by Maria Luis
Danny’s city-issued police dog didn’t listen. With his big brown paws wrapped around her thigh, the big guy went to town, his furry face a mask of bliss as his tongue lolled out of his mouth.
Yup. This was her life.
Lizzie curled a hand around his collar and gave a sharp tug on the leather. “Rock, Rocky, c’mon dude, not in public!”
The sound of her brother’s raspy laughter caught Lizzie’s attention. Her gaze snapped to his face, noting the good humor in his gray eyes. “Tell your dog to stop treating my leg like a stripper pole.”
Nathan Danvers, older by two years, only threw his head back with a boisterous ha-ha-ha.
“You’re evil,” Lizzie muttered with another tug at Rocky’s collar, “totally evil. You don’t deserve your wife, you know. She’s way better than—”
Jade followed her husband into the entryway, took one glance at the K-9 humping Lizzie, and said, “Didn’t I tell you not to wear those pants last time? You know Rock loves them.”
Lizzie’s mouth fell open. “That’s all you have to say? Blame the pants? I’ll have you know that these suede pants were a steal, a total find. Grabbed them at the thrift shop for a whopping ten bucks when they originally retail for over two hundred.”
Danny strolled closer. “Rocky knows quality when he sees it. Can you blame him?”
After a short whistle from her brother and a hand command Lizzie didn’t understand, Rocky gave one last desperate hump (oh, God), and then released her to trot over to his partner-slash-father. Panting happily, the dog sat with a heavy thump of his butt on the floor, and stared up at Danny as though to ask, I did good, didn’t I, Dad?
Both Danny and Jade reached forward to scratch the pup behind his ears. One of them must have hit a spot because Rocky twisted to the side, neck further exposed for their fingers, as his hind leg thumped like Bugs Bunny.
With a mock-glare, Lizzie finally drew off her jean jacket and hung it up on the coatrack by the front door. “You better try to get him out of that habit before the baby decides to spring from your vagina, Jade.”
After three years of growing accustomed to Lizzie’s forwardness, Jade Danvers only rolled her dark eyes and made a subtle show of scratching her forehead with her middle finger. “I thought we discussed not using certain language around me.”
Lizzie grinned. “Which one got to you this time? Baby? Or the springing from your vagina bit?”
“I can’t wait until you get pregnant.”
“You’ll be waiting for a while, then. First, we need a sperm donor.”
Her brother cleared his throat awkwardly, muttered “boyfriend, you mean, right?” and motioned for them to follow him into the kitchen.
The Victorian-era house had been in the Danvers’ family since Lizzie had been a kid—and she’d always despised it, until recently. Memories of her drunken father generally took hold and overrode all the good, not to mention the one memory that never shook free: a teenage Danny bleeding out in the library, his breathing shallow and fading quickly. Their father had been responsible for that, and Lizzie had never felt even the slightest measure of sadness when they’d learned that he had died in a drunk driving accident a few months later.
But still, the memories never faded. Not when Beth, their mother, had decided to keep living in the Victorian, Bayou St. John house; not when Danny had decided to live there later on, after Beth remarried police lieutenant Josh Cartwell and they moved across the Mississippi River to Gretna with Lizzie in tow.
Only in the last three years, since Danny had met Jade, had the house with all of its secrets, become a true home. One with sunlight and laughter and open doors that never slammed shut in anger.
And in two months, the Danvers family of three would become a family of four.
Jade was having a girl, and Lizzie was over the moon for her best friend and her brother.
She watched the Miami-born Jade take a seat at the table, one hand going to her belly as the other steadied her stance with a palm to the table. Some women you just couldn’t tell when they were about to pop out a kid; Jade wasn’t one of those women.
Her stomach was the size of a watermelon, at least.
Danny liked to tease that Jade was about to give him twins, even though all the sonograms showed a single baby girl.
Amelia, if Jade had her way.
Sophia, if Danny had his.
Lizzie was hoping for an Elizabeth.
