Page 50 of Lucky Star

The tone of her voice told me that she was speaking from experience.

“You mean Murray?” I asked, wondering if that was why after five years together they still hadn’t gotten married. Then again, I’d asked Sarah to marry me after less than seventy-two hours, so what did I know about what the correct amount of time was to date before you popped the question?

“God, no!” When she laughed, her eyes cleared. “Actually, Murray’s best friend. Well, former best friend.”

“Sounds like an interesting story,” I remarked, hoping to steer the conversation to her love life instead of mine.

“It is. And I’ll share it with you some time, but right now we’re talking about you.”

Shit. So we were.

“It’s nothing like that,” I said before draining the remainder of my beer. “The fact is, it’s all this.” I gestured between us. “The only people I can talk about this with are my parents and my best friend Mike.” I dragged my hand through my hair and, letting it drop to the table in front of me, looked out the window. “They’re the only ones who know how Sarah orchestrated this whole charade.”

“That’s absurd. She didn’t orchestrate anything.”

“I assure you, she did.”

“And I assure you, she didn’t.” The hard glint in her eyes dared me to challenge her. Which of course I did.

“Look, Jillian. I have no idea what you think you know, but before the meeting with the PR team, Sarah called me into the office early to convince me to go along with Aerin’s proposal. We’d just gotten engaged and there she was, signing us up for this whole farce without even trying to convince Broderick there was another way.” I blew out an angry breath and rolled my neck. Speaking in a somewhat more subdued tone, I added, “And she didn’t just go along with it. She fucking extorted me into as well.”

To Jillian’s credit, she didn’t bat an eyelash. Undaunted, she said, “I’m not going to ask about that because that’s between you and Sarah, and I don’t need to know those details. But I am going to tell you something else, and I need you to listen until I’ve finished.”

“Yeah, fine. Whatever.” As far as I was concerned, she could talk until she was blue in the face. I didn’t think there was anything she could say that would make me change my feelings.

“This fauxmance wasn’t Broderick’s idea. It was mine.”

Well, anything but that.

“Explain.”

She huffed. “I was about to, but you interrupted, which you said you wouldn’t do.”

I gnashed my teeth to keep from telling Jillian to fuck off. While my first inclination was to storm out, there were two irrefutable truths staring me in the face. One, she’d driven us out here which meant I had no way of leaving, and it’d take Uber forever to come get me, and two, I needed to hear the rest of her story. I hated that I’d spent the last several weeks doubting Sarah, and if Jillian could help rectify that, I had to listen.

When I flattened my lips into a hard line and crossed my arms, Jillian continued.

“Some of my reasons for concocting this scheme are my own, and I don’t think it’s imperative that I share them with you as they don’t impact the situation outside of the fact that they served as my initial inspiration.” The sentence came out in one rushed speech, her words streaming together without pause. “Suffice it to say, it was my agent who approached Broderick with the idea. Naturally, he loved it.

“We’ve both been at this long enough to know that so many Hollywood relationships are nothing more than cleverly-arranged PR opportunities, so I didn’t think there’d be any harm in us doing the same. The studio can only pump out so many behind-the-scenes teasers or trot out the author for Q&A’s before the fans clamor for more. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

“Except it was,” I remarked. “A huge one.”

“All right, look. I concede this has had unintended consequences for you, but I honestly didn’t know you were in a relationship when we approached Broderick, and he never once said a word about it either. Not to lay the blame on you or anything, but you don’t exactly have a lot of information out there to draw from. Your Twitter handle is more Seinfeld and Star Trek retweets than anything, and you never referred to Sarah as your girlfriend in any of your Instagram pics. And before you say it, calling her your ‘best gal’ isn’t some giant clue either.”

Hmm.

I’d taken to calling Sarah that one night when I’d almost slipped up and called her “my love.” It’d been a garbled, awkward save, but people had been drinking so it’d gone unnoticed. And from that point on, anytime I’d been tempted to say more, I’d roll out that line instead. It was my secret way of telling her that I loved her. And based on the comments I’d gotten when we’d announced our engagement, I’d thought for sure others had picked up on it as well.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled to a picture Mike had taken of Sarah and me that I was positive gave away my feelings for her. Passing it to Jillian I asked, “Don’t tell me you can’t see how far gone for her I am in this one.”

“Come on, Cameron!” Jillian exclaimed. “You are giving her a noogie in that picture. That hardly screams, ‘this woman is the love of my life and I’m banging her senseless.’” She passed my phone back to me.

Chuckling, I shoved it into my pocket. Okay, fine. She wasn’t wrong.

And while I hadn’t so much as kissed Sarah before that fateful tequila-fueled night, I’d most certainly fantasized about banging her senseless. Instead of sharing any of that with Jillian, though, I said, “She didn’t know how I felt about her when that picture was taken.”

She rolled her eyes so hard I worried they’d get stuck up inside her skull. “You two with all your angsty secrets. How you managed not to explore the whole friends-with-benefits thing is beyond me. It’s clear to anyone with two eyes in their head you want to have crazy hot monkey sex all day long, stopping only to eat—and maybe not even for that.”

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