by Marina Adair
After a few moments had passed, Lexi said, “You can come up now. He’s on the ladder. Probably wondering why his design manager is flinging herself on the floor.”
“I’m not flinging…” Her eyes darkened with suspicion. “Stop changing the subject. We are talking about you and my brother.” She sighed, and her face went soft, almost hurt. “Are you sleeping with Marco, Lex? And if so, why didn’t you tell me?”
Lexi considered fanning the air. It was so thick with guilt it made it hard to breathe. When she and Marc had made that promise to keep quiet about their deal, it seemed so simple. She never imagined it would put her in a situation where she’d have to be disloyal to her best friend. “Look, I am not sleeping with him.” Shit, that was a lie. “Well, I mean we slept together, but—”
“Oh God.” Abby covered her mouth. “I think I just threw up a little.”
The idea of sex with Marc made Lexi queasy too, but not the kind of queasy Abby was feeling. “I got drunk, my date got handsy, so Marc took me home. He crashed at my place to make sure I was okay, and he fell asleep in my bed. With me. But nothing happened.”
“Then why is everyone saying they saw you two running in the park?”
Right. That. “Marc asked me if I wanted to go on a run, so we did. And it was fun.” It was better than fun. It had been one of the best mornings she could remember in forever. They didn’t stop for coffee, but they sat on her back porch and shared a pint of caramel ice cream from Picker’s. They talked about nothing important, laughed when Wingman farted, and scooted closer when Chad happened to walk by. Then he left and, as promised, Lexi had spent the entire day trying to make a baked pork chop interesting. “He makes me laugh. End of story.”
Abby’s eyes narrowed and her lips went thin. “Then this isn’t some kind of twisted payback at Jeff for being a total douche? I know I told you to stick it to him, but if you’re using my brother because he is Jeff’s best friend, that’s just wrong.”
Her friend’s words stung. She hadn’t pursued Marc. He had followed her. And she hadn’t said yes to their pretend relationship because of his friendship with her ex; if anything, that had been her biggest concern. But if her best friend came to that humiliating conclusion, then what would everyone else think?
“Marc was my friend too, before Jeffery and I even started dating.” Not sure what else to say, Lexi went for honest. At least as honest as she could get without betraying Marc’s trust. “I thought it was weird at first too. But Marc makes me feel good about myself. We have fun. He gives me the space I need to cook and figure things out. It’s no big deal.”
Abby didn’t look convinced. “Okay, so what if I were to say Marco is one of the hottest bachelors in the valley?”
“So?” Lexi sat back in a chair and shrugged, trying to appear unaffected. So Marc was hot. So were a bazillion other guys. Granted, a bazillion other guys didn’t make her undies catch fire every time they looked at her.
Nope. Only one guy had managed that. Not that she would admit that to Abby.
“Uh-huh.” Abby sat back and mimicked Lexi’s body language, only her friend actually pulled off laid-back and unaffected. “And if I were to warn you that Marc is a commitmentphobe playboy with the attention span and life goals of a horny teen.”
“Why would you say that?” Lexi sat forward, unaffected going right out the tent. “Marc may have been wild in high school, but people change, Abs. I mean, only a person with some serious focus and talent could single-handedly restore the Napa Grand like he did, not to mention that he is the one responsible for bringing the Showdown back to its original glory after two decades.”
That was exactly why, blood oath or not, Lexi would never say anything to Abby. Marc had a hard enough time proving to his siblings that he had his life together. Nope, she wasn’t going to let them use their arrangement against Marc.
“I think it sucks that your family is constantly—”
Abby’s lips turned up a little at the right corner, and Lexi snapped her mouth shut. This was a bad sign. Her friend made that face when she was scheming. And whenever Abby schemed, Lexi somehow ended up with an egg-white facial.
“Go on, I’m fascinated.” Abby kicked back in the chair, her shoulders completely at ease, and gave an encouraging—and totally patronizing—wave of the hand. “My family is constantly what?”
