“Would you tell me if you were?” he asks.
An impish look covers her face. “No.”
“Mallory!”
“Are you dating anyone?” she asks, propping a hand on her hip.
He lifts his chin. “I plead the fifth.”
“Yet you expect me to tell you if I’m dating someone,” she protests.
“I don’t see you drilling Alex,” Tyler says.
She gestures toward us. “That’s because it would be pretty hard for him to deny he’s dating Finley when the evidence is in front of us.”
Tyler scrutinizes us for several seconds, but it’s not as intense as when we first got here. Like he not only believes we’re a couple, but that Alex isn’t a nightmare boyfriend.
“I thought we were getting some spiked coffee,” Mallory says.
“I never said spiked coffee,” Alex counters. “And you’re too young for spiked coffee.”
She props a hand on her hip. “I’m a month away from being twenty-one, so if you think we’re getting non-spiked coffee from St. Nick’s coffee stand, then you’ve lost your mind.”
Alex lifts a brow. “The jury’s out on where my mind has gone, but we’re”—he gestures between me and him—“getting spiked coffee anyway. You’re getting regular coffee.”
“We’ll see about that,” she says, then turns around in a flounce and heads away from us.
Caught in the glow of Alex and his family, I realize I have two choices. I can keep my guard up and worry about Tyler watching us like a hawk over the next ten days, or I fall into the illusion that Alex is my boyfriend and his family is mine, like it’s a ten-day long cosplay. The safe choice is obvious. The risky one is tempting.
I hear my mother’s voice in my head, see the pleading in her eyes. Take risks.
I suppose you can’t get much riskier than this, only my life isn’t on the line, it’s my heart. But no one’s ever died of a broken heart, right?
Look at my heart walking a tightrope without a net.
It’s either commit to this or not, but it’s not really a choice. For once, I’m going to let my heart lead me. I’ll just deal with the fallout when I get home.
I suspect it’ll be one hell of a crash.
Chapter Twenty
Alex
I’m still not sure what I did to piss Finley off. Was it me bringing up my conversation with Roland again? Or suggesting I’d ask her to bake me cookies? Maybe both? Finley’s right. She’s not the pushover I thought, although I never thought of it as an insult. More that she’d be a go-with-the-flow kind of woman. Not that I’ll ever cop to that either. I’m not entirely stupid when it comes to women. The jury’s out on the percentage of stupidity though.
When I slipped my arm around Finley, I half-expected her to slap it away. But it was the perfect chance to convince Tyler our relationship is real. We were already “scheming”—her word, not mine—so holding her close as a show of unity felt like a natural step.
I’ve never been big on public displays with my past girlfriends, but with Finley it feels… weirdly right. And when she slid her arm around me, a warmth spread through me like drinking a fine whiskey in front of a fire. I attribute it to the civil conversation I was having with my brother and sister, the first in years. But I’d be lying if I said Finley wasn’t part of it too.
We’ve been at the market for an hour, but we only got our spiked coffees about ten minutes ago—delayed every few feet by something Finley wanted to check out. And Mallory won out in the end when Tyler got her a spiked coffee, much to her delight.
Now we’re sitting at a picnic table, sipping our drinks while she peppers Tyler and Mallory with questions about their hobbies, our parents, even Grant. She makes it seem like causal curiosity, but I know she’s compiling a mental list of “perfect gifts.” Then it hits me—she does the same thing with the customers at Beans to Go, asking about their lives and actually remembering all the little details. Is that calculated—just good customer service—or does she really care?
Finley takes a sip of her spiked peppermint mocha and says, “So, tell me about Eloise.”
Mallory and Tyler go conspicuously silent.
Finley winces. “Sorry if that was out of line. Maybe you haven’t had a chance to get to know her very well.”
