Best Fake Fiancé: A Single Dad Romance (Loveless Brothers Romance Book 2)
Best Fake Fiancé: Chapter 36

“DAD!” Rusty calls.

I take a deep breath, my hand still on her doorknob, then open it again.

“Yes?”

“I need a glass of water.”

“There’s a glass on your nightstand,” I point out.

In the dark I can just barely make out her small form in the bed, Astrid the wombat snuggled up on one side, her bright green cast on top of the covers.

“That one’s old.”

“Is this what you’re using your coupon on?” I ask.

It’s an idea I got from one of the ballet moms, actually. Rusty likes to fight bedtime by asking for a million things after lights out, so I gave her a coupon that she’s allowed to use once, and that’s it. One post-bedtime request, and then she has to go to sleep.

Of course, now I’m wondering whether having a broken arm merits a second coupon, the guilt twisting deep in my chest, intertwined with anger at Charlie, because I specifically said no sliding rocks and she still threw caution to the wind and now Rusty’s paying—

“Yes,” she says. “Can I get it myself?”

I step into her room and take the glass.

“Not a chance, kiddo,” I say, because I know what she’s really after — most of her uncles are still downstairs after Sunday Dinner, and she thinks they’re having fun without her. “I’ll be right back.”

Rusty sighs dramatically as I leave, but she doesn’t put up too much of a fight. I head to the kitchen and get her a new glass.

As I walk back through the living room, I realize everyone’s quiet and looking at me.

“What?” I ask.

Levi, Eli, Seth, and my mom all raise their eyebrows and shake their heads in the exact same way. They’re clearly up to something.

“Sure,” I say, and head back upstairs to give Rusty her fresh water.

She does her best to put off going to sleep: she needs to say goodnight to Grandma again. She wants socks. Her pants are itchy. She needs a different stuffed animal, she has to tell Seth something really important, she left the milk out.

I shut it all down, kiss her one more time, and close the door on her protests.

Usually, I don’t. Usually I have a little more patience with her, but not tonight. Not after yesterday, when Charlie got her arm broken after the knife thing and after nearly getting us arrested.

Not after I made Charlie cry and run away from me like that. Not after watching her leave felt like someone sucking all the air out of the room.

Ten minutes later Seth left the room and came back with my keys. Charlie texted him. She wouldn’t even text me to give me my keys back, and I have no idea how she got home. I’ve been telling myself I don’t care.

When I get back to the living room, they’re all still sitting there, and I stop dead in my tracks.

“What?” I ask again, more sharply than I meant to, but they’re all watching me like I’m the latest addition to the freak show, and I’m over it.

My brothers exchange glances, and finally Seth shrugs. I shove one hand through my hair, patience hanging by a string, cross my arms in front of my chest.

“You,” he says, walking up to me and putting one hand on my shoulder, “are coming with us.”

“Coming where?” I ask.

“My place,” Levi says.

“Did you not just see me put my daughter to bed?” I ask, jerking a thumb over my shoulder. “Whatever the hell you want, just do it—”

“I’ve got Rusty,” my mom says. “You go on with your brothers.”

“I have work to do,” I say.

I have no desire whatsoever to go to Levi’s cabin in the woods and do whatever the fuck they think I’m going to do. I want to go back upstairs, to my own room, and I want to sulk and be angry at Charlie and worry about Tuesday’s hearing and wallow in my guilt about Rusty.

“No, you don’t,” Seth says.

“Who asked you?”

“We can lift you,” Eli chimes in. “There’s three of us and one of you.”

I grind my teeth together, annoyance and irritation and anger at everyone in my life gnawing at me from the inside.

“I don’t want to go to Levi’s house,” I say, as patient and slowly as I can. “Right now, I just want to be alone—”

“Fascinating,” interrupts Seth.

I consider punching him. Not that hard, just hard enough to make him fuck off.

“Unfortunately, you’re terrible at knowing what’s good for you so we’re taking charge now,” he continues. “And you’ll be coming with us.”

I look from one face to another, all wearing the same expression: total sincerity.

Shit. They mean it. They’re actually prepared to lift me up and take me out of here if I don’t come of my own free will. For a second I think about just punching one of them — a gentle punch, they can take it — and then running upstairs and locking my door before the others catch me, but I only give that tactic about a thirty percent chance of succeeding.

“Fine,” I mutter, and head for the door.

I STARE at the brown liquid in the tumbler in front of me as Levi re-corks the bottle and puts it back on the shelf.

“How long have you been barrel-aging your own whiskey?” I ask, sniffing it. “Where have you been barrel-aging your whiskey?”

