Kiss Her Once for Me (29)

“I panicked, too,” I confess, knowing she can’t see the heat of my face.

“So, you didn’t know?” she asks. “You didn’t know you were engaged to my older brother?”

“What? No! Of course not!” I sputter. “You and I weren’t exactly on a last-name basis. And Andrew calls you Jacqueline, and there are no pictures of you on his Instagram”—I definitely would’ve noticed—“and he said your family spends every Christmas here, when I happen to know this is not where you spent last Christmas.”

All of this is true. On paper, there was nothing to connect Andrew and Jack before she showed up here. Of course, now that I’m confronted with the truth, the signs are more obvious. The shared casual lean. The shared eyebrow pinch. The shared pouty mouth, the shared staggering bone structure, the shared gorgeous brown eyes and soft black hair. They’re both built like Olympic swimmers. They both have the same tendency to flash a charming smile and completely upend my life.

She props her arms against the railing between us and leans forward. “What are the odds, huh? Of all the people in Portland…” She laughs her too-big belly laugh, like it’s the funniest thing she can imagine. I grab the railing on my balcony, too, so our bodies are mirror images of each other. But I’m distinctly not laughing.

“It’s… it’s good to see you again, Elle.” Jack exhales with that same easy honesty. “I didn’t think I ever would, but…” She reaches up to push aside the flop of hair falling into her eyes. “You look good. Are you good?”

“I—” No, I almost say. No, I’m not good. I’m a frozen burrito. My ten-year plan crumbled, and I crumbled along with it. I’m so lonely and desperate, I agreed to a marriage for money. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”

“Good.” Jack smiles fully, and I look away again. “What are we going to do?” she asks, and for a moment, it feels like we’re on the same team again. I almost reach out for her before I remember there’s a fifteen-foot drop into snow between us.

“I don’t know,” I say.

She pushes back from the railing. “I don’t think we should tell Andrew the truth. About us.”

I’m not sure what I expected her to say, but it isn’t this.

“It… it will only hurt him, I think,” Jack announces casually. “So we should just keep what happened last year between us, okay?”

“Oh, okay,” I stammer in agreement.

She flicks her hair out of her face again. “It was only one day, right?” she says, her quarter-moon smile pale in the dark. “It’s not like it meant anything.”

“Right,” I say. “Of course. It didn’t mean anything.”

Jack nods once, then turns on the heel of her work boot and stomps back inside the house, Paul Hollywood following closely. The door closes between us with a snick.

I stare at the empty balcony across from me long after she’s gone. I already knew what happened between us a year ago meant nothing to her. So why does it feel like my heart is breaking all over again?





Chapter Nine


“Well, that went off without a hitch,” I snap when Andrew and I are finally alone in our shared bedroom for the night, our stomachs full of Katherine’s short rib and Meemaw’s sangria, our fake smiles distorting our facial muscles.

Andrew leans back against the closed door and sighs. “It could have gone better, I suppose.” He smiles at me, like he believes his smile will solve all of our problems.

“Could have gone better? We are lying to your sweet old grandmas, and your sister’s best friend is like the Sherlock Holmes of fake-dating!”

“But tomorrow is a new day,” he says cheerfully. “The good news is, my grandmas and mom ate it right up. They’re all so desperate for me to settle down and make them grandbabies, they saw what they wanted to see: me, helplessly in love. As for Dylan, we’ll just have to be more convincing.”

“How do you propose we do that, exactly?”

Andrew scrunches up his nose. This is clearly his thinking very hard face. “I could kiss you more?” he suggests.

“Please don’t.”

“If you insist.” He crosses the room and flops down on the queen-size bed.

“There’s only one bed,” I point out to him. “Aren’t you going to valiantly offer to sleep on the floor?”

Andrew gets up, reaches for his rolling suitcase, and pulls a black leather toiletries bag from the front pouch. “No, I’m not.”

“In romantic comedies, the gentleman always offers to sleep on the floor in these situations.”

“I’m not a gentleman, and this is not a romantic comedy. Besides, we are two mature adults who’ve shared a bed before.” He pulls off his sweater and tosses it inside a giant armoire in the corner of the room before he sits down at a little vanity table and begins performing a multistep nighttime skin care routine.

For a moment, I stand there, awkwardly watching him dab cream beneath his eyes, thinking about grandma hugs and home-cooked dinners, and Jack on a balcony saying, Why her? “Andrew,” I eventually croak. “We can’t do this.”

He eyes me over his shoulder in the mirror. “We can’t… share a room? I think it might give us away if we sleep in separate beds.”