Once Jade was all settled in, she announced, “I heard a little something through the grapevine about you getting a new boyfriend?”
Five hours had been all it took for Lizzie’s photo with Gage to go viral.
So much for bringing up #badboyirredemption casually into the conversation.
“I, um, may be seeing someone.” Lizzie chose the seat opposite Jade’s and slowly sank down onto it, her leg drawn up under her. “Sort of. It’s complicated.”
“More complicated than dating a guy who plays video games for a living?” Danny grabbed plates from the cupboard and set them on the counter. “I told you that Scott was a total tool. You should have listened to me before you went out with him.”
Her brother thought all of her boyfriends were “total tools.”
“Are you really one to talk?” she tossed back. “Until Jade, you were the worst sort of tool.”
“At least I had friends outside of a computer screen.”
“Hey!” Lizzie narrowed her eyes. “Watch yourself, big bro. You’re speaking to a woman whose entire life is internet-based.”
“Your photography business isn’t centered on the internet, not really.”
Giving Jade a grateful smile, Lizzie sighed and pulled her hair up into a bun. “Thanks for trying to make me feel better, but we both know that Naked You is just as web-focused as ThatMakeupGirl. It’s all right; I’m totally content with the knowledge that I’m a millennial through and through.”
And it was true.
While her YouTube channel focused on makeup and skincare, Lizzie also ran a side business that focused on the bare skin. As little or as much as her clients were willing to show. From the time that she’d been little, the human body had fascinated her. While her friends played with dolls and made up extravagant stories about their everyday doll lives, Lizzie had wanted more.
Why were they shaped so oddly?
Why were their eyes so bulging, their torsos so tiny, their breasts so big?
Lizzie had tried her hand at fashion design, only to find that she lacked the patience to sit around at a sewing machine for hours.
Drawing outfits was also beyond her.
But makeup she’d developed an affinity for, early on.
And photography allowed her a glimpse of reality and the chance to observe people for who they really were beneath the gloss and the foundation, sometimes even beneath the confines of clothing, too.
Naked You provided a creative outlet to dress people down, whereas ThatMakeupGirl was all about the glitz and the glam.
Two sides of Lizzie, and yet very few people knew that she was the photographer behind the inspiring social media account. As in, only Danny and Jade, along with her mother and stepfather, were aware of Lizzie’s other business.
She wasn’t ashamed of her work; if anything, a need to keep a part of her life private had unintentionally evolved into secrecy.
Heaving a small sigh, Lizzie rose to help Danny set the table. “Just say it,” she said, catching her brother’s narrowed gaze.
Never one to mince words, he handed her the bowl of pasta sauce and gave exactly what she’d asked for: “You’ve got to pull back from social media, Liz. Your life is online. Your friends are online. Your businesses—both of them—are online. Your relationships with guys, lately, have all been online. Aren’t you getting a little sick of the distance factor?”
She’d been sick of the distance for years. But the longer she’d stayed in the game, the harder it became to separate herself from it. If it weren’t for her family and f
riends in New Orleans, she’d have no roots.
Just like the butterfly on her butt, which was healing quite nicely, thank you very much, she’d be ever restless and never in the present.
“I do take my photos for Naked You locally,” she said, placing the bowl on the table. “That counts for something, right?”
Jade gave her A Look, one that she’d no doubt deliver to AmeliaSophiaElizabeth the moment she messed up for the first time. “Amor, you don’t even use your real name when you operate Naked You.”
Her heart clenched. “Lizabeth Vittoria is very close to Elizabeth Victoria.”
Danny came up beside her with the pasta and a bottle of wine. He set the cabernet far away from his wife, as though knowing she’d be tempted to have just a sip. “It’s a lie.”
It wasn’t a lie, it was . . . “Dramatization,” she said out loud, “I’m just making sure my identities stay separate. A lot of young girls watch my YouTube videos. Naked You is all about the naked form. The two can’t co-exist.”
“I don’t think that’s the issue.”
Her lips pursed. “Are you about to lecture me, Nathan?”
