The Fine Art of Faking It

by Lucy Score

  “I think it’s the tofurkey that’s sitting like a bowling ball in my stomach,” he told her.

  “You didn’t have to eat it,” she pointed out.

  “I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “How many gas pills is too many?” Eden wondered. “Because I’m so bloated I could be a parade float.”

  They helped each other up the wide front steps of Franklin and Phoebe’s pretty little craftsman cottage. Tucked away on a swatch of green grass at the back of the farm, it was a little slice of country heaven.

  The lights were already on inside, welcoming them.

  “Sweet baby cheeses! How many pies is that?” Eden hissed to Davis.

  “Eight. Eight entire pies… and then that looks like a cobbler.”

  Eden clamped a hand over her mouth. “Can we even do this?”

  Davis glared at the desserts like he would a cloud of aphids. “You listen to me, Eden Moody. We can and we will do this. And then we will go back to the inn and get naked.”

  She admired his blind, stupid faith in their sex drive.

  Franklin busied himself lighting a fire in the great room’s fireplace. Aurora, who had eaten as much as two adults, was sniffing around the pies. “Can I have apple and pumpkin and cheesecake?” she asked Gia.

  “Christ, Shortcake. Are your legs hollow?” Beckett asked ruffling her red curls.

  “Gram, do you have whipped cream?” Aurora asked Phoebe and grinned up at Beckett.

  The crowd groaned at the question.

  “In the fridge, sweetheart.” Phoebe had given up on the wine. “I’m going to make the biggest pot of coffee in the universe,” she announced. “Anyone want?”

  “Can you just inject it directly into my veins?” Summer asked.

  Davis steered Eden to the couch by the fireplace. “Maybe if we just sit down for a few minutes, we won’t feel like vomiting anymore.”

  With effort, Eden propped her denim clad legs up on the coffee table. “My biggest regret in life right now is that I wore jeans. I think they’re cutting off my circulation.”

  Summer flopped down in the overstuffed chair next to the couch with a groan. “Rookie mistake not wearing pjs. The rest of us just get to go home and fall into bed.”

  Summer was wearing a cute matching set of lavender thermal pajamas.

  “Mama! I sit with you?” Meadow demanded.

  “Okay, baby, but you’re going to have to climb up here yourself, or Mommy’s going to puke on your cute little head.”

  “Okay, Mama!” Meadow scrambled up onto the cushion next to her mother and promptly flopped into Summer’s lap.

  “Why, God? Why?” Summer wheezed.

  “Do you do this every holiday?” Eden asked.

  “Sure do!” Jax poked his head between Eden and Davis over the back of the couch. He was digging into a piece of pumpkin pie slathered with a tower of whipped cream.

  “How can you eat, man?” Davis asked him.

  “It’s his super power,” Joey said, slinking up behind them and laying across the back of the couch. “He can eat anything all day long.”

  “Jackson always was an emotional eater,” Phoebe called from the kitchen. “Now, who’s ready for pie?”

  Groans and maybe some dramatic gagging sounded throughout the entire first floor of the house.

  “Would you think less of me if I took my pants off right now?” Eden asked Davis.

  Davis was behind the wheel after losing the coin toss. To be fair, he hadn’t lost. He’d just been too full to bend over and look at the coin.

  “I unbuttoned mine two hours ago,” Davis told her as he steered them toward the inn. “Took my shoes off too. Can overeating make your feet swell?”

  “What about naked Thanksgiving sex?” Eden asked, shimmying out of her jeans. “Ahhhhh.”

  “Still happening,” Davis insisted grimly. “I’m a man of my word. I deliver what I promise.”

  Right now, the only thing less appealing than getting naked and bouncing around was the leftover pie that had been foisted on them. Phoebe gave them two to take home. Eden planned to serve them to her guests tomorrow morning for breakfast with fresh juices from OJs by Julia.

  Davis eased the car down the lane. Jax and Joey’s foursome were illuminated in the headlights as they walked home.

  “Besides the obscene amount of food, that was actually kind of nice,” Eden ventured.

  “They make family life look… fun,” Davis agreed.

