The Bookworm's Guide to Faking It (The Bookworm's Guide, #2)

by Emma Hart

  ME: What are the chances of that?

  SAYLOR: Absolutely zero.

  ME: Always the vote of confidence.

  SAYLOR: That’s Kinsley’s job. I’m the dose of reality. She’s the sunshine, I’m the big fucking storm.

  ME: I lied earlier. NOW there’s never been a truer word spoken.

  SAYLOR: And you’re very welcome.

  ME: Nobody thanked you.

  KINSLEY: Seriously. Nobody.

  KINSLEY: You might need to dig a little. Why did his mom say that? Could you ask her?

  ME: Ten years ago, sure. Now? I don’t know. I haven’t really spoken to his family in a long time.

  KINSLEY: You’re gonna have to suck it up. You could always just say there was a misunderstanding.

  SAYLOR: Nailed it. If anyone asks, say you weren’t aware of their belief that you were dating and you were only there as friends.

  Damn it, that was genius.

  Why didn’t I think of that?

  I was just about to respond when three knocks sounded at the door, making me look up.

  “Holley?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I come in? I need a piss.”

  “Charming,” I drawled. “Yes, you can come in.”

  The door clicked as Sebastian pushed it open. “What am I supposed to say?” he asked, strolling in like he hadn’t just given me too much information. “You’re lucky a piss is all I need.”

  “You could have just said you needed to use the bathroom,” I called after him as he shut the door. “That would have sufficed!”

  “Fine. I need to use the bathroom!” he yelled back.

  It’s a bit damn late now.

  This was going to be a longer weekend than I thought.

  The sound of a flush filled the air, followed by a running tap that was accompanied by a happy hum. I didn’t recognize the tune he was making, and I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to my phone.

  Not to the text conversation, though.

  I opened my reading app instead.

  Sure, I could have grabbed my tablet, but that was in my bag in the other room and I was comfortable.

  Seb walked back into the bedroom and perched on the end of the bed. “What are you doing?”

  “Reading.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “How to Hide A Body,” I replied without looking up from the screen.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  I could feel his gaze on me as I tapped to turn the page.

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  With a glare, I turned my phone and pointed to the top of the screen where the title was. “You see? It’s a mystery. Like where your body will be if you don’t leave me alone to read.”

  His lips twitched to one side. “All right, I believe you. You know we have to get ready soon.”

  “Right, about that.” I put my phone down. “We’re not going along with this.”

  He blinked at me. “My mother will have a fit.”

  “I don’t really care,” I said blithely. “We’re going to act like friends, then if anyone brings it up, we’ll say we’re just friends and we weren’t aware of it.”

  “That might just work.” He tilted his head to the side. “Although there are worse things I could be doing this weekend than pretend to be your better half.”

  Snorting, I sat upright. “Please. In the unlikely event that you’d ever be my half of anything, you’d definitely be my worse half.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You play sports and don’t read. That’s clearly the worse half.”

  “I read.”

  “Sports news doesn’t count.”

  “I still read.”

  “What was the last book you read?” I asked, leaning back against the headboard. “Go on. Shock me.”

  His smirk let me know he was about to do just that. “Read Game of Thrones. Took me two months to get through the first one, but I eventually read them all.”

  Wow.

  Okay.

  Fair enough.

  “What’s the matter, Holley? Bookworm got your tongue?” His shit-eating grin was almost begging me to slap it off his face.

  “Shut up,” I mumbled. “Since when did you read?”

  “Well, when you tear your rotator cuff and can’t do a whole bunch of stuff, you have to find other ways to occupy your time,” he said dryly. “And as far as hobbies go, reading isn’t all that dangerous.”

  “Have you ever fallen asleep while reading and dropped a book on your face? That’s pretty dangerous. It hurts.”

  “Why are you falling asleep while reading?”

  “Because ‘one more chapter’ turns into ten more chapters.”

  “It’s not hard to stop after one more chapter.”

  “That’s the difference between you and I, Sebastian. You can stop reading. I cannot, therefore resulting in a severe lack of a respect for the thing known as a good night’s sleep.”

  He leaned back on his hands and grinned. His smile made his eyes sparkle, and it was really quite irritating. “And an extraordinarily serious lack of self-control.”

  I tapped the side of my nose with one eyebrow raised. “Now you understand.”

  A beeping came from his pocket and stopped whatever he was about to say in response. He pulled his cell out and stared at the screen, frowning as he read whatever was there.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Mom said we need to be at the rehearsal dinner half an hour early,” he said, looking up at me apologetically. “We have forty-five minutes.”

  Sighing, I slid off the bed and grabbed my toiletries bag from the chair. “I guess I need to shower now, then.”

  CHAPTER TEN – HOLLEY

  rule ten: deny, deny, de-fucking-ny. like when your mom asks if you’re a virgin and you’re… not.

  “This is a disaster,” I hissed to Sebastian, wishing I could extricate his arm from around my shoulders.

  “It would go better if you’d stop smiling like you’re possessed,” he muttered back.

