A Charmed Little Lie

by Sharla Lovelace

  I always scoffed at the whole world famous thing, but at that moment I was feeling so nostalgic and crushed that it nearly broke me. Aunt Ruby loved that stupid festival with its corny honey-themed everything.

  The doomsday feeling must have caught because Nick pulled out his phone and pulled up a picture of the same girl he had a shrine to in his home.

  What the hell were we doing? After what Carmen said, there was no point. I should have just left her office and drove straight back in the seven-hour direction I came, dropped him off with the five hundred dollars I’d just lost for nothing, and gone home to cry into a glass of Chianti and a tub of Blue Bell.

  But I didn’t have another seven hours in me. I didn’t even have seven minutes. I needed out of that car and out of these clothes, slopping whatever cans of crap were still hanging around my aunt’s pantry into the microwave.

  Nick blew out a breath and clicked the photo closed, resuming his thousand-yard stare.

  “What’s up?” I asked, preferring anything to the running commentary in my head.

  “Nothing,” he said softly.

  “Didn’t look like nothing,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t know what nothing looks like on me, so I guess you aren’t an expert.”

  My jaw dropped and locked. Say what? I know he didn’t just—

  “I’m sorry, what are you put out about right now?” I asked.

  He rubbed at his eyes as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. I was about to oblige him with the side of the road.

  “Sorry, I know you just had your nuts handed to you.” He cut a glance my way. “Rhetorically speaking. But now that acting school is over, I’m back to remembering I don’t have a job. And I need one. Fast.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “I’ll get you home tomorrow.” God forbid I hold too long to someone who uses rhetorically in conversation.

  “We should have just taken turns driving back today,” he said under his breath.

  “What, the whole two hours to your place?” I said. “I have another five hours to mine. I’m cooked, Nick. I’m done.” I slid him a look. “You were nice earlier. Can we find that guy again?”

  “Fine,” he said, wide-eyed, as if I was one of those females, having a moment. “I know you’re grouchy too.” Now I was grouchy. The day was getting better and better. “I’d be pissed if my friend sold me out like that.”

  “Carmen didn’t sell me out,” I said. “She’s just doing her job.”

  I didn’t harbor any bad feelings toward Carmen. She didn’t have to tell me about Bryce’s plans or point out that we were about as married as the dog she saw sitting in my rental car. She did that as a friend. To let me know we needed to step it up if stepping was in the plan. She was helping the only way she legally could. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. I was about to lose a shit-ton of money I never knew existed and a house I didn’t even know I wanted.

  Unless I got married. For real.

  What the living hell was Aunt Ruby thinking?

  “And this aunt of yours was supposed to like you, right?” Nick added, just as I turned down Aunt Ruby’s winding road.

  The burn clogged my throat as I approached the clearing and rounded it to see the big old house sitting there like a grand old dame.

  “That’s the rumor,” I whispered past tears that I was doing my best to shove down.

  * * *

  I couldn’t get out. I just couldn’t. Every moment I’d lived there, every young moment I’d lied to friends about why we couldn’t hang out there, every time I was embarrassed by my goofy aunt and her eclectic house came rushing over in a flood of guilty waves.

  “Lanie?” Nick said, his voice sounding like he was in a well. Or I was in a well. One of us had definitely left reality.

  “This is my fault,” I choked. “I lied to her. I lied to a dying woman and now she’s calling me on it.”

  “Yes, I think we established that,” Nick said. “But you did it to make her happy,” he added quickly, as I geared up to let loose. “Beating yourself up about it won’t change it.”

  Ralph whined from the back seat, either agreeing with him or wanting the hell out of the car. I swiped under my eyes. Either way, we needed to head in that direction and get off the pity train.

  “Okay, Ralph,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We got out, crunched across the gravel, and I let my gaze travel over the house I’d know if I were struck blind and had to identify it with my fingers. The big wrap-around porch with two giant oak rockers on either side of a stack of wooden egg crates. The roof that dipped down lower in front to protect from the afternoon sun. The upstairs windows, one of which used to feature me, looking out at nothing and wanting to be anywhere else but there.

  I made it all the way to the porch banister—the wiggly one attached to the post with all my growth marks—before I lost it.

  Ugly cry lost it.

  Standing there, hugging a post, silently crying out the last vestiges of my sanity, while Ralph sniffed out the yard and Nick shouldered both our duffle bags, I officially hit bottom.

  It was all going to be stripped bare, knocked down, ripped into splinters, and carted away. My life, my past, my touchstone. The leaky faucets and ornery plumbing and loose windows might be a pain in the ass, but they came with the hideaway closets, stained glass entryway, and memories soaked into every board.

  The flood wouldn’t stop once I opened that portal, and Nick turned and sat on one of the steps. Waiting me out. Looking like the weight of the world had wrapped around his neck. Petting Ralph and probably praying he wouldn’t have to comfort me in some way.

  That was okay. I didn’t need a stranger to comfort me. I’d only shared air with the man for a little over three hours, so there was nothing he could say or do at this point to make things better.

  “Lanie, let’s get married.”