  “Yeah. They do,” Eden agreed with a heavy sigh.

  “What’s that? Is that a dog?” he asked, pointing at a pair of yellow eyes reflecting the car’s headlights.

  Eden peered through the windshield. “Is that a goat?”

  One minute the shadowy figure was hunkered down behind the tree, and the next it was jogging into the midst of Jax’s family.

  “No! Bad goat!” Jax’s high-pitched screech rattled the car windows.

  Davis braked hard, and Eden’s seatbelt locked against her.

  They watched as the goat danced into the headlights leering at Jax. Reva and Caleb doubled over with laughter.

  “Ha! You Satanic son of a bitch!” Jax shouted yanking something from his coat pockets. “That’s right, Clementine! I came prepared. Cornbread!”

  Jax wound up like a major league pitcher and tossed what did appear to be cornbread into the field.

  Clementine stared him down as if plotting his goat-trampling death.

  “Oh, this isn’t good,” Eden breathed, smothering a laugh behind her hand.

  “Get out of here, Clementine,” Joey said, howling with laughter. She stepped between her husband and the offending farm animal.

  The goat weighed its options. Cornbread? Or Jackson Pierce’s pants?

  “She still wants to eat you, Jax,” Caleb giggled into his mittens.

  “Should we get out and help?” Davis asked.

  “I can’t outrun a goat right now.”

  “Shoo,” Joey said, holding one hand over her full-to-bursting stomach and waving the other at the goat. “Go on. Leave him alone this one time.”

  Clementine feinted to the right and dodged left, getting within biting distance before Joey blocked her.

  “You told me you were going to untrain her!” Jax reminded his wife.

  “I’ve been busy having a family and breeding horses, jackass. Do you want me to step aside?” Joey offered amicably.

  “No!” Jax grabbed his wife by the shoulders and hid behind her back. “Just make her go away.”

  “If I laugh any harder, I’m going to vomit forty pounds of food,” Davis told Eden.

  Clementine made her move. She dodged toward Joey again, and when Jax shrieked, the goat turned and jogged after the cornbread he’d thrown.

  “Was that goat smiling?” Davis asked.

  The inn was still standing when they returned. Eden’s phone had been blissfully silent during the day. She only had a handful of guests tonight, and they were all in town visiting family, so their needs were few.

  The dogs met them at the kitchen door, and Eden held the door so they could romp outside. “Watch out for runaway goats,” she warned them.

  Davis helped her stash the pies in the commercial refrigerator, and together they trudged down the hallway to their rooms. They paused outside of Davis’s door, staring at it. “Do you want to maybe change and come over to my room?” Eden offered. She’d never invited him into her space before. They spent almost all of their naked time in his bed or his backseat or her parents’ house.

  “Yeah. That’d be good,” he said.

  She unlocked her door and shuffled inside, dumping her purse, coat, and pants as she went. Normally, she was a tidy person to the point of obsession. But tonight was not the night for cleanliness and organization. Tonight was for food comas.

  She wrestled her way into a pair of stretchy leggings and a black tunic with an open back. If a guest needed her, she would at least look somewhat presentable. Flopping down on the couch
, Eden let out a heavy sigh. Despite the unbearable bloating and stomach pain, today had been… good.

  It was interesting watching a family with so many moving parts celebrate together. She’d seen festive family celebrations before, plenty under her own roof. She wondered if she would ever be part of the celebration rather than the organizer or a guest? Would it ever be her family celebrating, arguing, eating until they burst?

  She was happy here in the business she’d built. She’d spent so much time building it, she hadn’t really given much thought as to what else she might be missing out on. But watching Donovan fawning over sweet Eva, seeing the heated look Summer and Carter shared over the heads of their kids, it made her wonder. Would she have that? Could she have it? And why was it, when she tried to envision it all, that it was Davis’s face she saw?

  There was a soft knock at her door. “Come in,” she called rather than getting up off the couch.

  Davis, in athletic pants and a Taco Tuesday t-shirt, came in followed by the dogs.

  “Awh, thank you for letting them in,” Eden said.