It smells good. Almost good enough to make me forget that I’m mad with them for dragging me to Levi’s mountain man shack.

Okay, it’s not a shack. It’s actually a pretty nice house, and he did build it himself. But I’m still pissed, and I’ve sure never seen barrels of whiskey anywhere.

“Approximately five years,” he says. “And I’ve been aging it in a suitable place.”

I give him a look for being obtuse, but I take a sip anyway.

It’s good. It’s a little weird — it’s smokier than a bourbon, a little sweet, and has a distinct note of wet rock — but it’s also delicious.

I take another sip. We’re all gathered around his fireplace, on two couches facing each other, a coffee table in front of us, a bear skin rug in front of the fireplace, which doesn’t currently contain a fire because it’s almost summer.

Yes, Levi the vegetarian has a bear skin rug. He didn’t shoot the bear himself. It’s a long story. Its name is Jebediah.

“Okay,” I say, leaning back onto my couch, Eli next to me. “Let me guess, I’m here because you think I’m wrong for being pissed at Charlie and you’re going to tell me to get over it and forgive her, because you all like her and think she’s fun and don’t want her to stop coming around.”

I take another sip. The weird/good balance is starting to tip in favor of good.

Also, I didn’t drive myself here.

“Not even close,” Eli says, propping his feet on the coffee table, which is a long, glossy slice of …tree, I guess. “You’ve been a total dick to everyone for the past twenty-four hours and mom needs a break from your shit.”

“I’m being a dick because—”

“Stop it, we know why you’re being a dick,” Seth says, his posture matching Eli’s. I put my feet on the table too, just for the hell of it. “We don’t care, we just need you out of the house before Mom kicks you out and locks the door behind you.”

“Be mad at Charlie all you want,” Levi says, swirling his own whiskey. “Just stop stomping around and snapping at people about using coasters.”

“I specifically said don’t go to the sliding rocks,” I say, ignoring the fact that we’re not talking about Charlie. “Seth, you were there. Did I not say that?”

“You did,” he says. “Heard it my own self.”

“And she took her!” I say.

“Indeed,” agrees Seth.

“And now her arm is broken, and it wouldn’t be if Charlie hadn’t just decided to do whatever the fuck she wanted to do—”

“She could have broken it anyway,” Levi points out. “There’s about a million ways to break an arm.”

“Caleb broke mine when I wouldn’t give him back his Lego Darth Vader,” Seth volunteers.

“You deserved that,” I say. “And it was an accident. He tackled you at the top of the stairs because he was seven and didn’t understand consequences very well.”

“Whereas Charlie snapped Rusty’s arm herself, on purpose,” Eli says sarcastically.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I snap, and take another long sip.

The bourbon also has a slight aftertaste of… sage?

“You’re saying,” Levi says, crossing one ankle over the opposite knee, “That if only everyone listened to you and did exactly as you directed at all times, life would be a Norman Rockwell painting because you’d be in total control of everything.”

“I’m obviously not saying that,” I go on. “But she’s reckless, she’s impulsive, she’s a scatterbrained mess who nearly got us arrested Friday night—”

“Hold on.”

“What?”

“Yeah, we need that story,” Seth finishes, leaning forward. “Daniel, did you have… fun?”

I just give him a long, withering look. Or, I try. Seth doesn’t wither. He just waits, glass between his hands, leaning forward.

“The question is,” Levi says. “Would Daniel know he were having fun if he had it?”

“Oh, for sure,” Eli says, grinning. “Daniel was real fun once. How do you think he got Rusty?”

“Do you still have your badass snake tattoo?” Seth asks.

“I’ve still got a tattoo of the constellation Serpens, yes,” I say, draining my whiskey glass.

“You mean the one you got because, and I quote, ‘snakes are badass’?” Seth says.

We all have constellation tattoos. We got them together, on Caleb’s eighteenth birthday, all five of us. I’ve got serpens, the snake, Levi’s got corvus, the crow, Eli’s got the dragon and the north star, Seth’s got Scorpio, and Caleb’s got the sextant, because he’s always been a nerd.

“At least I didn’t get my ex-girlfriend’s zodiac sign,” I counter.

Seth’s face goes flat. Everyone goes quiet.

I regret saying it instantly, even though it’s been at least five years.

Then he drains his whiskey glass.

“She wasn’t my ex at the time,” he says, his face lightening. “Besides, scorpions are also badass. Tell us the story of how you had fun already.”

I tell them, mostly because I feel bad for bringing up Seth’s ex, Delilah: the milkshakes, the trespassing, the skinny dipping, Officer Sherman.

I leave out the part about barebacking and barely getting away with it, because there’s such a thing as oversharing.