  “Love makes the world go round. So does a really good juicy burger.”

  Chapter Five

  There are things a girl hopes to hear in her lifetime, and a marriage proposal definitely tops that list. A proposal offered as a business deal, probably thrown out in desperation to stop my meltdown and pending dehydration, however, was not what most women have in mind.

  “Don’t, Nick,” I said, hiccupping through my sobs, trying to make it stop. “Don’t play with that. Don’t make fun.”

  “I’m not,” he said, still facing forward, Ralph’s face in his hands as if it were all addressed to him. “I’m dead serious.”

  I waited for more and it didn’t come. Um, I needed more explanation than that.

  Wiping at my face in vain, I leaned against the post and looked down at possibly the hottest man I’d ever met. Sitting on my porch in a black-on-black suit, asking me to marry him by proxy of Ralph.

  “Why?”

  Finally, he let go of the dog’s large head and stood, turning to face me as though it was with his last dying breath.

  “You need this house,” he said, his words slow and precise. His dark eyes didn’t blink, didn’t look away uncomfortably, didn’t falter. “You may or may not need the money, I don’t know. I don’t see you getting all emotional about that, but you’re hugging the house, so I’m guessing the money’s not an important factor.”

  “I didn’t even know about that money.”

  “Which brings it to me,” he said, closing his eyes briefly. “I need a job.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “I’m saying I just got in a car with a stranger for five hundred dollars,” he said. “That’s how far I’ve fallen. Three months of my life—what would that be worth?”

  My tongue felt as swollen and stuck as my eyelids.

  That sentence, along with the glazed over look his eyes got and the hard set of his jaw, was possibly the saddest thing I’d ever witnessed. To be followed closely by the strong possibility of my saying yes.

  The image of him staring a
t his daughter’s photo in the car, and the haunted expression on his face floated across my waterlogged brain.

  “This is for your daughter, isn’t it?” I asked.

  No blinks again. No twitches or tells.

  Of course it was. He was too proud to have done any of this otherwise. I could tell that in the first ten minutes I’d known him. This man that I couldn’t do any of this without.

  I sighed, feeling everything sag as I expelled that breath. I was exhausted.

  “Yes or no?” he asked.

  I averted my eyes to a broken piece of step.

  Is this what you really want for me, Aunt Ruby? A fake marriage?

  “So what happens at the end of three months?” I asked, keeping my gaze down.

  There was a pause that made me look back up. A look of defeat in his face that I knew had to mirror my own. He’d been married and it failed. He was volunteering to do that again on purpose.

  “We make it look good for three months, get what we need, have a big public fight, and file for divorce.”

  “You make it all sound like a piece of cake,” I said.

  “It won’t be,” he said. “But we can manage. Can you, with your job?”

  Oh shit, my job. I hadn’t even thought about that again since I blustered about it in Carmen’s office. I could take all my vacation and sick time, and then—then what? Quit? Who does that? “I—I’ll figure something out.”

  He tilted his head. “So is that a yes?”

  “How much money are you asking for?” I asked.

  He looked away, an uncomfortable something passing over his expression. “You tell me what you’re offering.”

  I put a hand over my forehead, which was suddenly boiling hot. “This is crazy,” I whispered. Eight hundred thousand dollars. That was crazier. Where did she get that kind of money? More importantly, what was I going to do with it? And where would I be without Nick? Back to my last hundred bucks. “Two hundred thousand?”

  He blinked hard and stared harder.

  “Two hundred thousand?”

  I stepped back. “That’s what—sixty—almost seventy grand a month, Nick,” I said. “What job is paying better than that?”

  “No!” he said, holding his hands up. “I’m not—I’m saying that’s too much. That’s—I can’t take that.”

  I blew out a breath. “I don’t care about the money,” I said, wiping my face for the fiftieth time. “If you’re giving up three months of your time for this, you deserve it a hell of a lot more than the Clarks. Hell, you’ve already given Aunt Ruby more of your time than any of them ever did. So take a quarter of it.”

  He nodded slowly, seeming to process every word. “So it’s a yes?”

  “My singular goal in life at this moment is to make sure they don’t get a penny or a splinter of this house,” I said.

  One eyebrow raised. “Which would equal—”

  My heart squeezed. “Let’s do it.”

  Nick took a deep breath and so did I. We looked at each other like cross-country runners probably do, anticipating a journey from hell.

  He held out a hand and I shook it. Like I’d just purchased a car.

  Or a husband.

  * * *

  Ralph was deposited in Aunt Ruby’s backyard, with mumbled promises that he wasn’t being punished. He sprawled out under a shade tree like Xanadu had arrived, so I figured my job was done. I looked around the sprawling living room with different eyes. Eyes that had been a visitor to my childhood home for many years, and hadn’t thought about living here again, ever. Ever. The dusty books and shelves of odd knickknacks and random quirky things, like a basket of tiny clocks and a model of a pirate ship, crammed the shelves. A large handmade doily covered a side table, where a colorful mosaic lamp watched over a bowl of mismatched keys. A grandfather clock ticked ominously behind me. It was all familiar in that way that home is, when you see the items like stage props that are always there, but never actually see them. They were background noise. To Aunt Ruby, they were life. And that’s what was missing. Her life. Her energy. Her buzz and the sounds of her moving around and the aromas of candles or homemade soaps or baking. There were no baked apple smells simmering in the air. Aunt Ruby always made baked apples and cinnamon when she was in a happy, carefree mood, or when it was time to celebrate something. My chest pricked with that sharp little pain of realizing I’d probably never smell that again. I could make them in my sleep, but it wasn’t the same.

