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When she didn’t answer I continued. “It might make this easier. Less explaining to do.” The practical answer, not the one my heart wanted to give. The truth was that part of me had always wondered what it would be like if we were together for real. But this wasn’t about us. It was about Luca, about keeping my family intact. I couldn’t afford to complicate things by admitting I’d spent the last three years fighting an attraction to my best friend.
“Where will I sleep?” The question came out quietly, almost timidly.
Heat pooled in my stomach. “There’s a guest room. You can have your privacy.”
“But if we’re supposed to be married . . .”
“We’ll figure it out. Make it look convincing when it matters, keep things separate when it doesn’t.”
She nodded, but something flickered across her face too quickly for me to read. Disappointment? Relief? I couldn’t tell.
“What about Luca? What do we tell him?”
This was the part that made my chest ache. “Well tell him the same we’ll tell everyone else. We’re married.”
“And after when we’re not?”
After. The word hung between us like a sword waiting to fall. After we’d convinced everyone we were the perfect couple, after we’d built a life together that would have to be carefully dismantled.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said.
It was a cop-out, and we both knew it. But the alternative—planning the end of something that hadn’t even begun—felt impossible in that moment.
Gianna picked up her purse and keys from the counter. “I should go. It’s getting late.”
“Stay.” The word slipped out before I could stop it. “I mean, if you want. The guest room bed is already made up.”
She hesitated, keys dangling from her fingers. “Colby . . .”
“It would be good practice. For when we’re living together officially.”
A weak excuse, but she seemed to consider it. Finally, she set her keys back down. “Okay. But I don’t have anything to sleep in.”
“I’ll find you something.”
Ten minutes later, she emerged from the guest bathroom wearing one of my old college t-shirts and a pair of my pajama pants rolled up at the ankles. The shirt hung loose on her smallerframe, and her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail. She looked young and soft and beautiful in a way that made my chest tight.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For letting me stay. This is all going to take some getting used to.”
“Yeah, it is.”
We stood there in the hallway, suddenly awkward with each other in a way we’d never been before. Three years of easy friendship, and now we couldn’t seem to find our footing.
“Goodnight, Colby.”
“Goodnight.”
I watched her disappear into the guest room before heading to my own bedroom. But sleep was impossible. I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the woman sleeping twenty feet away. My soon-to-be wife. The mother Luca had been wishing for without even knowing it.
In three days, we’d go to the courthouse and make it official. In three months, we’d stand before a judge and prove that we were the stable, loving family Luca deserved.
And somewhere in between, I’d have to figure out how to keep my own heart intact when this was all over.
CHAPTER 4
Gianna
Three boxes of my belongings sat in Colby’s living room like evidence of a crime I hadn’t yet committed. I stared at them from the kitchen doorway, coffee mug trembling in my hands as the reality of what I’d agreed to settled over me.