His brows pulled low at her use of his real name. “All I’m saying is, you’ve been pushing ThatMakeupGirl for a decade now. Same shit, different day. Don’t you ever wonder if it’s not you anymore?”
Yes.
All the time.
But she owed it to her fans to keep going, especially those who had been with her from the start. She’d watched them all grow up; they’d traded emails that spanned longer than some marriages lasted. She’d received baby photos in the mail and even a few graduation caps. YouTube had given her a job; her fans had given her a purpose.
Swallowing hard, Lizzie fiddled with her fork. “It’s why I started Naked You—to give myself an outlet in a completely different atmosphere.”
“And now you’re going to date Gage Harvey just to satisfy people’s thirst for drama?”
“Nathan.” Jade’s quiet reprimand was paired with a hand to his forearm.
Lizzie’s brother was huge, more mountain than man, but at his wife’s touch, he let out a big sigh. “You’re going to get hurt again, Lizzie.”
“How do you—? Did you see the photo of us online?”
“Who didn’t see the photo of you two locking lips? I’ve already seen it on three different websites today. But no”—Danny shook his head—“I knew before the photo. Your boy Gage told me himself.”
“He did what?”
Annoyance balled her hands into fists as she thought of Gage from that morning at the coffee shop. He’d been so smooth, so suave, in telling her that she had one evening to clue her brother in about their fake relationship. The fact that he’d already—
Lizzie pressed her knuckles to her mouth and counted to five. No, make that ten. Just to be sure she didn’t reach through her phone and strangle the hot-as-hell cop. “All right,” she muttered, “I’m calm.”
“Your skin looks a bit red,” drawled Danny as he dumped pasta on Jade’s plate, then Lizzie’s.
It took everything in Lizzie’s power not to sound bitter when she ground out, “It’s called blush.”
“Nathan,” Jade said, already digging into her pasta, “be nice to Lizzie.”
“Or what?”
“Doghouse, my love.”
That was all Jade said, and Danny gave in without a fight. “In case you’re wondering, we had to deliver a warrant the other night. Harvey was there with S.O.D. It was a damn good scene, by the way. The client tried to slip out the back, and we were all there waiting for him—”
Jade laughed. “It always gets me when you call them clients.”
With a smirk, Danny swirled his fork in his pasta. “The Public Integrity Bureau’s new technical term for anyone who’s on the wrong side of the law.”
Lizzie poured herself a glass of wine and took a healthy sip. “Can we get on with the story? The two of you are going to put me to sleep with all the cop lingo.”
Despite the fact that Jade looked ready to pop, her belly was so large, she still worked full-time for the NOPD’s crime lab. Back in the day, she and Danny had run into each other frequently in the field, even after they’d gotten together. Nowadays, from what Lizzie understood, their meetups didn’t happen as frequently. Her brother’s move into the K-9 unit meant that he was needed all over the city, and rarely camped out on one scene long enough for Jade to show up.
Danny leaned in, planting one forearm on the table as he met her gaze. “You’re a fun-killer. It was a good night. Anyway, after task force brought the client to lockup, Harvey came on over. You can imagine my surprise when he wanted to talk about you.”
Lizzie drank more wine.
It was either that or beg for information.
And her brother was not above making her work for it.
They were siblings all the way to their core.
“So?” she prompted when the silence stretched too long. “What did he say?”
Dropping back in his chair, Danny folded his hands over his flat stomach and watched her. Rocky, though he was never given table scraps, pranced over and laid his head on his dad’s thigh.
The drool was real.
“Besides the fact that he had his hands all over you for that ridiculous tattoo?” Danny’s shoulder lifted. “Not much. Said that you surprised him with a hell of an offer he couldn’t refuse. I’m guessing he’s your commitment-phobe?”
She was never going to live that video down. The next thirty days couldn’t end fast enough. Offering a half-smile, she said, “He seemed to fit the bill.”
