Best Fake Fiancé: A Single Dad Romance (Loveless Brothers Romance Book 2)
Best Fake Fiancé: Chapter 12

I’VE BEEN WAITING years for this kiss. Six, I think, though as Charlie presses her lips against mine, as she goes on her tiptoes, as her hand settles against my hip and I pull her against me, fingers on her back, her mouth opening under mine — as all that happens, math’s not my strong suit.

I don’t have a strong suit. Not right now. Right now, I’m weakness itself, giving into impulses and fantasies and a wanting so deep I could swim in it.

She moves closer, presses against me. My hand replaces its way into her hair and tangles there as our heads tilt the other way and my tongue meets hers, and she grips the back of my neck even tighter, drawing me down, and somehow two of my fingers replace their way onto her skin against her back, under her shirt.

I am unmoored, swept away. I’m caught in a riptide as I push her backward one step, then two, guided by the vague notion that somewhere in this room there’s furniture and I want her on it and then Charlie’s pulling at me, the tide herself.

There’s a table. It shudders as I push her against or she pulls me against her, against the table, impossible to know which, and she tilts backward as I lean over her, my whole hand against her bare skin now, her fingers tugging at my shirt like she’s looking for a way in.

Then, suddenly, her hands are on my chest and she’s not kissing me anymore. Charlie shoves me away and I let her, standing up straight and taking a step backward, her hazel eyes wide.

Too late, I realize there were footsteps.

“Eli told me to come—”

The door swings open, and Levi’s bearded head pokes through.

“Get… you… for dinner,” he says slowly.

I say nothing. I couldn’t think of a word if my life depended on it right now. All I can do is watch the expressions moving over Levi’s face, like clouds across a clear sky, from surprise to confusion to reluctant understanding.

“Dinner,” he says again, unnecessarily, and then he’s gone. Footsteps thunk down the attic stairs and I shove one hand through my hair as I feel like a pool float, slowly deflating.

Except my dick. That particular part of me is so hard it feels like it might shatter.

Charlie and I turn our heads, looking at each other again. She’s wide-eyed, nervous, her lips slightly parted and her hands perched next to her on the table, fingertips tented, like birds ready to take off at the slightest provocation.

“Fuck dinner,” I say.

It works. It gets a smile from Charlie, her hands flattening against the table, the uncertainty washing out of her face.

“We should go down,” she says. “Unless you want your family members tromping up here one by one and asking increasingly nosy questions about what we’re doing.”

“The door locks,” I offer, my voice low, even though I know she’s right.

“How long do you think that would work for?” she says, head tilted to one side.

“Maybe today’s the day they start respecting boundaries,” I say as she hops off the table.

“I wouldn’t put money on that,” she says.

The neck of her shirt has gone lopsided, and I tug it back into place over her bra strap, my fingers brushing her neck. Her bra’s black. I wonder if her panties match today, which doesn’t help my erection.

“Me either,” I admit.

She reaches up and moves a strand of hair off my forehead, her fingertips barely brushing my face.

I catch her hand again as she lowers it, pull her fingers back, plant my lips in the very center of her palm like a promise.

“Daniel,” she whispers, that single word filled with uncertainty, with a thousand possibilities both good and bad.

“Right here,” I say, my voice low, quiet, rough.

“That was weird,” she says, nearly whispering. “Are we good?”

“DAAAAAAAAAAD!” Rusty shouts, and I close my eyes for a moment. I love my daughter more than life itself, but sometimes I really wish she would chill.

“I said go see where they are, not scream at him,” my mother’s voice says.

“Coming!” I shout unromantically toward the door. Charlie clears her throat.

“Not like weird weird,” she says, her words rushed. “But, I mean, that was definitely not what we talked about and it was kind of sudden—”

“I’ve wanted to do that since I kissed you on the truck at the bonfire,” I say. “When we were drunk, and you spilled your beer on me.”

Charlie blinks, surprised.

“I thought you forgot that.”

“I tried.”

“DAD, you’re not coming!” Rusty shouts, and suddenly Charlie laughs.

“If you replace out tomorrow that you’ve got a second child, I will kill you,” she promises.

I let her hand go, open the door, let my fingertips drift to her lower back, guiding her even though she knows the way.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “This one was very effective birth control.”

DINNER IS SOMEWHERE between awkward and pandemonium. Levi won’t look at me directly, but Seth doesn’t seem to want to look anywhere else. Eli’s just smirking, and every few minutes his girlfriend Violet shoots him a stop it look. Or maybe a be nice to your brother look.

Or maybe it’s a please take the trash out when you get home look. I don’t know girlfriend looks. I can’t interpret them.

Caleb’s the only of my brothers managing to act normal, a fact which makes him my current favorite. I know that either Seth or Levi told him about the whole fake engagement situation, but he is somehow managing to pass the mango-cashew slaw and curried veggie skewers like a normal human being.

“I thought it was a ski resort,” my mom is saying.

“I thought you said it was an outlet mall,” Eli says, frowning.

Levi clears his throat, pulling a chunk of pineapple off a skewer with his fork. He’s barely said a word all night, so everyone stops and looks at him.

