Page 16 of Friends Who Fake It

Francesco threw Willow a half-smile. “Are you persisting with that oat substance?”

Willow raised her brows, ignoring the fluttering in her chest because he remembered her milk choice from a couple of years back, when they’d caught up for coffee.

“If you have it,” she said to the woman, who gave a decidedly less warm look in Willow’s direction.

“Aye, we do. Oat milk for you,” her gaze slid back to Francesco. “And for you?”

Willow could practically feel the breeze from the other woman’s fluttering lashes.

“Just an espresso.”

Willow bit back a smile. She certainly remembered that about Francesco. Even in the mornings, he had his coffee short and black. She’d fixed it for him, after his father’s death, on the nights she’d stayed over, sleeping on his couch so she could be there if he needed her.

Francesco put his hand against her lower back once more, and Willow tried not to think about what a perfect groove it was for his hand to touch, because that kind of thought was the exact opposite of what a friend would contemplate.

They chose a table built into the bay window at the front of the pub. It was a small enough table that their knees brushed, but Willow didn’t suggest they find somewhere bigger. Neither did Francesco.

“Do you need me to fix your hair, while we are here?” he offered, grinning in a way that was objectively sexy.

Willow smiled back. “You think you could manage a nice up-do?”

“I’ve seen Sofia do her hair often enough,” he said, referring to the woman who’d been raised as one of the Santoros, and very recently become engaged to King Ares of Moricosia. “I think I can manage.”

She laughed then. “That’s just so like you. Confident to a fault.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s a you thing.”

He shrugged. “How hard can it be?”

“To impress my stepmother?” she replied archly.

He grunted.

Willow turned, looking towards the view of the square they had through the window. The rain had eased, but it was still grey and gloomy.

“She’s harder on you than she is on the twins.”

Something familiar rolled through Willow’s gut. A cement boulder of remembered pain, the force of which had compelled her to grow a sort of armour out of nothing. “Yes.”

“That is to say, she’s not exactly pleasant to them, either. But with you, she is particularly…”

“She expects a lot,” Willow remarked, her voice flattened of emotions. Which was not the same as not feeling them. “And I suppose she’s never been able to shake the sense that she has a lot to prove.”

He sat silently, waiting for her to continue.

Willow toyed with the edges of the table before a voice in her head—unmistakably Meredith’s—told her to stop fidgeting and she shoved her hands beneath the tabletop, squared her shoulders and held Francesco’s gaze. “She was very young when she married my father. Younger than I am now, come to think of it,” Willow said, pulling a face. “And I guess my mother was a pretty intimidating person to try to replace.”

“I never met your mother.”

She tilted her head to the side. “I don’t really remember her,” Willow said, wistfully, ignoring the throb in her heart because the only position in her life that had been filled by a mother was that occupied by Meredith. “But I know what I’ve been told, by family, family friends.”

Once again, he waited in silence.

“She was very beautiful, and she came from one of those very wealthy, very old families from the north. My father apparently adored her,” she added. “That’s a tough act to follow, for someone like Meredith.”

His lips pulled to the side, as if deep in thought. “Meredith is, I suppose, beautiful. And I presume she is also of some kind of aristocratic background.”

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