“Nothing.” Lexi stood and, afraid she would say something to rat herself out, walked back to the table, where she arranged and rearranged the danishes—three times.
“Oh, that sounded like a whole lot more than nothing.” Abby slid up to the table and helped herself to a danish. The raspberry-and-peach-filled one, right in the center, which forced Lexi to rearrange—again.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Instead of taking a bite, Abby licked the icing off of the top. “Then I won’t tell you that you have a huge chunk of melted chocolate on your cheek and that Marco is headed this way.”
“What?” Lexi whispered, her hand automatically going to her right cheek as she craned her head and…
Sure enough, walking down Main Street, dressed in black slacks and a blue button-up and looking like the poster boy for Bad Boys of Wall Street, the hubba-hubba edition, was her man. Well, her fake man. His strides were smooth and laid-back, and although he stopped to talk with Mr. Craver, the Meat in Picker’s Produce, Meats, and More, she could feel his attention zeroed in on her. Her eyes were fixed on Marc when both men looked up and over at her. They both wore knowing smiles, but nothing about Marc’s expression felt fake. Neither did the way her breath caught or that silly little flip her stomach seemed to have become so fond of recently.
Lexi pulled back her hand back. Clean.
She glared at Abby, who merely shrugged with an I-told-you-so grin. “I will give you one week, and then you have to spill.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lexi said, smoothing down her light-blue summer dress and suddenly wishing she had gone for the green one with the halter top. It matched her eyes and made her boobs look more D than full C.
“The sad thing is, I believe you. And for your sake, I hope that you figure it out before you sleep with him.”
“I have not, nor will I ever be sleeping with Marc,” Lexi snapped in the quietest possible way.
“Never took you for a fibber, cream puff,” Marc drawled. Not only was all of his six foot three of pure, testosterone-loaded charm smirking down at her, he had his arm slung around her waist and his hand resting on her ass.
“What are you doing here?” She batted at his hand, which he didn’t move, except to gently cup her left butt cheek.
“Making sure your pants aren’t on fire,” he whispered, his lips purposefully grazing her ear. Then, louder, he added, “And bringing you this.” He held out a coffee cup in his free hand and smiled at Abby. “Hey, sis.”
When Lexi didn’t make a grab for the coffee, he shoved it in her hand. “Figured after a late night in the kitchen and an early morning in the bakery, you’d need a little sugar and caffeine to stay awake.” He looked back to Abby. “She hates mornings. It’s why she became a chef instead of a baker. Right, sugar?”
Rolling her eyes, Lexi took a sip to keep from saying something that would blow their cover when she felt herself flush. It wasn’t the heat of the coffee that warmed her, rather that behind all the meathead BS Marc was spewing out, he was silently showing her that he listened, paid attention, and that fake relationship or not, he cared. Because a dark-chocolate mocha with a shot of hazelnut and lots of whipped cream was not only her favorite, it was the exact caffeine fix that she needed.
Problem was, the charming playboy with the badass smile and disarming dimples could easily become more than just a quick fix.
Marc’s smile faded as though he read her mind. “Hey, look at me.”
Unable to resist, she did, her heart clogging her throat. She didn’t care if Nora Kincaid and her gossiping biddies were watching or tha
t Abby was two feet away. She wanted Marc to kiss her, right there on Main Street, in front of the farmers’ market, and in turn the entire town.
So when Marc leaned down, Lexi went up on her toes to meet him halfway. When he was close enough that she could smell his skin, feel his breath skate across her lips, he opened his mouth and—licked up the entire left side of her face.
With a horrified gasp, she pulled back.
“What?” He shrugged. “You had a huge glop of chocolate on your cheek.”
CHAPTER 9
She was wearing yellow tonight. A paper-thin yellow dress with little white flowers that she filled out to perfection. It barely had straps, just skinny strips of fabric holding it up over her otherwise bare shoulders. And when she moved, hell, even when she breathed, the dress swished back and forth over those long, toned legs.
