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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 – HOLLEYrule 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.
