by Pippa Grant
But before I can confess my weakness, he pulls away.
“There,” he says in that smoky, sultry, sinful voice. “Now you look like a newlywed.” He slaps me on the bottom, making me yip as he starts for the door. “Come on, cinnamon twist. The old folks are waiting.”
Ten
Hope
* * *
I’m still replaying that kiss over and over again in my head when Blake parks his truck in front of the Happy Cat Community Center. Usually, bingo is at the senior center, but when Sunshine Toys announced they were sponsoring this week’s prizes, the town’s ladies went crazy reserving their spots, so bingo got moved to a bigger location.
We’re not even out of the truck before the squealing starts.
“It’s the newlyweds!”
“Oh, my, he must be very good in bed.”
“Shh! If they want to have a quickie in the truck, let them.”
“Mom, we’re not having sex in public,” Blake says to the last one.
Minnie O’Dell beams at him as she smothers me in a hug. “You should. Your father and I used to—”
“Ma, gross!”
“I know he’s just saying that for my benefit.” She giggles. “And welcome to the family, Hope. We’re so glad it was you. And we’ll have to plan a reception. Three of my boys, happily married. I’m so thrilled. So thrilled.”
She links arms with both of us and leads us into the one-story building. My shoes squeak on the vinyl tile, but the noise is quickly drowned out by the gasps, and then the clapping.
Sorry, Blake mouths to me over his mom’s head, not looking the least bit sorry.
The bird woman with the cupcakes from yesterday is sliding a sheet cake out of a box on a side table, muttering to herself, and there’s a line of senior citizens waiting to buy paper bingo cards and dabbers.
“I need to go—” I start, but before I can finish with check in for volunteer duty, Ruthie May and her granddaughter Emma June tackle us too.
“Hope! Blake! You came! Here. We saved you a spot at our table.”
“We’re not playing, we’re working,” I say.
Ruthie May clucks her tongue. “You’re not volunteering on your wedding week! The luck is with you. Come. Sit. We already bought you cards.”
“We got it covered, Hope,” Ryan calls. Blake’s oldest brother is a fireman by day, but tonight he’s in a bingo apron with dabbers tucked into one pocket and a sample of the evening’s prizes tucked into another. “You sit and play.” He pulls out a giant purple dildo. “If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll take this puppy home. Since I know what else you’re sleeping with.”
He winks, and Blake tosses a dabber at him. “Very funny, old man.”
Three of the regular elderlies in sun visors, Palm Springs shirts, and matching pastel pants descend on us. “It’s your turn to play,” Greta says.
“I have a lucky feeling about you tonight,” Eunice adds.
“That’s just gas,” Phoebe tells Eunice. “But Olivia did my star chart today, and she said I’d lose to newlyweds, so I’ll let you pretend your gas is a lucky feeling. But if you win that vibrator, you have to promise to give it to me.”
There’s a groan from the cake table, and the pixie woman kicks one of the legs. I still haven’t met her, and I need to fix that, but she doesn’t look like she’s having the best day, and Olivia’s gliding over to help.
“Just had to crack, didn’t you?” the bakery lady says to the cake.
“That’s a hell of a break.” Dean slides next to her and aims his camera down at it. “Bad omen for those newlyweds, you ask me. I’m Dean. You know those two?”
She turns and throws her hands up in Cassie’s direction. “I tried, I really did. I’m so sorry. But it should still taste great, and I’ll refund your money as soon as I get back to my computer. Cracked cakes are on the house!”
Without answering Dean, she slips out of the room.
“You know these two?” Dean turns the question to Cassie, who’s wearing a sling that matches Olivia’s, though hers is filled with hedgehogs, not baby. Olivia must have decided Princess and Duchess deserved a night out.
Both the hedgehogs squeak indignantly at Dean’s question and Cassie shoots him a get lost look.
Princess and Duchess are possibly the most adorable hedgehogs I’ve ever seen, and they won the owner lottery when they got Olivia. They’re hugely popular at bingo night—all the senior citizens love cooing over them almost as much as they love fussing over Clover Dawn, now that she’s here. Poor Olivia seemed to be pregnant forever.
