Page 23 of Just (Fake) Married (Calloways vs. McGraws #1)

FIFTEEN

ETHAN

A Few Weeks After the Wedding

Seth: Guess what I just found out?

Mac: The earth is round?

Seth: Is that supposed to be a joke, little brother? You remember what happened the last time you tried to make a joke at my expense?

Mac: Yeah, but you have a bum leg, so I figure I’ve got a chance.

Seth: Then I’d be a one legged ass-kicker.

Tag: Why am I on this group chat? I’m not a McGraw.

Mac: You’re honorary.

Tag: Can I get out of it?

Mac: No

Carter: SETH! WHAT DID YOU HEAR?

Seth: Ethan’s already knocked up his fake wife. With twins. Which makes sense. Harmony always had a very fine ass.

Ethan: Don’t talk about Harmony’s ass.

Seth: Ha! So, is this true? Have you gone from fake to fucking already?

Ethan: How’d you hear this?

Seth: A trucker at the bar heard it from a waitress in Big Horn, who heard it from her cousin who teaches at the school in Last Hope.

Carter: And you believed that?

Seth: Hey, I’m just trying to reconcile what I heard with what you all told me. I thought this marriage was just for show.

Ethan: It is.

Seth: So you didn’t knock her up?

Ethan: Of course not!

Mac: They barely speak to each other.

Ethan: We speak…when she’s not avoiding me.

Carter: Best you avoid each other. It will be cleaner when this all ends.

Eli McGraw has left the chat

Ethan McGraw has added Eli McGraw to the chat

I stood just inside the bathroom door and waited for the sound of her door opening.

After a few days of listening for it, I’d detected a pattern.

Around seven in the morning, the goose started honking, and about thirty minutes after that, she would emerge from her bedroom in a storm of noise and animal chaos to head downstairs.

It’s like the woman was late for life every single day.

There was a coffee pot set to an auto timer, which I’d deviously turned off last night.

So if I didn’t catch her coming out of the shower, I’d have a second chance to catch her in the kitchen while she was forced to make coffee.

My wife needed her coffee.

At the exact right moment, just as she came out of her bedroom, I swung open the door to the bathroom, letting out a plume of shower steam behind me.

I might have been only wearing a towel.

Okay, I was only wearing a towel.

But these were desperate times. Harmony was avoiding me and I’d had enough.

The week after the wedding I’d been busy giving patient notes to the doctors who were taking over my cases.

There’d been some paperwork to fill out and I’d answered dozens of emails I’d let pile up over the last few months.

But now that the work was done, I was at loose ends. Some might say bored.

And I missed Harmony.

“Ethan…what are you…why are you…”

Her voice trailed off as I casually rubbed my chest down over my six pack, and her eyes followed like she couldn’t help herself.

I took that time to take her in, too. Messy bun, brightly colored clothing, a bit disheveled.

Minimal make up, either because she’d run out of time, or didn’t bother, I wasn’t sure.

And it didn’t matter. She was beautiful with or without makeup.

“Don’t you have a shower in your room?” she asked.

“This was the bathroom my brothers and I all shared growing up,” I said. “Only my parents had ensuites.”

“This is a thing you do?” she asked, breathlessly. Her eyes watching a bead of water make its way down my chest.

“Shower?” I asked her. Was I being objectified for my physical appearance? Yes. Did I love it? “Yes. I actually do it once a day.”

“I meant naked.”

“That’s usually the preferred method of showering. Harmony, are you okay? You look a little flushed.”

Her hands immediately flew to her cheeks. “No, I’m…I’m…not…anything.”

“We haven’t really had a chance to talk since you moved in.”

“Well, we’re not talking now. Not with you all…” she waved her hands up and down in the direction of my body. “Naked.”

“Have you been sleeping okay?”

“Yep. Great. So good. It will be hard to go back to my lumpy twin…you know, when this is over.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it being over, until it’s begun.” I leaned against the door frame. Did that make my abs flex? Just a bit. “I think the folks in town should see us out more.”

“Out?”

“You know, where people can see us together. Being…”

“In love?”

I snapped my fingers. “Exactly. That.”

“Hookay,” she breathed, clearly flustered. By our conversation or my nakedness, I wasn’t exactly sure. “But I’m running late. So I’ll just go. And then we can talk…later. About…love.”

She didn’t walk, she ran down the hallway toward the grand staircase, and for some reason, that put a smile on my face.

