised hitch, since this part’s mine and he didn’t see it coming. I turn and give him the besotted bride with everything I’ve got, the woman who got the impossible man.
And the look he gives me back isn’t all performance, and we both know it.
A quick cold thing crosses Bettina’s lovely face, there and gone. Artie roars with delight and declares that he likes me, likes me very much, that Loukas has done well for himself at last. Underthe table, hidden by the heavy linen, Loukas’s free hand finds my knee and presses once, hard, and I can’t tell anymore whether it’s gratitude or warning or the same thing happening to him that’s happening to me.
Two tables down, I catch the couple Loukas pointed out in the corridor, the only people aboard he seemed glad to see. A big golden rancher with cold blue eyes gone soft at the corners, and a small dark-haired wife tucked under his arm, both of them watching us with the quiet amusement of people who’ve sat right where I’m sitting, the wife murmuring something up at the man that cracks the ice in his face clean down the middle into a smile.
I haven’t time for them yet. I’ve a wall to be, and a fire to put out, and the fire appears to be me.
“Tell me, Bettina.” I go on sweetly, before she can take back the field. “How did you and Artie meet? I do love a story where someone gets exactly what they were after.”
The table laughs, taking it for a bride’s fond curiosity.
Only Bettina hears the blade folded inside it. And only I see her decide, in the half-second before she laughs along with the rest, that whatever it takes and however long the journey runs, she’s going to make me sorry I ever set foot on this train.
Chapter Six
“SO TELL US HOW HE PROPOSED,” Bettina says over dessert, folding her hands beneath her chin like a woman settling in for a bedtime story. “In detail, please. I simply can’t picture our Loukas on one knee, he’s far too proud for it. Was there a knee? I must know about the knee.”
And there it is, the trap, laid out neat as the dessert spoons.
The pudding in front of me is a small architectural feat, some pale set cream under a lacquer of burnt sugar, the kind of thing that takes a trained man an hour and costs what I pay a volunteer for a day, and I look at it rather than at her, needing a moment the pudding’s willing to give me.
Here’s what nobody tells you about lying for money. The lie itself is never the hard part. The hard part is that a clever liar asks for detail, detail being where amateurs drown, and Bettina Kraus is no amateur.
She’s spent the soup and the fish constructing this exact question and tending it like a crop she means to bring in, and now she’s harvesting, sweetly, in front of eight investors and one beaming oblivious husband, in the fond tone of a woman who’d love nothing better than to watch my story collide with whatever story Loukas has already told.