“We think he might be exploring the possibility of mining,” he says solemnly.

“Mining?” says my mom, incredulous.

“He can’t do that on National Forest land,” Charlie pipes up. “It’s protected.”

Eli snorts.

“Walter Eighton doesn’t understand the meaning of the word no,” he says. “If someone tries to tell him he can’t do something, he’ll just throw a fit until he gets his way.”

I’m listening, but barely, because Charlie’s right here, next to me, and I’m trying not to watch her hands as she drinks her beer and slices into her carrots and swirls a bite in tamarind chutney and then lifts it to her mouth, closing her lips around it.

“He’s reported us to the alcoholic beverage control board what, five times?” Seth says. “Six?”

She bumps me slightly, her elbow against my side as I reach for my water.

“Daniel,” Seth says, and my head snaps up.

He looks entertained, and I quickly run back the last thirty seconds in my head.

“Six,” I confirm. “He keeps telling them that we’re distilling onsite, but our license is only for brewing.”

“Are you?” asks Silas.

“No,” Seth and I chorus together.

“You should give it a shot,” my mom says. “You know, your great granddad Lowell made the best whiskey in three states.”

“Mom.”

“I mean you should do it legally, Daniel,” she teases.

“Great-Granddad Lowell also had quite the mugshot collection,” I point out.

“Yeah, looks like he knew how to have fun,” Seth says. He shoots me another look. I don’t know what this particular look means, so I ignore it.

“Lowell bought the ring, right?” Charlie suddenly asks. She’s holding her hand flat in front of her, watching it sparkle.

“He did,” my mom confirms. “Three days on horseback to Richmond—”

“Last time I heard this story he also had the fastest car in the county,” Caleb suddenly says. “What happened?”

“It was briefly in the Sherriff’s possession,” my mom says lightly. “What makes you think Walter Eighton wants to mine on National Forest land?”

There’s a brief pause as we all switch mental gears from my bootlegging ancestors to the topic at hand. Levi’s the first to get there, sharing a quick glance with Caleb.

“Do you know what a thumper truck is?” he asks the table.

“Is it a truck that thumps?” Silas guesses, gesturing with his fork.

“It is,” Levi confirms. “It uses seismic activity to identify possible sites for natural gas drilling, and for the past few months, we’ve had backcountry hikers and campers reporting possible minor earthquakes around Laney Caverns, but they weren’t being picked up by any seismic equipment anywhere.”

Levi cuts a mushroom cap in half and carefully places it in his mouth, despite the fact that everyone is paying attention to him.

“But then you also found a thumper truck?” Seth asks, always the least patient brother.

“Tracks,” says Caleb. “Large, deep, fresh tracks on a fire road that’s supposed to be off-limits to public vehicles, in the vicinity of where the seismic activity was reported.”

“That’s not proof,” Seth points out.

“It’s not,” Levi agrees. “But it’s sure worthy of some suspicion, and Walter Fucking Eighton—”

“Levi,” I say as Rusty suddenly perks up.

I look over at her. She’s grinning from ear to ear.

“You’re not supposed to say fucking,” she says, delightedly.

“Excuse me?” I say sharply, and the grin drops off her face.

“Uncle Levi said it first,” she says.

“It wasn’t okay for him to say it and it’s not okay for you to say it,” I tell her, shooting a glare at my oldest brother. He at least has the grace to look ashamed.

“Sorry, Rusty,” Levi says. “That was rude of me.”

Rusty sighs, dramatically rests her chin on her hand, and stabs at a piece of eggplant. She’s not that much taller than the tabletop, so the effect is more funny than anything else.

“Please don’t use language like that,” I tell her.

She sighs again, and I silently pray that we’re not about to get into our but why can’t I say those words, they’re just words conversation. Frankly, I agree with her, but I also can’t have another meeting with a teacher about her teaching her classmates the word asshole. Or clusterfuck. Or shitshow.

“Okay,” she finally says. “Sorry, Dad.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Walter Eighton,” Caleb says, reminding us where we all were.

“Right,” Levi says. “He’s been petitioning for mineral rights in Cumberland National Forest, and the first step in the convoluted process of getting them is to show that there’s actually something there to mine…”

I stop listening to them discuss the finer points of land use legislation and federal protection levels, because right now, I couldn’t care less.

Instead I feel like a travel commercial I saw once: rocky cliffs overlooking a deep blue ocean, a color so rich it seems unreal. There was a man standing on top of the cliffs, and I’m sure the announcer was saying something like come on this great vacation and conquer your fears, after this you’ll be the billionaire CEO of your own company but all I remember is the guy suddenly leaping off the cliff, flailing on the way down, landing with a huge splash.

I feel like I just leaped off the cliff. I feel like I’ve stood there for years, looking out at the ocean, not even knowing there was a cliff. I’m pretty sure I’m flailing now. I think there might be rocks at the bottom. I have no idea what’s in store.

Casually, I lean back in my chair, take a sip of water, wipe my hands on my napkin. Then I put one hand on Charlie’s leg. My heart kicks and next to me, she takes a deep breath, her shoulders moving.