  “I am possessed. Possessed by anger.”

  “Holley.”

  “Sebastian,” I snapped back, still making an effort to keep my voice low. “Do not start with me. I am not in the mood.”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “This is all your fault.” I turned around to face the bartender. The movement shrugged his arm from around me, but in such a natural way that it didn’t look like we were mid-fight.

  Because we were.

  We were mid-fight.

  From the moment we’d stepped into this room, we’d had to pretend like we were dating. His mom had introduced me to almost everyone in this room as ‘Sebastian’s girlfriend, Holley,’ and we’d had approximately five seconds to come up with a story about how we’d reconnected when he came back to White Peak.

  If you were wondering, it was all very sweet and romantic and had started when he’d stopped by my bookstore to pick up a book for his mom. It’d just happened to be before my lunch break, so he’d taken me for lunch, and that was all she wrote.

  I wanted to vomit. It was so romance novel-esque that if it’d happened in real life, it would have been a dream. So sweet. So perfect. So romantic.

  But it wasn’t real.

  And it wasn’t a dream.

  This right here was a nightmare.

  He’d stopped by my bookstore, all right, but there’d been nothing enjoyable or sweet about it.

  I handed ten dollars to the barman and took my glass of wine without turning back around. I couldn’t believe this was going this badly. Not that the night was—no, the night itself was going perfectly fine.

  The rehearsal dinner had gone off without a hitch, much to Kate’s relief. She was now soaking up as much time as she could with her fiancé, Spencer, before they were split up tonight ahead of the wedding. They were being stopped every few steps, and I swore May was about to step in and whisk them
off somewhere for a moment.

  To sum up, it was going exactly as well as you’d expect it to.

  Except that my night… wasn’t.

  I couldn’t believe I’d been roped into this. I know, I know, I’d said it a thousand times, but seriously. If it weren’t for Sebastian, I’d be at home right now. In bed. With my book and my snacks.

  That was how a Friday night should be spent.

  Instead I was here in a black, long-sleeved dress with a scooping neckline and high heels pretending I was Sebastian’s girlfriend.

  All the women in the world, and here I was.

  Why couldn’t he have paid someone to do this? It wasn’t like he didn’t have the money.

  “I’m sorry,” Sebastian said, turning around and leaning on the bar next to me. He dipped his head so his mouth was close to my ear, and his firm bicep brushed against mine. “There’s nothing I can do. If I argue, it’ll only ruin Kate’s night.”

  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. I knew he was right, and for the record, I didn’t think he was any happier about this than I was. I did understand what he was saying, though, and I wasn’t about to be the brat who ruined his sister’s wedding.

  “I know that,” I said, softening a little bit. “But does your mom realize what a situation this puts us in? And that’s before you consider the fact that you’re famous. If the media come after me, I’m going to kill you.”

  He sighed and motioned for another beer. “No, I don’t think she does realize it. I think she’s just going with the motions because it’s easier for her. She doesn’t often think about other people when she’s in one of these moods.”

  I made a noise that agreed with him and quickly snagged an empty stool before someone else could get it. Seb grabbed his bottle and turned to the side, looking over at where his mom was entertaining some of the guests. She was a natural, someone who thrived in social situations and could charm the pants off a monk if she really wanted to.

  Kate was the same. All the women in his family were like that, and to an extent, I envied them.

  Because I just… wasn’t.

  I was quiet and reserved and a little—lot—nerdy, content to spend my weekends wrapped up under a blanket with thick socks, hot cocoa, soup, and a book or three. My idea of a party was accidentally having too much wine with my dinner at Bronco’s and ending up on the karaoke machine, then spending the next two days hating myself because hangovers at twenty-six were not the same as twenty-one.

  In related news, I had a habit I needed to break before I hit thirty, because I bet hangovers then were even worse.

  “We can leave,” Seb said after a few minutes of silence. “We’ve done the dinner and everything else.”

  I skirted my gaze toward him. “But the wine is here. And after the day I’ve had, I need the wine.”

  Maybe I wouldn’t learn.

  He held up a finger and summoned the bartender again. He rushed over, drying a glass, and leaned in to Seb. Seb said something in a low voice, and the bartender nodded with a smile before he stepped back.

  “What was that?”

  “Drink up,” Seb replied to me before taking a long drink of his beer. “He’s sending some to our room so we can go.”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  “Holley, you’re tired. I can see it. You’ve had a long day, and if you want to go back to the room, put on some sweats, and read your book, then you can do that.” His eyes met mine, and in them I saw nothing but earnest truth. “Let’s go, okay?”

  “Okay.” I finished the last mouthful of my wine and let him take my hand and lead me away from the bar. We wove through groups of people until we reached his dad, and he grabbed his attention for a moment.

  “We’re going,” Seb said to him. “Holley’s tired.”

  “Did you get your car sorted?” His dad, Ben, asked me.

  I nodded. “It was towed this afternoon. It’ll be ready on Sunday morning.”

