Page 14 of Gimme Some Sugar

“A fake date?” Jackson echoed, and Bellamy nodded.

“Sure. Maybe there’s a woman out there who would be sympathetic to your cause and wouldn’t mind a little acting.”

“Eh, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. The cloak and dagger thing isn’t really my style,” Jackson pointed out.

“As true as that is, it doesn’t look like you have a whole lot of options,” she said, placing the plates on the table. “Unless you want to come clean or bring a real date.”

Well, shit. “Good point. But how am I going to fake date in four days?”

“How about Molly O’Brien?” Shane asked.

Jackson shook his head. “She’s going out with Marcus Lawrenson.”

Shane made a face like he smelled something rotten. “Never liked that guy. Michelle Pierce?”

“Went out with her last year. She asked me to meet her parents on date three.”

“Okay, that’s a no,” Shane said. “But come on. There must besomebodywho would be willing to pretend to be your girlfriend for a few hours.”

They sat in silence for a minute, both of their faces bent in concentration. Finally, Jackson had to admit defeat. As much as he wasn’t crazy about telling his mother the truth about his bachelor-and-loving-it lifestyle, he wasn’t really wild about telling another out and out lie, either. Coming clean was the only way out of this mess.

“What about Jenna?” Bellamy asked, and Shane nodded, breaking into a grin.

“She’d be perfect, man.”

Jackson considered the possibility. He’d met Bellamy’s friend from Philadelphia a handful of times, and she’d always been fun to hang out with. The fact that she lived a hundred miles away was a bit of a bonus—he could always blame a fake breakup on the distance. No harm, no foul.

Still, Jackson hedged. “Do you think she’d do it?”

Bellamy sat back in her chair wearing a triumphant grin. “I bet she would, as long as she’s not busy. You want me to call her?”

Deception this complicated had a way of backfiring, and Jackson was stepping into dangerous territory with this charade. He should just forget it and tell his mother the truth. He was an adult, after all. She’d get over the disappointment eventually.

Except he’d done nothing but disappoint her so far when it came to relationships. And she had really good reasons for wanting to see him happy. Ones he didn’t want to contemplate.

In the grander scheme of things, how many ripples could one fake date really cause?

Jackson blew out a breath and pasted a smile to his face. “That would be great. If she’s willing to come out for the weekend, I’d love to take Jenna to the party.”

4

After trying everything from covering her head with both bed pillows to using the meditation app Sloane swore by for relaxation, Carly bit the bullet and got out of bed. The banging coming from her backyard wasn’t horribly loud, but the source of the noise seemed to vibrate within her like the hum of a tuning fork.

A really sexed-up tuning fork. Whose provocative thrum reminded her that almost a year had passed since she’d experienced an orgasm that hadn’t been self-inflicted.

It was way too early for this.

Carly pulled a pair of yoga pants and a freshly-washed T-shirt from the top of her clean laundry pile and put them on. No way was she going to get caught without clean laundry—or worse yet, without a major article of clothing—again. She’d spent her few spare hours before work yesterday separating darks from lights and letting the detergent do the talking. Sadly, it had only taken three loads to wash just about every stitch of non-work related clothing Carly owned.

She padded out to the kitchen, grateful that she hadn’t been in too much of a bleary, post-work haze to set up the coffee pot last night. Although things were really starting to gel at La Dolce Vita, the process of bringing the restaurant from vision to reality had had its share of growing pains. As a result, Carly had been popping off fourteen hour days like Pez since the New Year. Even then, most of her precious little at-home time was spent in the sunny kitchen of the bungalow, ideas and recipes rattling through her head in various stages of readiness.

But she loved every self-affirming second of running the back of the house at La Dolce Vita, of having her name and her name alone on the kitchen, even if said kitchen was in teeny-tiny Pine Mountain. That success, combined with being far away from Travis while their names untangled, was enough to make putting a whole lot of hustle-and-go into a small-town restaurant worth it. Plus, if she was too busy to even take a bathroom break, then she’d definitely be too busy for those little pinpricks of loneliness that slipped past her defenses when she drifted off to sleep at night.

“Ugh, knock it off,” Carly muttered, wiping the sleep from her eyes. She wasn’t a pity-party kind of girl, and living in Pine Mountain was only temporary. Plus, she had a kitchen. Herownkitchen, one she’d worked incredibly hard for.

So why did she still feel like a square peg trying to shimmy into a round hole?

As Carly poured herself a cup of coffee big enough to do the backstroke in, her eyes shamelessly skimmed the bank of windows on the rear of the house. Jackson’s sun-kissed head was barely visible through the glass, and she creased her brow in confusion. Either he’d shrunk about three feet overnight, or something was seriously amiss in her yard.

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