  There were vague words about hunger and food, and explaining why there were fifteen cans of corn in the pantry and nothing else (one—no one lives there, and two—I’m the only one who visited. And I love corn), but it all kind of blended together in one swirly blur that ended with us sitting on stools at the lunch bar of the Blue Banana Grille.

  You’d think two recently engaged people who just met at lunchtime—in another diner—would have a few things to talk about. A few things to learn about each other. Birthdays, favorite food, middle names.

  Instead, after being accosted out on the sidewalk by honey pushers handing out samples, we were staring at blue laminated menus like normal people. As if any of this came close.

  “So, why are they out there doing that?” Nick asked.

  “The honey wars are coming up,” I said. “It’s part of the Honey Festival,” I continued after his questioning look. “All the local honey farmers and amateur wannabes compete for the best honey. And spend weeks pimping it out. If you tell them theirs is the best yet, you’ll get seconds.”

  He nodded. “Good to know. So, what’s good here?” he asked.

  I gave him a sideways glance, and did a double-take as I caught the stares of at least half a dozen other women in the diner. Not on me. On GQ over here. Not that I blamed them. He was delicious in that suit, like he’d worn them all his life. No one would ever suspect that he’d just been flipping burgers that morning.

  “I have no idea,” I said, peering back at my own menu. “It’s been years since I ate here. Well, except for the pie.”

  “The pie?”

  “And the honey,” I said, pointing to a pyramid stack of jarred raw honey with the familiar local sticker sporting the Anderson Apiary logo and the scripted Made by Local Bees in Charmed, Texas. “Best honey in the world.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he said.

  “I used to come pick up a couple slices of pie for Aunt Ruby and me when I’d visit,” I said. “After she lost her sight and couldn’t bake anymore. It was the next best thing to perfect, and it’s pretty out of this world.”

  “What kind?”

  “All of them,” said. “I do remember their chicken fried steak being amazing years ago too.”

  Nick slid me a look. “Chicken fried steak?”

  “Yeah.” I raised an eyebrow at the pause. “Why?”

  “Do you know what cheap-ass cut of meat is used for that?”

  “No, and I don’t care.”

  “It’s nasty,” he said. “There’s a reason it’s beat to death and slathered in batter and fried.”

  I blinked and studied him. “Do you hear yourself sounding like a total food snob, Armani?”

  There was a flash of fire in his eyes as he looked away, back at his menu.

  “It’s not Armani. It’s the only nice thing I have left.”

  Hmm. There was a story there. No rush, though. Evidently I had three months to learn it.

  “And I’m not a food snob,” he continued. “I worked in a greasy spoon just like this.”

  “Then don’t ruin chicken fried steak for me.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  He cut a look my way. “Do you always have to get in the last word?”

  “Frequently.”

  “Lanie Barrett,” said a familiar voice as a petite brunette with impossibly dark eyes appeared from a hall behind the bar. She and Nick could have been siblings with those eyes. “Good lord, I don’t rememb
er the last time I saw you at my counter.”

  I was acutely aware of the state of my face, even though I’d done repair in the car, and of Nick listening. And of how many lies I’d told in the past year, spread so thin I couldn’t remember to whom. That was easy when you were alone and could spin in any direction. A little weirder with a witness.

  “Hey, Allie.”

  “Sorry to hear about your aunt,” she said, grabbing a paper towel to wipe up some coffee.

  Allie Greene was one of the few people I actually believed that from. She was always down to earth and sincere. A no-nonsense single mom since she was seventeen, growing up in the same trailer park Carmen did and running her dad’s diner her whole life, she didn’t have time for petty rumors or gossip. Even though she probably heard her share.

  “I didn’t know her well,” Allie continued in her soft husky voice, a nostalgic smile on her face as she twisted her dark hair up into a clip she had on her jeans. “But she was always so sweet when she’d come in back in the day.” Her smile broadened. “I remember she’d always slip me a quarter when I was out there bussing tables. Tell me to go buy a Coke.”

  I chuckled. “She still thought a quarter would get her a Coke up until last year.”

  She smiled. “This your husband?”

  Here we go.

  Nick looked at me, a touch of humor in his expression. Well?

  God help me.

  “Yes, this is Nick,” I said. “Nick, this is Allie Greene, an old high school friend.”

  Which was stretching it slightly, and the small twitch in her cheek told me she recognized that. We were school friends in that way that the passing of years creates. When the fact that you traveled twelve years in the same building makes you comrades. In reality, we were aware of each other through Carmen, and through classes, but probably didn’t have a real conversation till I started coming into the Blue Banana for pie.