  “I figured I’d save you the trip.”

  “Bless you.”

  She felt his weight at the end of the couch and opened her eyes she hadn’t realized were closed. Turkey made her eyelids so heavy.

  Davis picked up her feet and put them in his lap. “We can just rest here for a few minutes. Get our energy up to get naked.”

  “Sounds good,” she said.

  “You have a really nice place here.”

  “Thanks, Davis.”

  “I had a good time today,” he told her.

  “Me too.”

  “Makes me wonder if maybe there’s something to the whole marriage, family thing.”

  “Hmm,” Eden hummed.

  “You ever feel that way?”

  “They make it look easy,” Eden told him. “Can you imagine our families sitting down for a holiday meal?”

  His silence had her opening her eyes again, and she realized what she’d said. “Not that we’re in a real relationship or anything like that. Or that our families would ever be forced to spend time with us as a couple,” she corrected hastily.

  “Of course not.”

  She let the silence fall again. “Davis?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  They were both asleep in under a minute.

  42

  It may have been the turkey talking or some side effect of too many gas pills, but Davis couldn’t stop thinking about Eden’s comments. Imagining their families sitting down to break bread was, of course, ridiculous, impossible even. But she’d said it, and he couldn’t stop mulling it over, looking for a solution. Even now, when he was supposed to be helping Eden educate the volunteers on their HeHa roles.

  They were crammed into a conference room on the second floor of the library facing a dozen of Blue Moon’s finest citizens and a few more who wandered in off the street looking for a snack and some conversation.

  “So Rasheeda, you’re going to be in charge of the kids with the donation cans, right?” Eden asked, a statuesque woman in her fifties.

  Rasheeda nodded. “I’ve personally handpicked ten of the cutest kids in town. She pressed a button on her cellphone screen and a slide show appeared on the wall. “We’ve been practicing the puppy eyes and the quivering lips,” she said, scrolling through photos of adorable, devastated looking kids.

  “You’re a genius, Rasheeda,” Eden announced. “Now, let’s talk winter coat drive. What have we collected so far, Ms. Friendly?”

  Ms. Friendly was the meanest teacher at Blue Moon High. She sniffed in derision, her mousy brown hair was wrapped around her scalp like a python settling in for the night. “I still don’t see why we aren’t only accepting donations during the HeHa festival,” she griped. “Going through the donations cuts into my lunch, snack, and meditation breaks at school.”

  Before Eden could formulate the passive-aggressive, polite response Davis could see her working on, he smoothly stepped in. “I know it’s an imposition now,” he said with sympathy. “But just imagine how relieved you’ll feel that you aren’t responsible for carting fifty garbage bags of winter garments from the park back to the high school so they can be picked up.” He flashed her a devastating grin and Ms. Friendly fluffed her very married hair in appreciation.

  Eden narrowed her eyes at Davis, but he only winked.

  Moving on, she scanned the agenda he’d printed. “I think that’s everything. We’ve got the chicken corn soup covered, the canned good pick-up scheduled, and all volunteers have been added to the email list and Facebook group.” She checked off each item with the zest of a list lover. And he found it incredibly sexy.

  “Are there any questions?”

  They fielded another ten minutes of questions that would be asked only in Blue Moon.

  Can I bring my pet ferrets to the funnel cake stand?

  Will there be a designated nudist area?

  Will The Man be recording us with drones?

  Nope. NO! And maybe. Just kidding.

  The volunteers filed out of the room talking about charity and ferrets. “Nice job, partner,” Davis said, raising a hand.

  Eden slapped his palm. “We work well together, don’t we?”

  “Kind of makes you wish we’d have done all this sooner, doesn’t it?”

  “What, you mean burned your house down?”

  “Har har.” He nudged her toward the door. “I have a feeling this is going to be the best HeHa in the history of Blue Moon.” It was time they had a talk. About what happened after revenge. About where they stood… together.

  “So, listen,” he began as she locked the door behind them.

  But a ruckus interrupted them. Two conference room doors on opposite sides of the hallway were open.

  “I need safety pins or else the whole world is going to see Bruce’s butt cheeks,” Ellery called over her shoulder as she barreled out of one room into the next.

