Page 6 of At the Heart of It (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #4)

J onah had several questions buzzing around in his brain and wasn’t sure which one to ask first.

He decided not to choose. “Why the hell am I here?” He leveled the first question at his ex-wife before turning to face the whip-smart woman with the sleek mahogany hair and the lips he hadn’t stopped thinking about for a month. “And why are you here?”

Kate flinched, and Jonah felt like an asshole.

Okay, so that came out a little gruffer than he meant it to.

The question—or maybe the bluntness of it?

—seemed to catch Kate off guard. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out, leaving Jonah staring at those perfect, soft lips for a little too long.

Way too long. Jesus.

He swung his gaze back to Vivienne. “What’s going on here?”

“You two know each other?” Vivienne looked genuinely perplexed, which wasn’t like her. That killed his initial theory that this was some sort of weird matchmaker scheme, which was totally something Viv would do. Helping her ex-husband find love again would make a great bestselling self-help book.

“I—we—” Kate was still fumbling for words, and Jonah couldn’t help remembering how cool and composed she’d been for their newlywed playacting in Ashland. That meant she was really rattled.

He looked back at Viv again, trying to make sense of things. His ex-wife gave a stiff smile and swept an arm out over the parlor. “Please, Jonah—have a seat.”

Christ. She only used his full name when she wanted something. After the publishing house had slapped him with that ridiculous “Average Joe” moniker during edits for On the Other Hand , Viv had taken to calling him Joe all the time.

At least until she needed something from him.

“I’m sure we can get this all sorted out,” Viv was saying as she poured him a glass of cucumber water. “Can I get you something else? A beer, maybe?”

She was really laying it on thick. Beer? Really? At ten in the morning when she used to flip him shit for drinking the stuff at all?

She’d tried for years to make him love wine instead, signing them up for a couples’ pinot noir tasting class and booking a romantic vineyard getaway when all he’d wanted was a goddamn pale ale and a quiet afternoon with a good book.

And now here he was getting worked up over the beer issue again when he still had no idea why Kate was sitting in Viv’s living room.

Jonah shook his head and took the water glass. “Water’s fine, thanks.”

He surveyed the array of seating options in the parlor and selected a leather club chair the color of squash puree.

It looked new, something she’d acquired in the months since their divorce, along with this house.

He’d been here only once before to pick up a cookbook that had belonged to his mother.

They’d been cordial enough then, but something told him this was a different sort of meeting.

He set the glass on the sleek glass coffee table, deliberately avoiding the coaster just to watch Viv blanch. Then he sat back with his hands on his knees and looked from one face to the next—Viv, Kate, and a curly-haired blonde who seemed so flustered she’d forgotten to introduce herself.

“So what’s going on here?”

The words came with an echo, and Jonah realized he and Viv had spoken them at the same time. He stared at her for a moment, resisting the urge to call “Jinx!” the way they might have in the early years of their marriage.

Viv looked away first and focused in on Kate. “I’m confused. You told me yesterday that you’d never met Joe. You were even joking about how you couldn’t find photos of him online.”

“Jonah,” he muttered, not that anyone was listening.

The blonde gave a vigorous nod and stared at him like he’d emerged from a spaceship. “It’s true about the photos. The only things we found when we Googled you were a couple pics from college and this one where you had a big lumberjack beard.”

Jonah frowned, wondering why the hell any of these people would be Googling him. “The military required me to keep a low profile for a number of years,” he said.

“And then he refused to have photos in the books,” Viv said in a tone that suggested she was still irritated about it.

“Oh,” the blonde said as realization seemed to dawn. “We were also Googling Joe Porter, not Jonah.”

Kate seemed to find her tongue at last. “Vivienne. This is—wow, such a coincidence.” She looked at Jonah then as though expecting him to correct her, but he apparently knew even less than she did.

She licked her lips—a nervous gesture that sent his libido reeling—and flicked her gaze back to Viv’s. “So, uh—Jonah and I met four weeks ago in Ashland. We stayed at the same bed and breakfast and ended up going to the same play that afternoon and?—”

“Oh dear.” Vivienne raised a hand to her lips, eyes wide with amazement. Someone who didn’t know her well might mistake the look for dismay, but Jonah knew better. Viv lived for serendipitous shit like this.

