Page 55 of Knot the Plan
“Don't,” I say.
“I haven't said a single word.”
“You're about to. I can see it loading.”
“Oh, it's loaded. It's been loaded since you got out of that truck.” She forks up a bite of someone's lemon bar and points the fork at me, my cousin, my lifelong comparison, the one other person born the same year who got to watch our mothers keep score. “Theo. Nate. Lucas. Give us a minute, my cousin's about to lie to my face and I need room to work.”
Nate looks at me, looks at the three alphas across the yard, and gives a single slow nod like he's already filed a report. “We'll be at the meat,” he says, and steers the other two off, Theo stealing one last bite off her plate on the way.
“They're very obedient,” I say.
“They're very whipped, which is a different and superior thing, and I love it.” She turns the fork back on me. “Don't change the subject. The subject is you. So. How's the operation.”
“Fine. Great. It's working.”
“Oh, it'sworking.” She glances past me, to where Hudson is saying something that's making my Aunt Deb wheeze, to Finn standing sentry near the drinks with his eyes already finding me across the yard, to Logan and his audience of toddlers. “It's working so well I almost put it in a book. You panic-recruit three alphas to fake-date a reunion and they show up looking likethat?Jos, I write fiction for a living and even I'd send that back for being too convenient.”
“It's a very good favor.”
“A favor.” She says the word like it personally insulted her grandmother. “Honey. I have written eleven books about exactly this, I know the genre beats in my sleep, and I'm telling you as a professional with a deadline and a contract, that is not a favor. That man by the drinks hasn't taken his eyes off you since you walked in — and he's pretending to guard the lemonade. The pretty one's working the whole table but he keeps checking that you're laughing. And the quiet one fixed atoy truckand then looked straight at you to see if you saw him do it.” She sets the plate down. Lowers her voice, the snark draining out of it all at once, gentle now. “You know that doesn't look fake, right? Like, from over here, with my whole entire eyeballs. When did it stop being fake, Jos?”
And I open my mouth to tell her it's still fake, it's all fake, it's a scheduling solution and a survival tactic and a thing I invented at my kitchen table, and what comes out instead, in the middle of my parents' backyard, under the PORTER FAMILY banner, with barbecue smoke in my hair, is nothing at all.
Because I can't say it. The lie won't come. For the first time in four weeks the lie won't come, and Cara watches it not come, and her face goes soft and a little sad and a lot happy all at once.
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “That's what I thought.”
Across the yard, Finn catches my eye, and lifts an eyebrow a precise degree, the one that meansyou good?, and withoutdeciding to, before I can stop it, I smile at him. The real one. The one I can't fake.
And I think,oh no.
And I think,three days was wrong — it's already too late.
Chapter 20
Hudson
Nobody warns you about the real danger of pretending to be somebody's alpha for a month.
At some point you forget you're pretending.
I clock the exact second it happens to me, and it happens in the Porters' backyard, under a hand-painted banner, with a paper plate of somebody's aunt's potato salad going warm in my hand.
We've been here an hour. Josie's across the yard being passed between relatives like a dish everybody wants seconds of, and I'm supposed to be running the play.
That's my job in this operation, the one we never wrote down but all understood. Finn holds the line. Logan does the quiet devastating sincerity. And I work the room, because working a room is the one thing I've never in my life had to fake. The grin. The easy hand on the shoulder. The name I remembered from an introduction twenty minutes ago.
I'm good at it. I've charmed her Uncle Ray, who came in wanting to hate me and instead spent twenty minutes telling me about the trout stream that runs through his property and theone fly he swears by. By the end of it I'd promised to come out and fish it with him before summer's done, and meant it.
I've complimented her mother's brisket to the exact degree that reads sincere and not strategic. I've told her Aunt Deb, and I quote, that I couldn't choose between her two pies if my life depended on it, which was a lie, because the pecan was better, but some lies are just good manners.
And the entire time, under the performance, I'm watching Josie.
That's the part they don't know about me. The whole town's got me filed as the loud one, the one who's not really paying attention, and I've spent years making sure they keep me filed there. A man who's always joking is a man nobody looks at too close.
But I see everything. I always have. It's just that I do it with a grin on so nobody feels watched.
So I'm the one who sees it.
