BILLIE
“Where were you this morning?”Bailey’s voice cut through the tranquil silence of my office like a hot knife through fondant.
My heart did a guilty little hop. I’d gambled that her late start and my early escape would cancel each other out, that I’d be able to coast through the day with no one noticing my absence. A rookie mistake, really.
I quickly shut down my PC hoping she hadn’t seen what was on the screen. I’d contacted a private investigator to look for Adam’s mom. I knew he was never going to do it, and after seeing the way he’d looked at that ring, I also knew he wanted to know what had happened to her. Also, if he was going to come into a lot of money,Iwanted to make sure that she wasn’t going to suddenly show up and take advantage of him. I figured as his “wife” it was my legal and moral duty to protect him.
“I had some errands to run,” I said, forcing my voice to the precise, neutral tone I reserved for clients returning a gown without a receipt.
Bailey’s nose wrinkled, the universal Bliss signal for,I’m about to ruin your morning. “Errands?” She repeated the word as if she’d just bitten into a lemon.
She stepped fully into the office, shutting the door behind her with more finality than was strictly necessary.
I nodded, pulling my chair closer to my desk, using it as emotional armor to hide behind. “It was nothing. Just a couple of things I needed to handle.”
Her lips thinned. “You didn’t block out your time.”
My stomach performed a slow, mortified somersault. In the sacred family temple of Bliss Bridal, failing to share your schedule was a sin just shy of embezzling from the till. “I forgot I had them,” I said, not even bothering to put much polish on the lie. She’d see through it anyway.
“Youforgot?!” It came out shrill, and I could see the vein in her neck starting to pop. Poor Bailey, born middle child and destined forever to mediate, organize, and manage everyone else’s emotional baggage. She was supposed to be prepping the latest batch of “Blissful Beginnings” welcome boxes, not interrogating her older sister before lunch.
I hated to go on the attack, but I honestly had no choice. “Birdie came in two to four hours late twelve days last month, eight the month before that, five so far this month. You’ve left in the middle of a workday six days last month, left early twenty-one, and not come in at all on four. I was out for four hours once since we took over the shop and didn’t block out my time and I get the third degree.”
“Birdie and I aren’t getting stalked, Bill. And your phone was off.” Bailey’s voice trembled, her hand leaving the doorknob to swipe at her dampening lashes. “I thought—” She stopped, chewing the inside of her cheek so hard I almost heard it pop.
Shit. I’d been so fixated on the mind-bending strangeness of my own wedding—being half-drunk on adrenaline and Adam’s cologne—that I hadn’t spent one single neuron remembering that, to my sisters, my world was still a dangerous place. Or thatI, the perennial planner, had left them without a way to reach me thanks to the courts’ no cell phone policy.
In retrospect, I’d handled it like a jackass.
All of the anger and defensiveness deflated from me like a popped balloon. Suddenly, my own panic and the memory of that marriage license, hastily signed and dated, as if we were on the run, seemed like the punchline to a very sad joke. My entire world lately had been the twins and Adam, the stalker had completely slipped my mind. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so…I should have thought about that.”
Bailey’s eyes flashed. “That’s exactly it. Youalwaysthink. So why didn’t you today? What’s going on with you?”
There it was, the real question. Not about time sheets or errands, but about why I’d let down my guard. And I—master of plausible deniability, queen of the diplomatic half-truth, couldn’t bring myself to look her in the face and say,Actually, I was off marrying the boy next door so he could claim his inheritance and maybe, possibly, so I could justify spending the rest of my life knowing, even if it was just for 90 days, I was Mrs. Adam Knight.
Instead, I lied. “I had a doctor’s appointment.”
Bailey’s jaw went slack. “You had a doctor’s appointment,” she repeated, like I’d said I was out test-driving tanks.
I shrugged, putting as much casual indifference into the movement as I could muster. “Just my annual. You know how they are about scheduling. They had a last-minute cancellation and I grabbed it. I’m fine.”
Lying had never been my fatal flaw. I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that a little harmless fabrication was the death of civilization, or even a smudge on my personal record, but I’d always preferred the truth, mainly because I refused to lie to myself and the lies you tell others become the lies you tell yourself, and then you had to remember which version you toldto which person, and the whole thing snowballed into a logistical nightmare. It’s much simpler to keep people at arm’s length and tell them nothing.
Today’s lie, however, felt like swallowing fire. It wasn’t the content of the falsehood—I’d gotten so used to telling people I was “fine” or “just busy” that I could do it with my eyes closed—but the fact that I had to lie to Bailey, of all people. Bailey would be heartbroken if she ever learned the truth, but it was a necessary evil.
There were several reasons she absolutely could not know. One, she was about to get married in a few weeks and Birdie was getting married in a few months. I wasn’t going to do anything to take the spotlight away from their big days, or the lead up. Also, she would read too much into it. It was on paper only.
So why did I feel like his wife? And why did it feel real when he’d said his vows to me? And that kiss… That kiss was…
No. Ridiculous. The truth was, it’s just paperwork, I reminded myself. A means to an end. The end being Adam’s ability to access his trust and inheritance. Nobody was getting hurt. Nobody even needed to know.
The marriage was fake. That was the lie.
It was only a problem if I started to believe the lie.
Bailey gave me a hard squint, then her crisis-management instincts overrode whatever speech she’d been cooking up. The bell at the front desk rang—three quick dings in a row, which meant either a courier with no boundaries or a bridal party here a full hour early. She adjusted the cuffs on her button down, gathered up her planner, and swept out with a purpose, the soft thud of her heels echoing off the oak floors.
I let out a breath and shut my eyes for a moment to regroup. The “annual” I’d just invented was a better story but not a great one. It had flaws. I needed to find out when my annual actually was so I could figure out how to go to it without her knowing.This was why lying was so wrong, it always created more problems.