Not that she complained.
She seemed to love every minute of it, but then, Olivia would find something to love about having to live in an igloo outside an extra stinky paper factory.
Greta glares at Dean and shoves me into a chair. “Nosy old badger.”
“Trying to take over my role,” Ruthie May adds with a sniff.
“Grandma.” Emma June smothers her in a hug. “You know that’s never going to happen.”
Blake sucks in a deep breath as he plops into the chair next to me and swings an arm around my shoulders. “Nothing like bingo night in Happy Cat. You smell that? That’s the smell of determination, rivalry, markers, and Ben-Gay.”
I shift a look at him, and I can’t help myself.
I crack up laughing.
He grins.
And this is what acting like a happily married couple must look like.
Odd.
It feels so normal.
And happy.
“Did you see?” Eunice asks. “We got you all a wedding cake. We didn’t know if you’d be here, or if you’d be home doing the horizontal mamba, but we would’ve eaten the cake with or without you. Who doesn’t love cake?”
“I love cake,” Blake says. Dean angles closer to us, and my fake hubby adds, “Almost as much as I love Hope and all her animals.”
“People! Places! Numbers are about to start!” Cassie calls.
There’s a mad rush for seats. An old guy tackles Ryan to get to the last dabber, and someone calls someone else a shithead who’s going down.
“See this?” Blake leans closer, giving me a whiff of his clean scent and another opportunity to ogle his sexy hand as he sets it over my bingo cards. “This is our future, baby. I can’t wait.”
“Take your time, young whippersnapper,” Phoebe tells him. “Have a few dozen babies first.”
“We already have baby goats,” I tell her.
“Hmm. Good start, but there’s nothing like projectile baby poo at three AM to solidify a marriage.”
“We’re still practicing,” Blake says with a wink.
All three of the sun visor brigade fan themselves.
“I would be too if I was hitched up to you,” Eunice says.
“Mm-hmm,” the other two agree.
“That’s my son you’re talking to. In front of his wife,” Minnie O’Dell warns from the next table over.
“You think Tucker will ever propose?” Emma June asks Ruthie May with a sigh.
“Honey, I know what you see in that boy, but the smarts to buy a ring ain’t it.”
“We’re starting with the green cards,” Cassie yells, and the room falls silent as we all bend over our cards.
“Holy shit, we have like eight of these,” Blake mutters.
“Each,” I agree. “You don’t go to Happy Cat bingo and not play the hell out of Happy Cat bingo.”
“Usually I do sixteen on my own,” Greta says with a pout, “but they wouldn’t let me on account of there being so many people here tonight.”
“So you two haven’t ever played bingo together before?” Dean asks. “Interesting.”
“We haven’t gone bungee jumping or cow tipping together either, in case you’re taking notes,” Blake replies. “That’s next week.”
I almost poke him, but we’re playing happy newlyweds. “I can’t wait, honey-bear.”
“B-Four!” Cassie calls with the help of the snuffling
hedgehogs.
“And after!” the whole room choruses back.
I should be up walking around with Ryan, Jace, and Olivia—and the baby, of course—making sure no one’s dabbers are out of ink or diving in with a towel if someone spills a drink on the cards or chasing George Cooney off the cake table, since the trash panda has just climbed up on top of it and looks ready to dive in.
George is a common sight around town, but I’ve never seen him at bingo before.
“Did Ryan mention if George Cooney was feeling better today?” I ask Blake as Ryan scoops the massive animal off the cake table and carries him to the door.
George chitters.
“Hush, you overgrown trash panda. We don’t eat other people’s wedding cake,” Ryan chides.
“Just said he had the burps,” Blake replies. “Why?”
“Cassie said he had too much peanut butter yesterday. We were worried.”
“Ah. Pretty sure he survived.”
“Shh!” the sun visor brigade hisses at us.
“G-Forty-seven!” Cassie says.