When I finish, Levi and Eli are smirking, and Seth is full-on grinning like it’s Christmas morning.

“You,” he says. “Naked. Outside. On someone else’s property. My God, Daniel, that’s about two steps away from some real law-breaking, like changing lanes without signaling or jaywalking.”

“You’re such a dick,” I say, but he’s already getting up and grabbing the weird whiskey off the shelf, pouring it into my glass.

“I’d like to submit a thought for consideration,” Levi says, settling back into his couch like it’s a throne.

“Submit away,” says Eli.

“I think this is why you like Charlie,” he says.

“Because she gets me in trouble and got Rusty hurt?”

“Daniel, we went over this,” says Eli. “Rusty could’ve fallen off the swings and broken her arm.”

“The swings have a rubber mat underneath them,” I say.

“You can be a dick all you want, but I know you understand the point I’m making,” he says.

“You like Charlie because she’s exciting,” Levi continues, acting like Eli and I aren’t bickering. “She’s fun. She’s unpredictable. She takes you on nude excursions.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Seth mutters into his glass.

“For all you act like you want safety and stability and a home life that looks like a Coca-Cola ad from the fifties, you’ve never liked someone half as much as Charlie and you never will,” he says.

I swallow hard and stare down, right into Jebediah’s glass eyes, his furry face forever frozen in a snarl. Levi’s right and I hate him for it, but that’s not the worst part. It’s not the real problem.

“She’s bad for Rusty,” I finally say, my voice quiet. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about it, she’s not — we can’t have a future if she’s not good for Rusty.”

There’s a brief moment of stunned silence, and I look up into three faces, all leaning forward and looking at me like I have two heads.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Seth asks.

“That,” Eli says, pointing at Seth.

“Charlie’s awesome with Rusty,” Seth continues. “So she fucked up. All parents fuck up.”

“I got a black eye once because I was riding on Dad’s shoulders and he walked me into a door frame,” Eli says.

“Mom forgot me at the grocery store when I was six,” Levi says.

“When Dad was teaching me to ride a bike, he steered me straight into a tree by accident,” Seth offers. “And didn’t Mom give you a huge gash on your arm once when you were hiding in a pile of leaves to surprise her and she raked you?”

“Oh, I remember that,” Levi says. “We all had to go to the hospital so you could get a tetanus shot.”

“They weren’t having a custody battle,” I point out. “Mom and Dad didn’t have some other parent just waiting for them to fuck up so they could use it against them in court.”

They fall quiet.

“I can’t fuck up,” I say. “I’m already the wrong parent, I already put her in public school and don’t live in a gated community and won’t give her a pony and don’t have a spouse—”

“You’ve got Charlie,” Eli says.

“Not a spouse, Eli,” I say.

“She’s been more of a presence in Rusty’s life than her own mother,” he says softly. “You think that other shit matters to Rusty?”

“It matters to a judge,” I say. “This school they want to send her to has a ninety-nine-point-nine college acceptance rate, last year they sent seven kids to Harvard and ten to Yale—”

“And Rusty was nearly a year old and barely able to sit up by herself, let alone crawl when you got her,” Eli says, his voice rising. “That’s in the file too. You know what else is in the file? That Swamp Thing has seen her about six times in the past year.”

“Don’t call her—”

“Rusty’s not here so I’ll call her garbage mother what I want, thanks.”

Somehow, my whiskey’s gone again. I stand up, then wobble, drunker than I was expecting.

“It’s on the table,” Levi says.

I pour more. I drink more. I sit back down on the couch, with my brothers, and lean my head back against the cool leather and close my eyes.

And I see Rusty, so small in her hospital bed, big eyes glassy from crying, still in her swimsuit, her wrapped arm propped up while she waited to get a cast put on. All I can hear is her soft voice saying hi, Dad.

Charlie on her other side, holding her other hand tight, looking ragged and terrified herself. Charlie who must have carried Rusty back through the woods, who must have been the one to get her into her booster seat, soothe her, get her to the hospital.

It suddenly occurs to me that when I got there, Rusty wasn’t crying, even though she was still in pain. She wasn’t scared even though she was in the emergency room, she wasn’t freaked out.

Even though her arm was broken, Rusty was fine, and it’s because Charlie was there. Because she loves Charlie and trusts Charlie and even if Charlie does dumb shit sometimes, she’s never once failed Rusty in the ways that matter.

“Are you asleep?” Levi asks.

“No,” I say.

“Are you considering our sage advice?” he asks.

I say nothing.

“That means yes,” says Seth.

“It’s good advice,” says Eli.

I just sigh, then lift my head and take another long sip of whiskey.