She looked at Jonah. “You two slept together?”

“No!”

This time it was Kate whose words came out in an echo of his, and Jonah looked at her again. She was shaking her head like the thought of sleeping with him was only slightly less repugnant than the thought of bathing in a pit of raw sewage. He tried not to take offense.

“Definitely not,” Kate said. “We saw a play together and had dinner together and?—”

“Pretended to be married,” Jonah supplied.

Hell, might as well put it all out there.

“That’s not as scandalous as it sounds,” Kate said with exaggerated patience.

“There were these two old ladies talking about the people next door having really loud sex, and Jonah and I—” She stopped there, probably realizing that any additional detail would make things sound more meaningful than they were.

Kate cleared her throat. “Anyway, we saw a play together and had dinner afterward, but we didn’t even exchange phone numbers. ”

Jonah watched her speaking, intrigued that she didn’t mention the kiss.

And that’s all it had been. Just a kiss, or more accurately, several long, drawn out, passionate kisses.

Making out, if you wanted to call it that.

The sort of kissing-for-the-sake-of-kissing that most people forget exists sometime between, “Are you taking the SAT prep course?” and, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” Kissing as the endgame, rather than foreplay.

God, he’d loved that.

But if Kate wasn’t going to say anything about it, he wouldn’t either.

He still didn’t know what the hell was going on here, but he sensed he was better off not volunteering too much.

He turned back to Viv, who was studying them both with that clinical, analytical look she always got when she was trying to burrow into a client’s brain and wiggle her fingers around in the dark, slippery layers.

But she didn’t press for more information, so it seemed like a good idea to get on with whatever the hell had prompted her to invite him here.

“So,” he said to Viv. “Want to tell me what this is all about?”

Vivienne folded her hands in her lap and nodded.

“In a nutshell, the Empire Television Network would like me to star in a new unscripted television program called Relationship Reboot with Dr. Viv . They’ll follow one couple each episode from the point where they first appear in my office for counseling to the point where they leave with a decision to save the marriage or mindfully disentangle themselves from the union. ”

Mindfully disentangling themselves from the union was exactly what he and Viv had done, or at least what she’d suggested when she’d brought up the idea of divorce in the first place. The words still grated on him, and brought out his inner chest-thumping caveman the way it always did around her.

Maybe that’s what she wanted. Why he was sitting here right now.

“Let me take a guess,” he said, pulling off his glasses so he could polish them on the hem of his T-shirt. “You want me to be part of this show.”

He regretted the words the instant they left his mouth. He’d look like a dick if he’d guessed wrong.

But he wasn’t wrong. He could see from the way Viv pursed her lips, and the way Kate shifted uncomfortably on the sofa and looked down at the floor.

Viv cleared her throat. “Based on the success of our co-authored book, and the fact that?—”

“No.”

All three women frowned, but it was Viv who spoke first. “Jonah?—”

There she went again using his full name. To this day, he regretted that stupid Average Joe moniker. Playing the Neanderthal to his ethereal, educated wife had seemed like a good idea at the time. But now ...

“We were able to function beautifully together during the publicity push for On the Other Hand , despite our separation,” Viv continued in her soothing-therapist voice. “Very maturely.”

Jonah put his glasses back on and folded his arms over his chest. “Not that maturely.”

“Having you as part of the show would lend an authenticity to it,” Viv said. “A relatability element.”

Kate cleared her throat. “For what it’s worth, the focus groups we’ve tested the concept with so far found a male element to be vital for a show like this.

Your contributions to On the Other Hand were some of the most compelling, heartfelt sections in the whole book. They literally changed my life.”

She was selling it pretty hard, though there was an earnestness in her voice that almost sounded real. But hell, she knew how to act. He’d seen that firsthand.

He looked away, needing to keep his focus on the subject at hand instead of the lushness of Kate’s thighs crossing and uncrossing under that snug little skirt.

Jonah tugged at his collar and turned his attention back to Viv.

“You swore when we finished that publicity tour that we’d be all done. No more.”

“I know that,” she said. “It was a promise I meant at the time, but things change.”

“No shit.”