Page 33 of Off the Mark
“You hate playing by the rules.”
She grinned. “I’m working on it. But a nice, friendly boyfriend who shows up for me, publicly, and stares at me like he’s obsessed should do the trick. Does that make sense?”
I cocked a thumb at my face. “I’m the nice, friendly guy?”
“Let’s hope so.”
“That’s easy enough. Growing up, Dean and I were more on the troublemaking side of things. But you can trust that my sweet Irish grandmother raised me up right. I will not disappoint.”
She snagged her bottom lip with her teeth. “I don’t need you to lay your jacket over a puddle so I don’t get my dainty little feet wet. I hate all that stuff. So nice. Polite. But not super traditional.” She peered over my paper. “You’re not writing any of that down.”
“Don’t have to. We haven’t seen each other in a few years, but I stillknow you, Charlie. You’ve never been impressed by empty, vaguely sexist gestures of chivalry.”
Her eyes slid from mine, back to the television. But she was trying to hide a smile and not doing a great job of it. “I’m that transparent?”
“Being an authentic person will do that to ya, babe.”
She scowled at me. Playfully. So I nudged her, just as playfully.
“Can I make a request too?” I asked.
“Go for it.”
I pressed my hands together in prayer. “Go easy on me when you fake dump me after the championship race?”
Her eyes widened. “You’re askingmeto go easy onyou?”
“I always assumed you left men’s hearts insmithereensform.”
“And you don’t?” she shot back. “I wasn’t just a witness to you flirting with women nonstop. I was also the one serving them drinks days later, when they were mourning the fact that you hadn’t called to their friends. I poured a lot of shots in your name, Rowan.”
I scoffed through a flicker of unease. “Yeah, I was young and really fucking stupid about how to handle casual dating. But Itriedto be straightforward. I never promised I would call or anything.”
Charlie spun on her stool with an amused smirk. “Well,thatwas a lot of verbal tap-dancing. Damn, I was only giving you a hard time because I thought you already knew about these women.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “I didn’t…I didn’t not know. I just…” That flicker of unease surged into a discomfort that had me reaching for my beer. Charlie’s gaze burned into me, but I didn’t meet it.
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ve not been some saint either,” she admitted. “Sure, I’ve dated some trash men. But it’s not like I’ve handled every relationship perfectly. There’s probably a bar filled with men cursing my name as we speak.”
That pulled a tiny smile from me. “So like…you poured a lot of shots in my name? Or were you exaggerating?”
Her brow furrowed. “I wasn’t exaggerating. What did you think was going to happen, messing around like that in a gossipy town? There’s no way someone doesn’t get hurt at least once, right?”
Some part of me knew she was right.
Accepting that was a whole other issue.
I lifted a shoulder and finished the last of my beer. “We make a good match, Maddox. Neither of us are saints. Though all of that was real. This is pretend. It feels like it’ll be much easier to get it right when there are no feelings involved.”
Charlie cleared her throat. “Exactly, yeah. Plus, we’re not here to dig through our personal trash cans. We need to agree on our relationship backstory so we can get the details straight. I already told Dempsey we’d been dating for two months and we’re in our”—she winced—“honeymoon period.”
My head tipped back on a laugh. “Holy shit, this is gonna be fun.”
“You’re welcome for making it easy for you.”
“And how’s that?”
She pushed her bangs to the side. “Isn’t that the early part of a relationship when it’s all constant hot sex and talking?”