Then her hand settles on mine.

I DON’T GET her alone again that night. When there are nine people in a house, four of whom are the world’s most interfering brothers and one of whom is your own seven-year-old daughter, secret alone time is hard to come by.

I do the dishes with a blissfully ignorant Silas while Violet and Charlie plan a day of cake tasting. Seth keeps wandering in and out of the kitchen, shooting me more and more significant looks each time until he’s practically a caricature of himself, and I do my best to ignore him.

Silas ends up telling me about his sister, June, who just moved back to town. Because I’m a good brother, I just nod along, mention that we were in the same high school class, and don’t bring up how Levi called her ma’am yesterday.

Call it pre-payment for Levi not telling anyone what he saw before dinner.

After that, Rusty wants to play Chutes and Ladders, so we do. I try to let her beat me, but the game is pure luck, so I win by accident but she’s a good sport about it. Then she ropes Charlie and Violet into playing, then Caleb, then Candyland comes out, and before I know it, she’s playing a version of that with Caleb and Eli that seems to involve bribery and negotiation.

I think she wins both games. I’d be tempted to say that they let her win, except I’m not sure Eli’s ever let anyone win anything in his life.

We have dessert: blackberry cobbler that Levi made from the bramble near his cabin. Silas leaves. Levi and Seth both go home. Rusty tries to negotiate her way out of bedtime, and I let her get away with ten more minutes, but then it’s lights out.

We don’t even get through a full chapter of Apprenticed to Dragons before she’s nodding off, heavy eyelids fluttering on her pillow. I leave her room and close her door, then stand on the second-floor hallway of my mom’s house and have my first alone time of the day.

Rusty’s room is right across the hall from mine, and as I stand there, mind jumbled, trying to make sense of everything, I’m looking into my own bedroom. I’m trying to clear my head, trying to get just a few seconds of clarity on today before I go back downstairs, but I replace myself mostly wondering why there’s a single pink shoe on my desk, when the last time I read the book on my nightstand was, why I’ve still got a picture that Rusty drew four years ago taped to my mirror when she’s got much more recent artwork I could be admiring while I got ready.

The bed is made. The small desk is neat, laptop plugged in, charging. All the drawers shut on my dresser, the closet door is closed, dirty clothes only in the hamper and nowhere else. If I bent down, I’d see all my shoes under the bed in a neat-enough row, a single novel on my bedside table, a few necessities atop the dresser.

I wasn’t neat until I had a kid, but after Rusty slammed into my life like a category five hurricane, I had to control every single thing that I could, because my day-to-day was filled with things completely beyond it.

One day, I was kissing Charlie on top of a pickup truck by a bonfire. We’d been best friends since we were eleven, and suddenly — finally — our relationship took a turn to something else, something I’d thought about for ages but had shoved down, deep inside myself.

She spilled a beer on me. We laughed. We went home separately but the promise was there, hanging unspoken in the air like a harvest moon.

The next day, Child Protective Services knocked on my door and told me that a woman named Crystal Partlow was claiming I was the father of her nine-month-old daughter. I denied the claim for about five seconds, until they showed me a picture of a baby named Rustilina, and instantly, I knew.

I got a DNA test anyway, but I knew. I’d slept with Crystal a handful of times about a year and a half before, during a rough, directionless period in my life when I drank too much, did some things I shouldn’t have, and made plenty of questionable decisions. She was one of them.

CPS was there because Rusty had been removed from her mother’s home and placed into foster care due to neglect. If I was competent and willing, they’d consider placing her with me, her father, instead.

I was willing. I got competent. After a series of talks, my mom offered her help, so I moved back home. We set up a nursery. I read every parenting book I could replace in the Burnley County Library, and one week after I found out that Rusty existed, I met her for the first time, in a supervised visit in the basement of an office building.

It was only love at first sight for one of us.

Rusty sat near the door the whole time, sobbing. She refused the bottle I offered. She would barely interact with me.

Same thing next day, but then the third day, she only cried for a few minutes. The day after that she smiled at me.

A week later, I took her home, and now she’s been with me for six years.

I didn’t forget about the kiss. I couldn’t. I wished I could, but the memory would pop up no matter what: while I was bent over, helping Rusty toddle around the house, when she woke up crying for her mom in the middle of the night and I did my best to soothe her, when I tried to convince her that broccoli was delicious by playing the airplane game.

Charlie stuck around. Our relationship waxed and waned in intensity, but she was always there: dropping by with dinner, inviting the two of us hiking with her, teaching Rusty cool animal facts like sharks have infinity teeth. In no time at all, Charlie was the fun aunt, we had a new relationship, and the past was past.

I couldn’t forget the kiss, but I could bury it. I could tell myself that it was in everyone’s best interest that I never think about it again and I could hide it, shove it down into a hole, only revisit the memory when I couldn’t help myself.

But buried things have a way of resurfacing, of exploding forth, of demanding to be reckoned with.

I hit the lights in the hallway, smile to myself, and head downstairs to do some reckoning.