  “We’re trying to make money, not get sued,” Rainbow muttered under her breath as she followed Ellery. Instead of her usual boxy suit, Rainbow was wearing a long flowing skirt in purple and… pasties on her otherwise bare and ample bosom.

  “Holy shit,” Davis murmured. He’d intended only to turn around but rapped smartly into the wall instead.

  “Oh, like you haven’t seen your share of these,” Rainbow said, rolling her eyes.

  “What’s uh… what’s going on?” Eden asked, clearing her throat, looking everywhere but Rainbow’s boobs.

  “Oh! Eden! Davis! How lovely to see you,” Bruce said, poking his head out of the second room. Bruce was wearing an olive wreath on his head and a very short Greek tunic that bared his chest and gapped over his ass. There was a large white screen set up behind him and a camera on a tripod. Nikolai Vulkov, Emma’s husband and famed photographer, was sitting on a folding chair with his head in his hands.

  “Oh, hey… Bruce. What’s hanging? I mean jiggling. Shaking! What’s shaking?” Eden asked in a strangled voice.

  “Bruce, Amethyst’s body paint is dry,” Gordon announced wielding an airbrush. “Do you want to come see before her shots?”

  “Please excuse me.” Bruce sidestepped with dignity across the hall, accidentally flashing his ass to two librarians who were minding their own business shelving books.

  “Uh, Niko,” Davis called into the now empty room.

  “I’m not looking up unless you promise me you’re fully clothed,” Niko said miserably.

  “Fully clothed,” Davis promised.

  Warily, Niko raised his gaze.

  “What the hell is going on?” Eden asked.

  “I love my wife very, very much. That’s what’s going on,” Niko said.

  “Emma roped you into this?” Davis clarified, eyeing the props. Plates of grapes, gold chargers, an acoustic guitar.

  He nodded. “It was some kind of emergency, according to Gia and Eva. They need to raise money. Whe
n they said a calendar, I didn’t think it would be a barely concealed nudity calendar. I live here four days a week. How can I look these people in the eye ever again? Pasties on the bank president! I’ve been staring at Bruce’s ass cheeks for the last thirty minutes!”

  “They’re trying to raise money with a nudey calendar?” Eden shot Davis a triumphant look.

  “Something about budget concerns. Do you have liquor on you? I’ll literally drink anything if it gets me through this,” Niko begged.

  “Sorry, man,” Davis said, slapping Niko on the shoulder.

  “I’ll text Emma,” Eden promised. “I’m sure she can send someone from the brewery.”

  “Please hurry. I have to shoot my sisters-in-law dressed as mermaids next. I’ve shot naked super models painted in oil on an airfield in Paris. I don’t think I can do this.”

  “We’ll send help,” Davis promised lamely as Eden towed him toward the door.

  “Let’s get out of here before we see Gordon’s junk—Oh God. Never mind.”

  They raced down the hall in the direction of the atrium and away from Gordon Berkowicz’s skinny form.

  “The Beautification Committee claims another innocent victim,” Eden giggled over her shoulder when they hit the stairs.

  Davis dashed down the stairs behind Eden wondering if they’d just gotten an even better revenge than they could have planned.

  43

  They laughed to the point of hysteria the whole way home.

  Davis wiped his eyes as Eden maneuvered the inn’s twisting drive. “I’m going to say it. Seeing Bruce like that was worth a burned-down kitchen. I feel avenged.”

  Eden laughed. “I honestly didn’t think they’d take things this far. I almost wish we would have gotten a peek at Amethyst’s body paint.”

  “We’ll see it in the calendar.”

  The inn loomed before them, and Chewy and Vader romped toward the car. Eden parked, and together they skirted the side of the building and entered through the kitchen, the dogs on their heels.

  “Did you two have a good time?” Davis asked, ruffling first Chewy’s fur and then Vader’s. Vader wasn’t playing as hard to get anymore where Davis was concerned. She leaned into his leg and stared adoringly up at him. Eden had to concede the point that her dogs adored her former mortal enemy.