Lainey was failing to see the issue that was causing him to pace about the driveway and turning his neck a splotchy shade of scarlet. “Okay. Tellhimthat.”
“And admit I’m committing health-care fraud? Brilliant. Really genius stuff.” He was too flustered to pull off sarcasm with any real bite.
“Two seconds ago, it was a ‘very legitimate business arrangement.’ ”
He retraced his steps over and over, his feet kicking up dirt. “Why doesn’t this bother you at all?”
She shrugged. “It’s a small town. People were going to find out.”
His nostrils flared on his inhale. “I hadn’t accounted for that.”
“You were the one who wanted to live together to make the lie more convincing.”
“Yeah, to a bunch of claims adjusters thousands of miles away. Not to Dave fucking Lindley.” He was cursing. Things were getting serious. “Do we need to act more ‘married’?”
Lainey tried to imagine how married people might act. The only married couple she’d spent a protracted amount of time with were Bree and Colin, and Bree recoiled at Colin’s touch, even though she tried to hide it.
“People don’t think that much about other people. We don’t have anything to worry about.”
“But if Dave asks what you’ve been up to, I should have a better answer than ‘Sleeping, I think.’ ”
He should’ve had a better answer than that already, considering he spent every day embroiled in a silent fridge standoff over the ownership of an expired package of hummus of unknown origin, but he didn’t have the posture of a man prepared to receive that feedback.
She walked down the porch steps and cautiously approached, regretting her decision when her just-showered bare feet hit the dirt driveway. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t go back to EZ Gas now that we’re married. I can’t afford to piss off the Bauers. There are only so many furnishings a person can construct with dead animal carcasses.” Yasmin Bauer’s chandelier had taken a sharp turn away from hunting-cabin chic and was beginning toresemble the lighting fixture of a particularly audacious serial killer.
He pulled his damp hair by the roots. “See! This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about. These people all know you. They’re not going to buy that a guy who just moved to town is yourhusbandwhen he doesn’t even know which gas station to go to.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders. His skin was still hot from his run. “Elliot. It’s okay.”
She let her fingers slip down the slope of his arms, all the way to the palms of his hands. She wasn’t sure what her eyes were doing, but his were staring back at her, unblinking.
She shouldn’t be touching him like this. Hands were so vulnerable. They were a person’s physical entry point to the outside world. A point of connection. It was as though she’d stripped him bare in the middle of her driveway.Theirdriveway.
She dropped his hands and cleared her throat. “There’s only that one blood feud in Timber Creek. That’s it. I think we’ll be fine. When in doubt, divert all conversation to the ‘busy season.’ People love to stress about busy season. That, and complain about tourists.”
March and April were lean months for Timber Creek. It was the time of year when locals claimed to dread the upcoming “hustle and bustle” while secretly longing for the financial boon of out-of-town guests. True contempt for tourists was a privilege the town simply couldn’t afford.
“What do we say when people ask how this happened?” He gestured between the two of them.
“Us?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Tell the real story. But say your threats of legal action were psychosexual foreplay in your pathetic, lovesick pursuit of me.”
He scoffed—which was rude. “Who’s going to believe that?”
“They’ll believe the part aboutyou—I’m a Wisconsin nine and famously a delight. The part whereIfall in love withyouwill be the tougher sell.”
“Right. We’ll have to start a rumor that you’re trying to steal my inheritance.” His barbs were beginning to sound like a joke she was in on.
“Yeah…I don’t think anyone’s going to believe I have any interest in stealing Gil’s turtle terrariums.” She wrinkled her nose as though the very notion carried a stench. “With all due. RIP, obviously.”
He sighed at her, as though her continued existence was a test of his fortitude. “We’ll have to iron out our story later. I have too much work to do if I want to get cabin four ready for us to move into.”
He kept bringing that up. That they were eventually going to livetogethersomeplace else. Something about the idea made her hands sweat. It was weird enough that he was living with her inherhouse, but at least here they had separate bedrooms. Relocating to a second place with Elliot—one where there was only one option for sleeping—had her, understandably, concerned.
“Can I borrow your handsaw again?” he asked. Elliot had barely been holding it together with his renovations at the Shore Thing. He’d immediately picked the wrong horse, opting to start work on one of the cabins that was nearly inside the lake. At every turn, he ran into drainage issues and rotted wood.
“You know you can,” she replied.
“It’s for the floors,” he clarified, not for her benefit, but his. Doggedly determined to renovate the whole property armed with nothing but a Home Depot credit card and YouTube videos from some guy called the North Shore Grump, Elliot had yet to directly ask for her help. Instead, he borrowed her tools the waya nervous golfer requested clubs from their caddy. Instead of a “yes,” he wanted a “no” accompanied by sage wisdom and a nudge in the right direction. She didn’t have the heart to tell him the item he required was a stick of dynamite.