“Considering that I’ve never known him to have a girlfriend, you’re probably right.” Trading a glance with Jade, Danny added, “I’m just—we’re just worried you’re signing yourself up for heartbreak here. I know it’s all part of your plan, but do you really know what you’re doing?”
Not at all.
And that was the scary part, because for the last decade Lizzie had operated on a very clear trajectory. Every move she made as a Beauty Influencer was strategic. Every swipe of lip gloss, every collaboration she’d done with a popular brand, had been to further her brand and become more than the stereotype of “that makeup girl.”
She lived makeup. She breathed makeup. And makeup afforded her everything that she owned.
But you’re tired of it.
Yes. Maybe. It wasn’t so clear-cut, but what was clear to her was this thing with Gage was outside of her norm. She might always date “total tools,” as Danny so eloquently put it, but Gage was . . . different. She didn’t know how, not quite yet. Didn’t mean she wasn’t dying to peel back his layers and discover what lay beneath.
She met her brother’s gaze. “I was told I needed to run everything by you before I officially enlisted him. Anything else you want to add?”
“Yeah.” He dipped his head, and lowered his voice. “Don’t get hurt.”
The warning bounced right off her.
Lizzie had no plans to fall in love with Gage Harvey.
Thirty days of make-believe.
One night of hot sex.
That’s all there was to it.
Chapter Seven
Damn.
That was the first thought to pop into Gage’s head when he spotted Lizzie strutting toward his old Chevy truck in the Winn Dixie parking lot.
Well, damn, and also, how does she make sweatpants look so good?
Her hair shone caramel under the sun, and it was with a small dose of satisfaction that he watched her slow, stumble, and then stutter to a halt at the sight of him leaning against his truck.
“You all good?” he asked, not bothering to hide the once-over he gave her. V-neck T-shirt; tight leggings that hugged her body in all the right places; PJ’s coffee cup clutched tight in one hand; a pair of pristine, white tennis shoes. He met her gaze. “Not used to walking without the weapons?”
“Weapons?” Her husky voice slid through him like a shot of bourbon
. “I’m in the market of advertising eye shadows and false lashes, Gage, not shotguns.”
“Your shoes, princess.” He swallowed a grin when a flush worked up her neck. “I was talking about those fuck-me heels you’ve worn each time I’ve seen you.”
As he was beginning to expect from her, her chin went up in defiance. “The shoes weren’t for you.”
“I figured.”
“And I can walk perfectly fine in tennis shoes. I just . . . there was a rock.”
“Yeah?” He made a show of looking around her to where her near-fall had gone down. “What’s your classification between a rock and a pebble?”
Blue eyes narrowed. “I’d offer you a sip of my coffee to fix that grumpy attitude of yours, but since you’re inhuman and all . . .”
Gage pushed away from the truck. One step toward her. Two steps. Her chest inflated with a sharp inhale when he wrapped one hand around the Styrofoam cup. With a quick tug, he pulled it from her grasp and brought the rim to his mouth, drawing out the moment.
“You wouldn’t.”
At her deadpan tone, he replied, “I would,” and then took a purposeful swallow of death itself.
Jesus. Coffee. And it was black, too. Not a single touch of cream or sugar to mitigate the bitterness.
It took everything in him not to cough and thump his chest, and he made do with returning the cup to her still waiting hand.
As though enjoying his misery, Lizzie took a long sip of the coffee, never taking her eyes off his face. Then, “Feel a lot manlier after that display of cavemanitis?”
It was seven-thirty in the morning, and the fire was already in her step. He should have downed the rest of her drink. She definitely didn’t need any more of a perk-me-up. “I think I liked you better in the heels,” he muttered, turning back to the truck.
“Because they make my legs look longer?”
He grasped the passenger’s side door handle and drew it open for her. When she went to climb in, Gage put his hand to her back. “No, princess, because you’re a hell of a lot less snarky when you’re an extra five inches taller. Might be the difference in oxygen levels.”
Her mouth parted in a surprised O just before he slammed the door shut and went around the hood of the truck.
