by Holly Renee
“Just tell her the truth.” Kennedy was always the rational one.
“Yeah right.” Liam ran his fingers through his hair, and there was something about watching him be truly nervous for the first time since I met him that I liked. Way too much. “You should have heard how excited she was when I told her. She’s been calling and texting me every day, asking me to bring her. She’s even been asking me for a picture so she can see what her grandkids will look like.”
“Did you send her one?” Chloe was far too interested in Liam’s distress. This was one of the reasons why I loved her.
“Hell no. I was going to send her one off the internet, but knowing her, she’d reverse search it on Google or something to find her.”
That would be hilarious. I wish we could all be there to watch Liam get caught in his lie. He was always calm and so aloof, and I knew it would be one of the best moments of my life to watch him get caught by his own mother.
“Why don’t you just take Brooke with you?”
My head shot up in Chloe’s direction, and I wasn’t sure if I heard her correctly.
“What?” Liam was apparently feeling the exact same way as me.
“That’s not a bad idea.” Kennedy sat up in the chair as she stared across the table at us. “Brooke could pretend to be your girlfriend for the week. She needs a vacation from work anyway.”
“No.” I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “That’s not happening.”
“Why not?” I could practically see Chloe rubbing her hands together. “You all are friends, so it wouldn’t be awkward, and you know enough about each other that your mom wouldn’t suspect a thing.”
Except it would be awkward as hell.
It would be the most awkward, horrible week of my life.
But Chloe and Kennedy didn’t know that because I didn’t tell them what happened at the wedding. I hadn’t told anyone.
I preferred to put my head in the sand and pretend like it didn’t happen.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Liam said the words, but he looked like he was actually considering it.
Like he thought I would actually agree to something like that.
“Agreed. It’s not happening.”
“The ultimate bachelor and bachelorette.” Chloe pointed back and forth between Liam and I. “I bet the two of you could even kiss in front of them and not be affected at all.”
He could. I was absolutely certain about that.
But I wasn’t willing to find out whether or not it would affect me. Because I already knew the answer.
“You all have lost your damn minds. I’m not going to Tennessee with Liam to lie to his mama’s face in some elaborate scheme because he can’t tell her that he’s not relationship material.”
“Oh, shit.” Tucker snickered under his breath, and I couldn’t believe that I had just said that out loud.
I looked over at Liam who was now looking at me with a smirk on his face, but I couldn’t read it. I could never read him.
“You know what I mean.” I rolled my eyes and tried to brush off what I had just said.
“Oh. I got it.” He nodded his head.
“When is the last time you were in a relationship?” I asked, trying to prove my point. I didn’t know why I allowed it, but one little look from him and he was already under my skin.
“When were you?” He asked the question so nonchalantly, but it hit its mark.
He was right. I hadn’t been in a relationship in so long I could barely remember when it was. But I wasn’t destined to be an old woman who had no husband and no babies and fourteen puppies because I didn’t do cats. I wasn’t. It wasn’t happening.
“Touché.” He was right. Maybe I wasn’t relationship material either.
Our waiter interrupted our conversation to set our food in front of us, and I was thankful for the reprieve.
There was no way in hell I would be going home with Liam. Hell, I tried to avoid him at all costs these days.
“I think it’d be good for you to get away for a little while.”
I stared at my best friend like she had lost her damn mind. Sure, a week away from the chaos of work sounded heavenly, but not with him.
She and I hadn’t talked about anything that had gone down between Liam and I or the lack thereof, but she knew me well enough to know that this wasn’t going to happen.
She knew me well enough to know that going home with Liam would not be a good idea for me. He may not have ever wanted anything from me, but I didn’t know that I would be able to say the same if I had to spend a week alone with him.
Or maybe I would.
Maybe a week with him would tell my libido and subconscious that wanted to be attracted to him even after everything that happened to calm the hell down.
“Can we drop this and eat?” I looked around the table. At everyone except Liam.
But he was the only one who came to my rescue.
“Yeah. I’m fucking starving.”
Men like Liam didn’t starve. There were too many people in this world who would be willing to give him anything for him to ever even feel the edge of hunger.
But I was famished and I wasn’t going into the lion’s den with the only thing that seemed to feed my appetite these days.
I was blond, but I sure as hell wasn’t dumb.
Four
The Deal
Liam
I had lost my damn mind.
There was no other explanation for it.
It was the only reason I could think of that my hand would be knocking on Brooke’s door right now.
I had spent the majority of my night last night lying in bed and thinking about Chloe’s idea. Would it be completely stupid and reckless to take Brooke home with me? Absolutely. Did I have any other options? Negative.
I even stalked through Brooke’s Instagram last night, careful not to press any damn buttons that would clue her into my investigation. All I needed was for me to like one of her photos from two years ago. Yes. I went back that far.
