Page 79 of Make-Believe Match

“Hey. Shhh, it’s okay.” I stroked her hair, the way I knew she liked. The way that relaxed her. “Everything is okay. So you found a dress for tonight?”

“Yes.” Her voice was muffled in my shirt. “It’s white.”

I smiled. “I like you in white. You were wearing a white dress the night we met, remember?”

“I remember.” She sniffed.

“You had fun with Kelly and Veronica?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s this about earrings?”

Sighing, she backed away from me and held up her hair so I could see the pearl earrings she wore. “They were your mom’s.”

“They’re beautiful. I don’t recognize them, but I was pretty young when she died. I didn’t pay much attention to jewelry.”

“They were a tenth anniversary present.” She let her hair fall. “And your dad said he hoped we would be as happy on our tenth anniversary as they were on theirs.”

I nodded slowly. “Ten years. That was probably right before she got sick.”

“It just feels so wrong to lie to him, Devlin.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “He’s so sweet, and he wants me to call him Dad, and I just haven’t called anyone Dad in so long and I—” She burst into tears again, and I folded her into my embrace once more. I knew by now that when the tears came, it was best to just let them fall.

“Hey,” I said gently. “If you want to call this off, we can. We should probably get through tonight, but tomorrow we can stop pretending and just say we realized we moved too fast, and we’ve changed our minds.”

Her arms looped around my waist and she tucked her head under my chin, pressing her cheek to my chest. “Can I think about it?”

“Sure. In the meantime, how about a bubble bath?”

That made her laugh. “Bourbon and cedar?”

“With just a hint of coriander.”

“Is the tub big enough for two?”

“Well, it was big enough for me and Dashiel when we were toddlers. But I haven’t tried to get in there with anyone else since.”

She leaned back and looked up at me. “Want to try now?”

I dropped a kiss on her puffy red nose. “Definitely.”

* * *

It was a tight fit, but we both managed to get in the bathtub. She sat between my legs and I washed her hair, then we traded places and she scrubbed my back. After we let the water drain from the tub, we turned the shower on and rinsed off.

I’d have gladly stayed naked with her all night in the bedroom, but since friends and family and possibly the entire town of Cherry Tree Harbor were expecting us to show up to our wedding celebration, I exercisedgreat restraintand kept my hands to myself the whole time.

While Lexi dried her hair in the bathroom, I ironed my shirt. While she dressed in the bedroom, I shaved at the bathroom sink. While I buttoned up my shirt and buckled my belt, she put on her makeup and strapped on a pair of high-heeled shoes. It was the routine of any married couple going out on a Saturday night, perfectly boring in its normalcy, but I liked the natural rhythm of it. The way we traded places and shared space with ease, the way she asked me to zip up her dress without saying a word, the way I could see her behind me in the mirror while I shaved, putting on the earrings my father had given her.

I wished I could remember my mother wearing them, but in my memories, she’s never dressed in fancy clothes with her hair and makeup done. She was justMom, moving around in the kitchen in jeans and sneakers, Mabel on her hip, helping me with my spelling words, hollering at her older boys to wipe their feet when they come in, stirring something on the stove. It seemed to me she never sat down, never stopped moving, never had a moment to herself.

As a kid, you never thought about the intimacies of your parents’ marriage—gross—but the love between my parents was always there in the room, and she would stop fussing about long enough to kiss him when he came home from work, dirty and sweaty and sometimes grouchy, but always smiling after that kiss. They made each other happy.

Switching off the bathroom light, I entered the bedroom to find Lexi frowning at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. “You look gorgeous,” I told her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

I came up behind her. Kissed one bare shoulder. “You still upset about the earrings?”