Pretty in Ink (Voretti Family Book 3) (8 page)

“Specific how?” he heard himself ask.

“See… The thing is…” She took a deep breath and then the words spilled out of her mouth so fast he could barely tell one from the other. “The thing is, I have that tattoo on my arm, and my parents are going to see it at the wedding, and if they think it’s CJ’s name they’ll freak out and pull my loan for the shop. So I need to be dating someone else named Caleb. Someone my parents love and respect.”

The words filled him with a fierce, primitive satisfaction. “You need
me
.”
 

“Yes. I need you.”

He glanced at Liv. Her eyes were wide and blue and open, and he couldn’t look away. He didn’t even want to blink.
 

She swallowed. “I know it’s a huge favor, but it would mean a lot to me.”

He couldn’t do it. He was clear on that much. But when she gave him those you’re-my-hero eyes, he went fuzzy on exactly why.
 

He jerked his gaze away. He needed a minute. A minute of looking at anything but Liv, so he could clear his head.

Once again, he found himself in front of Ella’s Barbie collection, but this time, instead of staring blankly while he waited for Papa Voretti to kick his ass, he actually looked. Each Barbie was paired with a Ken doll. The Barbie in the ball gown stood next to the Ken in a tux. Tennis Barbie was arm in arm with tennis Ken. And bikini Barbie was ready to hit the waves with the Ken wearing board shorts. Perfectly matched.

Unlike him and Liv. A partner was supposed to help you be your best self—the person you wanted to be. But Liv brought out the worst in him. The emotional toddler who made snap decisions based on momentary gratification instead of logic. Even a fake relationship would be a disaster of epic proportions.

But he could still help her out. He’d talk to her. Calm her down and help her examine her options. Find a way for her to escape her parents’ wrath that didn’t require him to stick by her side for the next four weeks.

He met her gaze—a necessary risk. “You don’t need a boyfriend, Livvy. You need an excuse to get out of the wedding. Come down with the flu.”

“You know my mom. Unless I’m in the hospital hooked up to an IV, she’ll tell me to pop a Tamiflu and some Sudafed and get my ass to church.”

“What about makeup? Can’t you…I don’t know…cover it up?”

“I’ve tried. I can get it to look almost natural, but almost won’t be good enough for Ella. You know she’s gonna be inspecting her bridesmaids before she lets us in front of the photographer. And even the strongest fixing mist isn’t going to stop Bridezilla and a bottle of makeup remover.”

“Wear a sweater.”

“Are you kidding me? She’d rip it off. You saw how she went after my shirt today.”

Desperation forced him to consider anything. “Maybe if you talked to her about it…”

“It’s okay to say no.” She crossed her arms over her chest and stared him down, blue eye flashing an unmistakable message.
You don’t have the balls to take me on.
“I’m sure you have better things to do.”

Damn right he did. Except that, with Liv in front of him, he couldn’t think of a single one of them. “I…uh…”

He’d given her exactly the opening she needed, but instead of taking him down, her arms fell to her side, like she was the one on the verge of surrender. “I know you’re not my biggest fan. You never liked to be around me. Not even when we were kids.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s okay. It’s not like it’s breaking news. I don’t know why I even bothered asking you for help.” She turned away, but not before he caught the rapid blink-blink-blink that warned of impending tears.
 

Aw, no. Anything but that.

“No big deal. I’ll find a way to open my shop. It’ll take a little longer, that’s all.” Her tone was breezy, but there was no mistaking the hurt underneath it. And it wasn’t just about the loan she stood to lose. It was about him. She thought he didn’t want to be her friend.

“Livvy.” She still had her back to him, and he couldn’t stand it. He needed her eyes. “Look at me.”

She didn’t move.

“Please.”

Finally, she turned toward him. But that was worse. Because he couldn’t fool himself into thinking that sheen of moisture in her eyes was anything but tears.

His chest went tight. Liv didn’t cry. Not when she fell off her bike when she was five, fracturing her thumb. Not when Matt spilled paint all over the prom dress she’d spent the weekend sewing. Not even when that waste of space Bennett Rasmussen stood her up for the dance. But she was crying now.