Brooke was fucking gorgeous. There was absolutely no denying that. She attracted attention everywhere she went. Every man’s head turned as she walked by, and for good reason. I was right there with them. She had a body that was sinful.
God sculpted her with the intention of torturing men like me.
And she had been. Torturing me.
Ever since the day I met her.
But as much as Brooke seemed like the girl who wanted nothing but a good time, I knew better. You could see it in her eyes. It was clear as fucking day, and I had no interest in going there with her.
Not again.
I had been there before, and I wasn’t in the mood to get my ass kicked by Tucker or Kennedy for that matter when Kennedy’s best friend fell for me, and I didn’t fall back.
I never fell back.
It was some fucked up part of my DNA. I was sure of it.
It’s why I stopped us at the wedding.
Maybe someday it would be different, but I highly doubted it.
Did I want to fuck Brooke? More than I wanted an extra inch on my dick. But wanting to fuck her was not a good enough reason to screw everything else up.
“What are you doing here?” She stood with the door barely cracked open, but I could see that she was wearing a pair of shorts that did nothing to cover her long tan legs.
“I just wanted to come over and check on you.”
She immediately knew I was lying.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to check on her. It just wasn’t the way our friendship functioned. Or what was left of our friendship after we almost fucked it up.
We relied on each other when we needed to, but we never really talked about it.
Hell, come to think of it, we didn’t really talk about anything. Not anything that actually mattered.
Not unless it had something to do with Kennedy or Tucker.
“Uh huh.” She opened the door a bit more, allowing me to come in, and I was o
verwhelmed by the smell of her as I stepped into her apartment. It wasn’t perfume. At least I didn’t think it was. The scent was soft and feminine and fit her perfectly.
“How was work today?” I sat down on her couch and looked around the room. It looked so different in here since Kennedy moved out. I mean, it was almost the same, the furniture, the walls, but almost every hint of Kennedy was gone, and this place was all Brooke now.
“Sucked.” She plopped down on the opposite end of the couch and tucked a pillow against her chest.
“That sucks.” Obviously. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say unless I wanted to blurt out that I really needed her to come home with me and meet my parents.
“What do you want, Liam?” Her fingers were playing with the edge of a pillow as she spoke.
“Who said I wanted anything?”
She wasn’t buying my shit. She never really had. She just stared at me with a bored expression on her face and was waiting on me to answer her honestly.
“Okay.” I turned on the couch to face her. If I was going to ask this of her, really, truly ask her, then I should at least be man enough to ask her to her face. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what Chloe said last night, and I think you should come to Tennessee with me.”
She seemed shocked those words actually came out of my mouth, and I couldn’t blame her because I was surprised myself.
She cocked her head to the side and studied me before replying, “Have you been drinking?”
I chuckled because she looked so damn cute when she was being so serious. “No. I’m serious. I think it’s a great idea.”
“A great idea?” She repeated my words back to me as soon as I said them. “You think it’s a great idea for me” —she pointed to her chest— “to come home with you?” She flipped her finger around in my direction. “This has got to be a joke.”
“It’s not.” I couldn’t stop smiling at her and the face she was making.
“So, you need someone to come home with you.” She starts ticking things off on her fingers. “Lie to your parents, pretend to be your girlfriend, and spend a whole week with you without any reprieve, and you really thought I was the girl for the job?”
“Yes?” Now I was starting to second guess my decision to come over here.
“And what’s in it for me?” She stretched her legs out in front of her, and I knew that she meant business. But the only thing I could seem to think about at that moment was her long perfect legs and how good they felt in my hands when I was driving her crazy from behind.
“A week vacation in Tennessee. A week away from your job.” She didn’t look impressed. “Obviously, I will pay for everything.”
“Obviously,” she said sarcastically.
“If a weeklong vacation is all I needed, I would find myself a temporary sugar daddy.” She laughed at her own joke. “You’re just going to have to be honest with your mom and actually tell her the truth.”
I knew she wouldn’t say yes so easily, but I didn’t think she would play hardball. I knew the way to her heart.
“What about that building on Main Street? The Marshall building?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, and I knew I was playing with fire. “What about it?”
“You have been eyeing that building for how long now? I heard the other day that it’s probably going to be taken off the market soon. They found a buyer.”
It was a lie, but it wasn’t. When I found out how badly Brooke wanted to buy that old rundown house to open her own salon, I called the current owner just to find out the details, and even though it had been on the market for quite some time, there was suddenly a lot of interest in it due to the revamp of the location. The perfect location. Right downtown located near our restaurant. The foot traffic alone would make the investment worth it.
But I knew that Brooke couldn’t afford it right now.
She really never spoke to me about it, but I overheard Kennedy talking about it one day when we walked by. Apparently, even though Brooke had dreamed of that place for as long as she could remember, she never really saw it as a possibility.