She was killing him. And so was that damn smell.
Wingman, nose shoved in the half-inch crack at the bottom of the window, whimpered. He’d been that way for most of the night, drooling over the smells wafting in from Lexi’s apartment. So had Marc.
Marc’s stomach grumbled, and on cue Wingman looked over with those big doggie eyes. “I know, boy. Let me finish this and then we can go upstairs and grab some dinner.” He’d gotten a pretty fair understanding of where the bakery stood, financially. All he needed to do was finish jotting down his ideas.
Glancing at his computer, he noticed it was after eight. If he stopped staring out the window and focused, he could be done by ten.
Wingman barked, as though saying no, and looked back out the window. Every night, right around this time, Lexi would start tinkering in her kitchen, and Wingman sat like a lovesick pooch waiting for the pretty lady with yummy treats from across the alley to invite him over for dinner.
Tonight it was pork with—Marc sniffed the air—some kind of herby sauce.
And there he was—once again—staring up at her window instead of focusing on his work. Between trying to catch glimpses of Lexi, going over Pricilla’s books, which were a complete disaster, and coming up with a business plan to help Lexi save her grandmother’s floundering bakery, he’d accomplished jack shit. Lexi was only part of the problem. Guilt, for spying on a woman who was obviously struggling to keep her grandma’s shop afloat, intensified when he discovered a staggering amount of unaccounted monies in Pricilla’s books. Marc couldn’t think past how much he wanted to pummel Jeff for putting him in this situation.
Lexi, on the other hand, had been much more productive. He watched her pick up four plates, balancing them on her arms like a pro, and disappear from the kitchen window, only to reappear in the dining room. She arranged the plates in a precise order, centering each one on the place mats she’d set out earlier in the evening. Two plates were identical, a beautiful chop of meat, the perfect proportion of what looked to be wild rice and a fancy drizzle of pink sauce. The other two plates, although identical to each other, were drastically different from the first, but even though he was squinting he couldn’t make out what was on them.
She stood back and eyed each one, tinkering with the silverware before taking a seat in front of the far-right place setting. After taking just a single bite, she glared at the first dish and shoved the plate back.
Even pouting, she was cute. Tonight she was supposed to be mastering the pork portion of the menu, and the irritated look in her eye meant that she had stuck to their grandmothers’ cookbook, using logic instead of instinct.
Marc leaned back in his chair and smiled at her dilemma. Lexi had always had a problem saying no. Which was why she often found herself torn between pleasing others and pleasing her need to break out of the box. Too bad that tonight people-pleasing Lexi won out, because the one who waved her finger at the rules was sexy to watch.
“Shit,” Marc whispered, lounging back in his chair. Everything inside of him went still, because Lexi, with all of her polished manners and practiced properness, was watching back.
Their eyes held for a moment and neither moved. Then she smiled. It was small and a little self-conscious, but it was a smile, and he realized that she thought she’d been caught spying on him. Before he could process what that even meant, Lexi made her way over to the window and opened it.
When Marc opened his, Wingman took it as his personal invitation to leap out in Lexi’s direction. Marc snagged his collar and tugged him back inside. “Sit or you get kibble for dinner.”
Wingman’s ears lowered. He glanced at the window and back to Marc, deciding with an irritated snort to plop his big old butt down on Marc’s foot—hard.
“You’re working late tonight,” she said, leaning out the window far enough that her hair, tied back in a single braid, fell over one bare shoulder.
“I was just finishing up your grandma’s books,” he said, resting his palms on the sill and looking up at her. Even from here he could see the way her smile faded a little.
“How bad is it?”
“Bad,” he said, going for honest. “But nothing you can’t handle.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He leaned farther out the window, his stomach groaning when a gentle breeze picked up whatever she had baking up in that kitchen. “Something smells good.”
“Are you trying to charm yourself into a dinner invitation?” She rested her elbows on the sill and grinned down at him.