He’d made her lips tremble and the light go out of her eyes, and he had to fix it. “I’ll do it, okay? I’ll be your boyfriend.
Fake
boyfriend.”

“No!” She swiped a hand across her eyes, removing all evidence of her tears in a single pass. “I’m fine.”

“I want to help.”

“No. You don’t.”

He sighed. “I’m sharing a room with the world’s creepiest collection of Barbies. And, I swear to God, they’re staring at me. If I didn’t want to help, I’d be drinking a beer by the pool.”

“Really?” She laid a hand on his chest and looked up at him with those wide eyes. They weren’t filled with tears anymore. They were wide and bright and inviting, and he wanted to climb inside.
 

Shit
.
 

He pulled away.
 

If he was going to do this, he needed rules. Parameters that would ensure his destructive emotions weren’t allowed to take over. The key was to maintain some mental distance. To remember that Liv wasn’t his future. If he ever got married, it would be to someone like Joslyn. Someone who calmed him instead of confusing him and stirring him up.

He cleared his throat. “I have a few conditions.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want to make this more complicated than it has to be. Your parents are already convinced there’s something going on between us, so we can play off that. At the rehearsal dinner, we’ll tell everyone that we’ve been secretly dating. They’ll see us together then, and at the wedding the next day. After that, we can quietly break up.” He listened to the words coming out of his mouth with a mounting sense of disbelief. This had to be the worst idea he’d ever had. But he couldn’t watch Liv cry again. The mere idea of it did terrible thing to his self-control.

“The rehearsal dinner isn’t for four weeks,” she said. “Why wait?”

Because I have a date with the woman I might spend the rest of my life with. Because I’ve always wanted you more than I should. Because you scare the shit out of me.
“Because the key to a good lie is to keep it simple. The less time we have to pretend to be a couple, the less chance we’ll get busted.”

“But our story is supposed to be that we’ve been having this secret relationship, right? Once we tell my family, they’re going to think back over the last few months, wondering how they missed the clues. My parents caught us here together, so that’s one point in our favor. But the stag and doe weekend is—”

“The what now?”

“Stag and doe weekend.” Liv smirked. “You know. Ella and Brandon’s combined bachelor / bachelorette party. Ella gave it a cute nickname just in case an entire weekend trapped at a remote mountain lodge playing bridal charades wasn’t painful enough already.”

Damn
. He’d forgotten about that. He mentally cursed Ella for being so paranoid about her fiancé getting a lap dance that she’d insisted on going co-ed.

 
“We’re both going to be there, in front of my entire family. If we don’t at least give each other some hot looks, no one is going to buy that we were secretly hooking up.”

“Not hooking up.” He paced the small room, as antsy as if he’d been locked up in solitary. “Having a relationship.”

Liv rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

“Okay. We’ll go public at the stag and doe weekend. Happy?”

“Thrilled. Anything else we need to work out?”

He debated telling her about his date with Joslyn, but there was no reason to go into that. It’s not like Liv was actually his girlfriend. He wasn’t cheating on her. The date was well before the stag and doe weekend, no Vorettis would be in attendance, and he wasn’t in the mood for another lecture about lack of sparks. “Nope.”

She gave him a sunny smile. “Then let’s make it official.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake, like they were closing a business deal.

Which was exactly the way he was going to treat this. Like a business deal.

But her skin was softer than he expected. Hotter. She curled her fingers around his palm like she didn’t want to let him go, and he felt her inside, burrowing into the quiet, dark places he never let anyone see.
 

He pulled free abruptly.

“Second thoughts?” she asked, softly.

He cleared his throat. “No.”
 

He had roughly a million second thoughts, but none of them mattered. He’d felt her hand in his. Looked into her eyes.

He was in this now, and there was no going back.

“W
AIT
A
MINUTE
. You’re taking me to
Michael Saka
?” Joslyn’s eyes widened with something that looked closer to panic than pleasure, and Caleb mentally cursed himself for his choice. You didn’t take a woman to the most expensive restaurant in San Diego for your first date.