Hell, from what Kennedy said, Brooke didn’t think she could make her dream of the salon happen even in the shittiest building she could find.
But she could.
And even though I was about to use this offer as ammunition to get what I wanted from her, it was something I had been thinking about almost every day since Kennedy had told us.
But I was a businessman, and buying a building for a girl who I had no interest in other than being friends or fucking was a really bad business decision. But right here, right now, it was all I had.
I could see the disappointment in her eyes even though she wouldn’t admit it out loud. “Do you know what they plan to do with it?”
“I heard that it will be some sort of retail store. Probably some big box store, I would assume.”
“Oh.” She gently shrugged her shoulders. “It was bound to happen sometime or another.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“We can make a deal. You help me and I can help you.”
“So what? I go to your mom’s for a week and pretend to be your girlfriend and you’re going to purchase me a building? What the hell do you think this is? A scene from Pretty Woman?”
I chuckled, but she didn’t seem to find it funny. “Not exactly. You come home to my mom’s with me for a week, and I’m offering a partnership into your new business.”
She watched me, carefully. Too carefully if I’m being honest. I could see her studying me, trying to figure out what my motive was, why I would offer her this. But she wouldn’t find it because I didn’t have a damn clue myself.
“And if I say no?” She cocked her pretty head to the side. “The offer is off the table?”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we get there, but I’m hoping you won’t say no. That’s not a good start to a partnership.” Of course, I wouldn’t tell her no. No matter what people thought of me, I wasn’t that big of an asshole.
I was just being one right now because I needed her just as badly as she needed me.
“Okay.”
“What?” I cupped my hand around my ear to make sure I heard her correctly.
“I said okay.”
“Yes!” I didn’t hide my relief as I threw myself back on the couch and took my first deep breath since the lie passed through my lips and into my mom’s fairy tale wedding planning.
“But...” She held her hand up to stop me. “I have some conditions.”
“Conditions. Cool. I can handle some conditions.”
“First, no kissing.”
And just like that, she rained on my parade.
“I’m a twenty-nine-year-old man bringing home a girl for the first time. My mom’s going to expect some kissing.”
“You’ve never brought any girl home?” She sounded shocked, but she shouldn’t be. She knew how I was.
“Of course not.” I shook off her question easily. “How about I promise not to slip you any tongue?”
God, what I wouldn’t do to have my tongue on her again.
“I would suggest that if you want to keep your friend.” She pointed down to my dick, and I straightened my pants under her scrutiny and threat.
“What else?”
“We’re sleeping in separate beds.”
I couldn’t help but grin at her rules. Basically, don’t touch me or put me in any situation where I might touch you. The line had been drawn in the sand. Got it.
“Anything else?”
“I’ll send you a list of road trip snacks, and I expect them all to be in the car waiting on me when I arrive.”
“Anything for you, babe,” I joked, but she sat up a little straighter.
“That was weird.”
“Well, get used to it.” I stood from her couch and straightened out the legs of my slacks. “There’s going to be a lot more of that weirdness happening
over the next week.”
“I can’t wait.” She rolled her eyes.
Come to think of it, I couldn’t either.
Five
Knight in Shining Armor
Brooke
He had every snack I had asked for in his car and more. He also seemed nervous, and I was eating that crap up.
“Are you scared of your mom? Should I be worried?”
He gave me the side-eye as he merged onto another interstate.
“No. I’m not scared of my mom. My mom is the best. She just has really high expectations for me, is all.”
That seemed sweet, really. My mom didn’t expect much out of me at all. She had one philosophy in life and that was to use her beauty and the thing between her legs to get ahead in life.
“And what exactly is the story here?” I waved back and forth between us. “We better go in there with it straight or I have a feeling your mom will see right through us.”
“Shit. You’re right.” He looked like he hadn’t really thought this out. It was a good damn thing I was here. “We’ve been dating for two months.” He sounded like he was speaking more to himself than to me. “You’re madly in love with me, but who could blame you.”
I smacked his arm, and he looked shocked as he rubbed it with his opposite hand. “You can’t hit the driver.”
“Then tell the driver not to be an asshole.”
This felt awkward. I had been around Liam too many times to count, but never quite like this and definitely not after what happened. There was always some other element involved, some other friend. If it ever seemed like we were crossing the line, one of our friends would be there to throw us right back into reality.
“Okay, okay. But we do have to pretend to be into each other. My mom’s not going to fall for it if you’re smacking me or giving me your evil eye the whole time.”
“What evil eye?” I acted offended.
“That evil eye.” He pointed toward my face. “It scares me enough. I don’t need you putting my mom through it too.”
I rolled said eyes before looking out the windshield. “So, how did we meet?”