We manage to lose on the green cards, the red cards, the yellow cards, and the purple cards. Gordon wins a Sunshine Toys starter pack with a dildo, a vibrator, anal beads, and lube in it. Eunice wins a toy of the month subscription. Mrs. O’Dell wins the lube sample pack and a gift certificate to a lingerie store in Atlanta.
And while I’m sitting there with friends, playing bingo to win sex toys, I start to relax and slip into a new pattern with Blake.
He reaches over to mark an O-Sixty-nine that I missed. I press my red dabber to his nose, and soon we’re both laughing and acting like teenagers as he tries to pay me back.
But that’s not his end goal.
Oh, no.
The man fakes me out with the dabber and gets me with a sneak kiss attack while someone across the room yells out a loud Bingo!
“Hmm,” Dean mutters from the table behind us. “This is gonna be harder than Kyle said it would be.”
We’re doing it!
We’re selling our marriage.
That, as much as anything, puts a real smile on my face.
“Blue cards, people! Grand prize time,” Cassie calls.
Ryan struts to the front of the room and walks the purple dildo around, Vanna White-style.
“Somebody’s going home really lucky tonight,” Ruthie May says. “That’s our most popular vibrating dildo. It can really work out some kinks, if you know what I mean.”
“It’s totally my favorite,” Emma June agrees.
“I tried it once and it overheated my cooch,” Phoebe says. She’s the smallest of the bunch—no more than five feet tall, and maybe ninety-five pounds—with smile lines creasing her elfin face.
Ruthie May gasps. “Uh, it’s not supposed to do that. Do you still have it? Our lab technicians might need to take a look.”
“Wasn’t the dildo’s fault. I was storing it over my oven. I spent all day Thanksgiving baking. By the time everyone finally left, I was ready to de-stress. But the oven was still on, so that sucker was about a hundred and forty degrees when I stuck it up the ol’ biscuit basket.”
Now we all gasp.
And she grins. “Just kidding. Not a dildo girl, never have been. They aren’t up to handling all this sexiness.”
“I-Seventeen,” Cassie calls, and we all breathe a sigh of relief and turn our focus back to our bingo cards.
Blake absently rubs his thumb over my arm just below my shirt sleeve, and I’m not actually certain it’s absently. Because he has a gleam in his eyes, and he hasn’t asked me to say three more nice things about him, though I know he hasn’t forgotten.
He wouldn’t forget.
Blake remembers everything, which is one of the things I really like about him, though I’m not quite ready to confess that just yet.
“You hold that dabber expertly,” I say to him instead, holding up three fingers.
“Mrs. O’Dell, you surprise me,” he murmurs.
I reach down and squeeze his solid thigh, because it’s there, and we’re supposed to be playing the happily married couple, and I do like touching him.
I can touch him here.
In public.
It’s not nearly as dangerous as touching him in private.
Also, this last game is taking forever.
Since this is the grand prize, we have to fill our entire card instead of just getting a single row.
Which means I have all the time in the world to lean closer. Let myself indulge in the fantasy that we actually could be the couple playing bingo in matching shirts with Blake’s brothers and their wives while talking about which sex toys are new at the factory.
I sigh dreamily just as Blake shouts, “Bingo!”
“A big purple dildo to the newlyweds!” Cassie cries. “Get up here, you crazy kids, and show off what you just won!”
“If the newlyweds need a dildo, they’re doing something wrong,” Carl yells.
“If you don’t need a dildo, what are you doing here?” Greta yells back.
Blake and I stare at each other, and a moment later, we’re both laughing so hard my eyes are tearing up.
A dildo. And not just any dildo.
We’re the newlyweds who won the dildo to end all dildos.
It’s like they knew I needed something to take the edge off of not sleeping with Blake, even though everyone is laughing and ribbing us and treating this like one big ol’ bachelorette party.
“Maybe if you’re lucky, she’ll show you how she uses it,” Ryan says with a wink when we make our way to the front of the room to claim Blake’s prize.