When he’d made the reservation five days ago, calling in years of markers to get his buddy who worked there to find an open table, he’d figured it would prove to Joslyn that he was seriously interested in her. Then, when he told her about his arrangement with Liv, she’d understand he was simply helping out a friend. Only, now Joslyn was looking at him like he was a stalker in violation of a restraining order.

Okay. Damage control.
 

He pulled into the lot and cut the engine. “I know it’s over the top, but I’ve always wanted to try this place. And Rafe won’t go anywhere unless there’s beer and wings.”

Joslyn sat frozen in her seat, staring at the sun setting over the ocean—even the parking lot had a killer view. “You don’t have to impress me. You know that, right? I already like you.”

Her words washed over him with a soothing warmth. She wasn’t worried he was a stalker. She was worried he was emptying his bank account to impress her.

This woman was everything he’d been looking for in a partner. He was going to give this relationship his best shot. He owed it to himself.

“I really do want to try the restaurant,” he said. “And I want to try it with you.”

“In that case…” Joslyn took off her seatbelt. “You’ve got yourself a date.”

*

Two glasses of wine and a filet mignon later, Joslyn looked much more relaxed as she told Caleb about the two problem children in her preschool class, trying to sound exasperated but failing miserably.

“And so I had to separate them for the rest of the day. Over a crayon!”

Caleb grinned. “What did you do with the crayon?”

“I hid it in my desk. Not that it helped, because at recess they argued over a rock someone found on the ground, and at lunch there was a dispute over who got to sit at the end of the table. And I finally figured out that their first argument hadn’t been about the crayon at all. Henry was upset because Jared said his Mickey Mouse backpack was for babies. So I had them talk it out, and by dismissal they were best friends again. We’ll see how long that lasts.”

He chuckled at Joslyn’s skeptical tone.

Her eyes went wide. “Oh my God. I just realized how long I’ve been babbling. You shouldn’t have let me go on for so long.”

“I was enjoying it. It sounds like you’re a great teacher.”

She went red—two patches in the middle of her cheeks that were…cute. “I’m only doing my job.”
 

The real problem is, there’s no spark. I saw the way you looked at that woman, and you were not thinking about banging her.

Caleb gulped down some wine, trying to drown Liv’s voice. Cute was a start. He could build on cute.

“Enough about me,” Joslyn said. “Tell me something about you.”

The standard getting-to-know-you question snapped him into hyperawareness. He sat up straighter, scanning all the way from the wood-paneled bar to the floor-to-ceiling windows in search of the threat he sensed, even as his mind told him it was coming from the woman sitting across from him. The woman who was probably expecting him to say something at some point this year. “I’m a detective. I joined the police department right out of college and worked my way up.”

“I know.” Joslyn took a sip of wine, but her gaze didn’t leave his. “Jen already filled me in on all the basic stuff. I want to know what you’re passionate about. What you want out of life.” She smiled at him, sweet as could be, even as her words made his stomach quiver. “Who you really are under that buttoned up shirt.”

He cleared his throat, trying to come up with something to say, because he didn’t feel passion. He didn’t let himself.

Except… “Family is the most important thing to me.”

Joslyn smiled at him encouragingly, and he forced himself to go on. He wanted a relationship, and sharing some of himself was part of that. “The thing is, I was an accident. My parents didn’t want kids. They never would’ve gotten married if I hadn’t come along, and I guess they figured they’d done their part by putting on those rings, because they didn’t bother doing much beyond providing me with food and shelter. I figured that was normal. But then I met the Vorettis. They were so loving. So involved in each other’s lives. They showed me what a family is supposed to be like. So that’s what I want. To be part of a family like that.”
 

Joslyn met his gaze in a moment of perfect understanding that calmed the frantic beating of his heart. “That’s what I want too. My parents divorced when I was young, and it was hard. I won’t do that to my children. When I get married, it’s going to be right. It’s going to be forever.”

For the first time, he could actually see it. A baby with his dark hair and eyes. With a wife like Joslyn, he wouldn’t have to worry about repeating his parents’ mistakes. She’d know what to say, what to do, to make sure their kids grew up knowing they were loved and cherished. So that they’d never question who they were the way Caleb did.