Page 5 of Friends Who Fake It

“But you said it. You promised.”

His eyes narrow. “That, Willow, is a low blow.”

“Doesn’t that show you how desperate I am?”

He made a grunting noise.

“It’s just one weekend,” she said. “After that, I’ll tell them we broke up. No one who knows you, and your dating record, will be remotely surprised that we don’t make it as a couple.”

“I think there’s an insult to me in there somewhere.”

“It’s not meant to be an insult,” she promised. “It’s just a statement of fact. You’ve had a lot of girlfriends, and that’s totally fine, obviously.”

“Thank you very much for your approval,” he said, the words a little taut.

“I’m not doing this right,” she groaned. “I’m asking you for a favour, I shouldn’t be insulting you. It’s just…I’m desperate. When I told Meredith we were involved, she looked so glad, so proud, as if I’d just cured cancer or something,” she said with a disparaging shake of her head. “Nothing I ever do—have ever done—has ever made her look at me like that before.”

Francesco’s face was impossible to read, and she was glad. She didn’t want to see sympathy or judgement there. She just had to get this out.

“So…I need you to come with me, this weekend.” She relented quickly, at the tightening of his lips, the fear that he would just dismiss her request outright. “Even just for one of the dinners. It doesn’t have to be the whole time. Justsomething, to get them off my back about dating someone else. I need space and time to sort things out with Tom, and that I can’t do with them breathing down my neck about getting married to Lord Dumpety Doo or whoever.”

“I hear Lord Dumpety Doo is actually taken,” Francesco drawled.

“I’m serious,” Willow said, though she laughed a little, even as tears sprung to her eyes. “I need your help, Francesco…”

ChapterTwo

OF ALL THE THINGS Willow could have said to convince him to agree to this hare-brained scheme, a soft, gentle plea for help was the one most likely to succeed.

Especially after how she’d been there for him when she hadn’t needed to be.

When his father had died, Francesco had gone to ground. He’d hidden away from the world.

Not because he’d been particularly close to his old man, but because he hadn’t been at all close to him. He’d grieved not just the loss of his father, but the loss of what could have, should have, been. Their mother had died many years earlier, and their father had withdrawn from them from that moment onwards.

It was a situation that had long-reaching consequences for each of the Santoro brothers. For Francesco, he’d been left reeling from the loss of his mother; utterly devastated. And the one person he’d wanted to turn to, to make it hurt less, had shut him out, pushing him away, for the rest of his life.

When his father died, Francesco was riddled with doubts—could he have done something more? Should he have tried harder? For a man who was famed for his self-confidence and surety, it had been an unexpectedly uncertain time.

He thought he’d hidden his grief, and regrets, but Willow had apparently seen something in him at the funeral, because from that moment onwards, and for the next six months, she’d been like a shadow. Texting to check in, calling and leaving little messages, coming over to his place when she couldn’t get through. Picking him up off the ground both figuratively and literally; when his grief had been too thick to wade through, and then, one time, when he’d had too much scotch to stand. Staying with him to make sure he didn’t drink himself into delirium.

Wisely turning him down when—drunker than a skunk—he’d hit on her.

Not holding it against him the next morning. In fact, not ever bringing it up again, because he wasn’t sure he could have kept meeting her eyes if she’d forced him to remember how he’d drawn her against him and kissed her, all stupid drunk and whisky breath.

How he’d lifted her silky shirt from her tailored skirt and dragged his fingers over her naked sides, marveling at the softness of her skin. Treating her like she was any one of the women he usually brought home for a night in his bed and then promptly forgot the name of.

Treating her like she could ever just be sex to him, when she’d shown herself to be the kind of friend that didn’t come along often.

The kind of friend he’d do anything for.

Even this.

His eyes swept over the grand Cotswolds’ estate, set against a dark grey sky that looked like it might weep rain at any moment, and a frown scored deeper across his face.

He’d had to agree to this, but he was not relishing a whole weekend of pretending to be Willow’s boyfriend.

For one thing, Francesco hated lying.

---