She was still affected by me. Our wedding night wasn’t a one-off.

Carter thought we should be avoiding each other.

Me, I’d decided we shouldn’t.

When I got down to the kitchen, Mrs. Walker was fussing with the coffee pot. “Sorry, Ethan, but the auto timer didn’t go on. It should be just another minute.”

“Did Harmony leave? Without coffee?”

Mrs. Walker nodded.

Uh oh. That wasn’t good for anyone.

I could do the town a favor and text her, see if she wanted me to drop some coffee off at the store. Although, I realized I did not have Harmony’s phone number. That seemed ridiculous, but things had moved so fast that all the normal steps in a relationship had been swept aside.

“Everything okay?” Mrs. Walker asked into my silence. She made me a plate for breakfast full of bacon and sausage.

I nodded and smiled. “Just fine.” I wondered if she had Harmony’s cell phone number, but I was not about to ask her. “Is anyone else here?”

“Carter came over this morning and is in your father’s office,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, and took my coffee and my plate of cholesterol and went to find Carter.

The living room was lit by the fire and the white overcast sunlight coming in through the high windows.

The room always seemed cold to me. A big two-story room full of the black, beady eyes of my father’s trophy kills on the wall.

The deer heads and the brown bear in the corner.

Mom had drawn the line at fish on the wall, and for that I was grateful, but it was still like being watched by vengeful animals as I walked from the kitchen to Dad’s office.

Until I got to the couch, where Harmony and I had spent part of our wedding night.

The couch was the only warm spot in the room, and I suddenly wondered if I could convince Harmony to let me give her orgasms all over this house so I could change the energy. Make this place less of a mausoleum and more of a home.

I mean…not a home for me. I wasn’t in need of a home. My home was in Seattle. A cold two-bedroom condo with my Peloton, a king size bed and a fridge full of protein shakes.

“Hey,” I said, coming into the office that still somehow smelled like my father’s cigars and the Calloway sisters’ perfume. Carter sat at my dad’s desk, stacked high with files and his breakfast dishes. He looked up over the edge of a laptop.

“Hey, yourself,” he shut the laptop and grinned at me.

I sat down in the chair across from the desk. “What are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked, and took a sip of my coffee.

“Well,” Carter said, pushing his hands through his hair. “Since the will reading, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the books. Dad held on to all of that with an iron fist, so I’m just trying to figure it out.”

“Anything to be concerned about?” I asked.

“Hmm,” Carter mused. “We bought up some land south of here. Tag thinks we should expand into grass fed beef, and I don’t disagree, but the mortgage on that land is more than I expected.”

“Anything I can do to help?” I asked blissfully, knowing there wasn’t.

I didn’t do cowboy and I didn’t do accounting.

I fixed people. That’s what I did.

“I can figure it out,” he said.

“Well, I’m going to ask a question that’s going to make me sound like a fucking idiot, but you wouldn’t happen to have my wife’s cell phone number, would you?”

Carter sat back with a slack-jawed expression on his face. “Your wife? Huh. That sounded pretty natural coming out of your mouth.”

“Relax. It’s an expression,” I said. “But I realized I don’t have her phone number.”

“Yeah, I don’t have it either,” Carter shrugged. “You can ask Tag.”

“Why would Tag have my wife’s number?”

Carter stared at me, and I realized belatedly how weirdly jealous I sounded. “Harmony’s number. Why would he have Harmony’s number?”

“Who knows why Tag does half the shit he does? You can ask him. But my guess is, he’ll have it. They’re cleaning out the bunk house today, you can find him down there.”

I left the office for the foyer. Slipped on my hiking boots and winter coat and headed out to the barn and the bunk house beyond it.

Walking through the barn, I had a sudden longing for my old horse, Prince.

Dad gave us each a horse on our tenth birthday with the understanding that we would do all the work that went into owning a horse.

We all took it seriously, riding out on the weekends to camp out at the creek up around the north ridge, just the older brothers, and usually Tag.

Mac and Eli would give us shit about leaving them behind until they were old enough to join us.

We’d fish and build a big fire and eat what we’d caught. Seth always brought warm beer he’d stolen from the bunk house. And we’d drink those cans, talking shit while we stared up at the stars until we all fell asleep.

Those had been the best days.

Funny, how I’d forgotten about them.

When Prince died, I’d refused to get another horse, and Dad hadn’t talked to me for a week. Those camping trips stopped around that time, too.