“Well, unless you invited your entire crew up for dinner”—his eyes landed on the overflowing table set for four—“watching that much meat go to waste would be a sin.”
“We couldn’t let that happen now, could we,” she said with a saucy smile. Cream puff was flirting—with him. “I guess I did overestimate a little.”
“That is why we are the perfect couple.”
She laughed. “Because I overcooked?”
He loved it when he made her laugh, which was probably why he was now drooling worse than Wingman. “And I like to eat. A lot.”
“I remember. But that’s like saying we are perfect for each other because I’m tall or have two eyes.”
“I like my women tall, and two eyes are damn sexy.”
She shrugged. “All right, I guess it’s only fair. You did spend all day working on the bakery. You can break the bad news to me over dinner.”
“Let me take Wingman up to my room and freshen up and then I’ll be over.”
Wingman barked, loud, long, and angry.
“Get out of that suit and bring Wingman.”
“You might want to rethink that.” He looked down at Wingman, who glared back, ready to take Marc out at the knees and make a leap for the window if things didn’t go his way. “Behind that cute face and those big brown eyes lies a fluff ball of trouble.”
“I don’t think so. You’re a good boy, huh, Wingman?” she cooed, and Wingman straightened his spine, and if he hadn’t been a dog, Marc would have sworn he smiled.
“Yeah, that’s part of his charm. Just when he’s got you thinking that he’s trained, he wolfs down dinner, drools all over your couch, and with one last doggie high five to the crotch, he’s running out the door without even a thank-you, dragging your favorite pair of shoes behind him.”
“He’s a dog, Marc. I like dogs.” She raised a brow. “And you just described yourself. Now are you coming up, or should I toss out the meat?”
It took Marc less than five minutes to pull on some clean jeans and a button-up, drag Wingman across the alley, and ring her bell. Then he felt stupid for changing. This was two friends having dinner, not a date. But when she answered the door, he felt himself relax. Because Lexi had been just as confused. She was still in that tissue-thin yellow dress that clung to her curves, all of them, but her silky hair was down around her shoulders, her lips were all shiny, and, aw hell, she looked like she was about to renege on her invitation.
“It’s just dinner, Lexi,” he said quietly.
“Right,” she whispered, her gaze dropping to his mouth. “Just dinner.”
Marc nudged his
dog on the rump, and Wingman, who was sniffing every inch of the stoop and rubbing his back against Lexi’s railing, got to his wingman duties and loped into the house before she could change her mind. After a sniff to Lexi’s crotch, Wingman found his way upstairs, and Marc used the distraction to step inside and close the door behind him. “I brought wine.”
“What a surprise,” she deadpanned, but she seemed to have a hard time taking her eyes off him when she grabbed the bottle. “It’s a DeLuca.”
“Sure am, cream puff. And you look nice too,” he whispered and gave her a kiss on the cheek, quick enough for friendly, but too close to her lips to pass as casual.
Wingman stationed himself at the top of the stairs, ears alert, tail up like an antenna, plate already licked clean, while they took a seat at the table. Lexi remained silent, her hands shoved under her thighs, and Marc realized that she was forcibly restraining herself from yanking the plate with a standard pork chop out of his hand and making him try the other dish.
He chewed his bite of chop, and the second he swallowed she asked, “So?”
“It’s good. Cooked to perfection, the sauce—”
“A fig-jam glaze.”
He smiled. “The fig-jam glaze is sweet and tart and goes well with the rice. Technically perfect.” And boring.
“It’s a braised pork chop in a fig-jam glaze over a bed of wild mushroom and pistachio pilaf. A Showdown classic.” Unable to help herself, she reached across the table, snatched the plate right as he was going for a second bite, and replaced it with the other dish. “Now try this.”
Marc raised a brow, chuckling when she sat back and once again shoved her hands securely under her legs. He slid the plate closer and sniffed. It was meat, but sliced thin and rolled around some kind of smelly cheese. He wasn’t big on smelly cheese, but she was watching, all wide eyes and hopeful stares.