  He smiled, and I was struck by how alike he and his son were. They had the same eyes—their smiles always reached them, making them seem even brighter than they were. “Good,” he said. “Go and rest. And I promise I’ll try and stop May gossiping,” he finished dryly. “At the very least, I’ll cut off the champagne.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” Seb gave him a weak smile and all but dragged me from the room and out into the much quieter hall.

  I blew out a long breath. “Oh, sweet silence.”

  Chuckling, he pulled me over to the elevators. “You’re welcome. Dad will talk to her and rein her in some.”

  “He couldn’t have done that three hours ago?”

  “You’d think.”

  The elevator dinged, and I tugged my hand out of Seb’s. His skin was far too warm and his grip far too tight for me to feel even remotely comfortable with that level of closeness, mostly because I actually liked how it felt to have my hand in his.

  The elevator took us up to the floor that housed the suites. There were four on here—we had one, May and Ben had the second, and Spencer’s parents had the third. The fourth was reserved for Spencer and his brother-slash-best man for tonight, and tomorrow, it would just be his brother’s.

  We stepped out of the elevator, and a trolley was already outside our room. It wasn’t the one we’d left, because that one hadn’t held four beers and a bottle of wine in an ice bucket, plus a bunch of snacks.

  Seb wheeled it inside, leaving me to shut the door, and I went over to inspect the snacks.

  Cheetos. Pretzels. Popcorn. M&Ms. Hershey’s.

  And a tub of chocolate ice cream.

  “Can I get this to my apartment, or…?” I looked up at him. “Popcorn and ice cream? This is heaven right here.”

  Seb looked up at me, his lips pulling to one side. “I told them to send a selection of junk food. Apparently, they took me literally.”

  “I don’t care how they took you,” I said, grabbing one of the pristine white bowls. “They put a woman on this. No man could effectively grab these snacks from the very vague guidelines of ‘junk food.’”

  “Hold on.” He pulled his phone from the pocket of his pants and held it over the cart.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking a photo,” he said, leaning back. “So if you ever ask me for junk food, I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Nah. They’re missing Sour Patch Kids.” I shrugged and put a spoon in my bowl, then grabbed the salted popcorn. “There we go.”

  “You’re taking all the popcorn?”

  “Did you want some?”

  “No.”

  “Then yes, I’m taking all the popcorn.”

  “You were taking it anyway, weren’t you?”

  I kicked off my heels, sending them scattering across the living room until they rested at the foot of the curtains, leaving me a good four inches shorter than I normally was. “Yep.”

  He laughed as I took my goodies into the bedroom and kicked the door shut behind me. There was a small table next to the armchair by the windows, and I put my snacks on there so I could drag the table over to the bedside.

  I’d already taken off my shoes, and it took me far too long to remove my dress. It was all but stuck to me, but I was grateful to finally kick it off and replace it with a pair of shorts and my favorite ‘book lover’ tank top.

  I unplugged my tablet from where I’d charged it earlier. The screen blinked off, so I turned it on and nestled myself into the bed while it loaded.

  My phone blinked from the side table, and I grabbed it.

  SAYLOR: How did it go? Did you lose your temper and blow the resort up?

  ME: You are about as helpful as an STD.

  SAYLOR: Thank you.

  ME: What makes you think that’s even close to a compliment?

  SAYLOR: Depends on the situation. If you want a guy to leave you alone, an STD would be VERY HELPFUL

  ME: Your brain is a very strange place.

  SAYLOR: I know. Try living with it
.

  ME: I do.

  SAYLOR: I’ll ignore that. How did it go?

  ME: Hell. It was absolute hell. I was introduced to everyone as Seb’s girlfriend and his GRANDPA WASN’T EVEN THERE

  SAYLOR: Ouch. Well, if it makes you feel better, Tori is going to be at the reception tomorrow.

  ME: Really? That’s random.

  SAYLOR: Apparently she manages the website Kate uses for her business so she got invited. Must be nice to live a fancy life

  ME: I’ve seen Tori work. There’s nothing fancy about holey sweats and Cheeto dust in her hair.

  SAYLOR: It’s like you can see me.

  ME: Again, there’s nothing fancy about it.

  SAYLOR: I’ve seen you relax. I bet you’re wearing old sweats and eating junk food right now.

  ME: Go away.

  SAYLOR: Lololololololol

  SAYLOR: That’s one way to scare Seb off

  ME: Who said I wanted to scare him off?

  SAYLOR: Your entire attitude.

  ME: Seriously. Go away.

  SAYLOR: It won’t worrrrrrkkkkkkkk

  ME: Goodnight, jerk

  I plugged the cable into my phone and put it down where she could leave me alone.

  My friends were exhausting.

  I was only slightly mollified that Tori would be here tomorrow at the reception and I could escape with her for a little while. God only knew I needed someone to help me get through the rest of this weekend.

  “Holley?” Sebastian’s voice came through the door.

  “Let me guess,” I called, pulling my ice cream onto my lap. “You need the bathroom.”

  “Yep.”

  I sighed. “It’s fine.”

  He pushed the door open and poked his head through. “Sorry. One-bedroom suite, one bathroom.”