Page 75 of Just My Fake Husband

“Other things? Like a certain marriage?”

She tilts her head as if silently saying,You said it, not me.

“There’s no need to figure it out. I already know.”

“And . . .? You should probably enlighten me since I’m your wife and all.”

I take a deep breath, in and out. “I don’t want to be married like this.”

She straightens. “Oh.”

“I think it’s pathetic that I roped you into this.”

“It kind of was.” She cracks a cautious smile.

“I had blinders on. I was too proud to let go of Foundations.”

“So you don’t want to be married to me. So how about . . .” She pauses to give a quiet laugh. “. . . You call your dad and tell him the truth?”

I let out a long, slow breath and lie back down on my back. “I think I should. This was wrong of me. In trying to prove to him I have integrity, I did something so completelyoutsideof my integrity.”

“So, do we tell everybody we’re a couple of frauds? Or do we just quietly end it now?”

I do not want to end this. Does she want to?

“Are you ready to end it?” I hold my breath.

“Not exactly.”

What kind of an answer is that? “What doyouwant?” I ask.

“I want to know what it would have been like between us if . . .” She gestures to me and then to herself. “. . . We could have removed your dad from the equation entirely.”

“We can still find that out. Let’s remove him from the equation. Start over.”

She scoffs. “Impossible.”

“Why?” I feel it now. Panic. Because everything in me wants this tonotbe impossible.

She draws her eyebrows together. “Because we can’t go back in time and what we have is tainted.”

“Tainted?” Okay that hurts. “I like what we have.”

“It’s tainted by the fact that we came together for business. We’ll never know if we would have chosen each other if we hadn’t been forced to walk into this.”

“So what? Let’s make it real. A real marriage.”

Her eyes flicker over me. “Why?”

I blow out a quick breath and sit back up on my forearms. “You do realize you ask ‘why’ more than my four-year-old niece, right?”

“You’re stalling. Why do you want this to be real?” As confident as her words are, there’s an undercurrent of vulnerability that is making it hard for me to not tug her into a hug.

I’m sorting out what to say when she crawls over the barrier, kicking it off the bed and onto the floor in one swift jab of her leg, and sits right on me, straddling me, pushing me back onto the bed. I try to sit up. Not because I don’t like the physical contact but because this is getting real . . . very fast. But she pushes me back down. “Gabriel. I can’t force you to say anything that you don’t mean.”

“But you can force me to lie down?”

A wicked smile plays about her lips. “Exactly.” She laughs but eases off me a bit. “What do you want, Gabriel?” she whispers.

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