“And now cake!” Cassie cries, fighting through the crowd with the hedgehogs in a sling, to congratulate us. “Cake first, and then fun times with the dildo.”
“In private,” Olivia adds as she and Jace and the baby also arrive in the midst of the crowd. “Apparently there are laws about public nudity. Silly laws. But still laws.”
She smiles at me, and I hug her tight, then pull Cassie in as well.
I might not know much about marriage, but these women have taught me everything I know about family and community.
I glance over their shoulders to see Blake watching me with a soft expression that makes my heart ache in the good way. Maybe, just maybe, he has some things to teach me too.
Eleven
Blake
* * *
We laugh the entire way home, in complete agreement that the entire town was in cahoots to make sure we took home the purple dildo. We both saw at least one other full card on our way up to claim our prize.
And maybe it was our cracked but delicious cake, or seeing George Cooney perched on the trash can looking very put-out for being denied sweets, or sitting with the sun visor brigade, but anytime one of us stops laughing, the other one snorts, and we both start rolling all over again.
It’s a wonder we make it home safely without Hope’s energy field shorting out my truck. But the hula man on the dash seems extra happy and bouncy, swinging his hips and strumming his ukulele in time with our laughter.
Our shadow follows us through the dusky evening light, parking in his spot across the road—apparently Dean the overly friendly private eye is going to be camping in the Frick’s field for the next month—but the fact that we’re being watched isn’t why I hurry around the truck to open Hope’s door.
It’s because Operation: Real Romance is in full effect, and damn if it doesn’t seem to be working.
I certainly haven’t seen her smile like that in…
Huh. I can’t remember.
Not the last time she smiled at me like that, anyway.
“You want to take this inside?” she asks, holding out our hard-won bingo treasure with a giggle. “I need to go check on the fur babies. Rick, my part-time hand, feeds and stables them on Bingo Night, but I like to do a stable check to make sure everyone’s okay.”
“I’ll come with you.” I tuck the dildo down the front of my pants, le
tting the massive purple head peek up near my right hip, making Hope giggle again.
“That’s obscene.”
“No, it’s not.” I stroke the dildo protectively. “Don’t talk that way about Dildo Shaggins.”
“Dildo Shaggins? Oh my god.” Her head falls back as she braces an arm on my shoulder and laughs so hard she clearly has to struggle to stay upright.
I want to make her laugh like that every day.
At least once a day.
“But I can’t take credit for the name,” I admit. “It’s from Fellowship of the G-Strings, a hobbit soft porn spin-off.”
She laughs harder. “Hobbit porn. What in the world? Why are people so weird?”
“Says the woman who’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect an innocent alpaca and his sperm.”
“Well, alpaca sperm. That’s a totally different thing.” She sobers abruptly, but I can see the grin still teasing at her lips. “A very serious thing.”
“Very serious,” I echo. “We should go check on him and make sure no one has run away with his balls.”
She laughs as she leads the way toward the stable. “If people had any idea how valuable he is, I’d probably have to hire security.”
I cut a glance her way, but I can’t get a read on her expression in the dim light of the solar lights along the path. “Well, Kyle knows.”
“But Kyle is family. He’s a rat, but a relatively honorable rat. He’d never outright steal, especially when it would be easy for people who know what they’re doing to trace him. It’s not like the alpaca sperm black market is huge, you know? No, he’ll do it the legal way. The St. Claire way. In court.” She sighs, but it’s a relaxed sound, not a stressed out one. “But looks like that’s not going to be a problem. Fingers crossed and knock on wood, but I think we brought the romance tonight. If I didn’t know better, I’d never believe we were about to kill each other just last night.”
I grunt. “We weren’t going to kill each other. It was just a fight.”
“I told you I hated you.”
“Well, I can bring out the worst in people,” I say, stepping to the side as she opens the padlock on the barn door and slides it to the right, even though I’m pretty sure she’s the only person I bring out the worst in. But if I’m going to win her over, I have to shoulder some of the blame too. “Too stubborn for my own good. And I’m always right so that can be hard to handle at times, I’m sure.”
