Best Fake Fiancé: A Single Dad Romance (Loveless Brothers Romance Book 2)
Best Fake Fiancé: Chapter 7

THAT WASN’T our first kiss.

I’m driving fast, too fast, along the dark winding rural roads back to town. Headlights in front of me, darkness behind me, his great-grandmother’s garnet ring around my finger.

It flashes, even in the darkness.

I don’t think Daniel remembers the first time. It’s been six years and he’s never brought it up — not a look, not a glance, not an oblique reference, nothing.

Not that I’ve brought it up either. It was only one kiss.

We were twenty-three and drunk at a bonfire. There’d been cases of shitty beer and a few jugs of moonshine passed around, and the two of us were on the hood of his truck, lying back against the windshield, watching the sparks from the fire swirl up into the sky.

We were laughing about something. We clinked beer cans together. He was three-quarters of the way through his first year at community college, and I’d just gotten accepted into a two-year carpentry program.

I remember it felt like we were floating, celebrating, the wasteland of the past four years behind us. We’d both pulled through bad times and bad company, and there we were, making something of ourselves, letting go for the first time in ages.

I don’t remember what happened next. He turned and looked at me or I turned and looked at him, or maybe both. It must have been both.

But I remember being suddenly breathless with desire. I remember the feeling that my brain had bubbles rising through it, like champagne, and I remember the way that everything but Daniel faded, and I remember that it felt like if we didn’t kiss right then I’d die.

So we kissed. It was gentle, slow, tentative. It was surprising. It felt like walking into an air-conditioned building on a hundred-degree day: wonderful and bracing, with that sense of bone-deep satisfaction.

Either he deepened the kiss, or I did. It doesn’t matter. I just know that it felt righter than any other kiss in my life.

Then I spilled my beer all over both of us. The kiss ended and we were laughing, flicking beer off. Not long after we both went home, separately, because I didn’t want to rush anything. I needed time to consider the fact that I’d just kissed my best friend of thirteen years, process it, decide how best to proceed.

The kiss rattled me, but in a good way. A tambourine, not a rattlesnake.

And then, the next day, Burnley County Child Protective Services showed up at Daniel’s door and told him that a woman he knew was claiming he had a one-year-old daughter, and suddenly, nothing else mattered.

I couldn’t blame Daniel for getting hit by a tornado, even though I was hurt. I couldn’t blame Rusty for being the tornado. I was sad and upset and disappointed, but what could I do? Life moved on. I got over it.

Okay, I did make a voodoo doll of Crystal. It was a really bad one — just a vague human shape that I carved from a block of wood that I had lying around — but believe me, I stabbed the shit out of that thing. I think it made me feel better, though eventually I threw it away. Having a voodoo doll of your best friend’s baby mama is fucked up.

I’m probably lucky that he forgot, or pretended to, or that we both decided to ignore it forever. Everything would be different now, and we’d have wrecked the friendship that we have. I wouldn’t hang out with his family every Sunday at dinner. I wouldn’t be Rusty’s cool aunt who buys her stuffed animals of deep-sea fish and secretly let her drive her own bumper car once at the state fair.

Daniel doesn’t know about that last part, mostly because before I took her, he gave me an extensive rundown of what rides she should and shouldn’t go on.

I ignored the list and we went on all of them. We ate cotton candy, too. It was a blast.

When I finally pull into my parking space behind my apartment, I don’t really feel better. I still feel a deep, layered guilt over wearing his great-grandmother’s ring. I feel the same about lying to his mom and half his brothers, not to mention my own parents.

And I sure feel something about that kiss, something big and spacious and impenetrable, something taking up almost all the room I’ve got for feelings and leaving no room for anything else.

I head up. I glance into the kitchen, decide that there’s nothing in dire need of cleaning before tomorrow. I brush my teeth, wash my face, turn out my apartment lights, and get in bed.

The ring catches on the sheet as I pull it up — just slightly, no big deal — and my heart skips a beat. I sit upright in bed, turn on the bedside lamp and pull it off.

Then I hunch over the ring in the not-very-good light, heart still thumping, as I assess it for any possible damage — a prong torn off, the gem fractured, I don’t know — but it’s fine.

I sit there, staring at it, for a long moment. I tell myself that literally millions of people own engagement rings, that plenty of them probably wear them to bed, and that these are made to go on hands. They can probably stand up to cotton sheets.

I close my hand around it and get out of bed, because I can’t wear this while I sleep. I’ll wake up every forty-five minutes to double check that I haven’t somehow swallowed it or something, and that’s no way to live.

I need a ring receptacle. What I really want is, I don’t know, a wall safe with a thumbprint scanner, because while you can lose keys and forget combinations, you can’t lose or forget a thumbprint.

I don’t have a wall safe. I don’t even have a fireproof lockbox, even though my mom keeps telling me to get one. My ‘important documents’ are just in a cardboard box under my bed, a fact that made both my mom and my sister briefly close their eyes and breathe deeply when they found out.

In the absence of something that locks, I head into the kitchen and grab a mug. I have about two thousand too many, because whenever I replace a particularly weird one, I can’t help but buy it. That also means that other people buy me weird mugs, so appropriately, I replace one that Daniel gave me last year.

It’s got a cartoon illustration of several pinup-type women facing away from the camera, wearing thongs, and in goofy all-caps text it says VIRGINIA BEACH: NO BUTTS ABOUT IT!

First, no butts about what? ‘Virginia Beach’ isn’t really a statement.

Second, there are clearly some butts about it because the butts are right there on the mug. I guess the argument could be made that the butts aren’t really about Virginia Beach, because butts simply exist and aren’t really about anything, but then it might seem like I’ve given this dumb mug way more thought than I should have.

I drop the ring in, and it lands with a satisfying clink. Then I double-check the locks on my door, put the mug on my dresser, and get back into bed.

After congratulating myself on actually replaceing a proper spot for the ring instead of sticking it wherever and telling myself I’d deal with it in the morning, I fall asleep.