Page 25 of The Honeymoon Hack

“Perfect.” I grabbed the welcome packet with the QR code for the app. “What about this?”

Brie lowered her voice despite the white noise. “I don’t like it.”

I nodded in agreement. “It’s probably loaded with location tracking.”

“Maybe even keyloggers or microphone access.”

“What do you think?” I tapped my fingers on the sheet. “I doubt we can avoid installing it.”

Brie chewed her lower lip. “We’ll need our phones for coordination. I could examine the installation package in my encrypted partition to see what permissions it’s requesting.”

“Risky, but it could work. Until then?—”

“—we put off installing it until I can give it the okay. If challenged, we blame technical difficulties.”

“Or simple forgetfulness. We did just arrive.” I stood, stretching. “Could always mess up our hair a bit and say we got… distracted?”

She giggled and finally opened her laptop, not looking at me. Claiming we were newlyweds would probably get us out of a fewresponsibilities, but not many. Brie pushed her glasses up her nose—a habit when she was problem-solving, not because they actually slipped down. “I’ll dig into it after Claire’s tour.”

I wandered over to the bed, where we’d tossed our suitcases before checking the room. “We should unpack. Or at least look like we started.”

Brie swiveled in her chair.

My eyes lingered on the bed and my suitcase. One bed. King-sized, but still only one.

Brie caught my gaze as she stood. “The bed won’t be an issue. It’s huge. Plenty of room.”

“I can sleep on the floor.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She joined me by the bed, opening her own suitcase.

“Rock, paper, scissors?” I pulled out a stack of T-shirts and carried them to one of the bureaus.

She shook her head and gave a dramatic eye roll in response to my joke. “We’ve slept in the same bed dozens of times before.”

It was true, but the only one out of the dozens that flashed through my brain was the one time we did far more than sleep. The taste of her, the warmth of her skin, the way we’d wrapped around each other in the narrow little bed, breathless and amazed at what was happening between us.

I’d been thinking about that night more and more often. Eating dinner with Mum most nights required topics of conversation. Brie came up so often. Something funny she’d said at work. Some amazing piece of code she’d written. Or the bad joke on her shirt that day, which Mum never understood.

“—the job the team did in Vienna?”

Shit, I’d tuned out.Catch up, Will.

“I mean, we didn’t leave the office for three days, sleeping on the awful pull-out couch.” She laughed as she carried her toiletry bag to the bathroom.

Right. The pull-out couch. Of course. “That doesn’t count. We were never actually sleeping at the same time. One of us was always monitoring the team’s progress.”

“Close enough.” She was still chuckling when she came back to the suitcases and the bed. “My point is, we’re adults. We can share a bed for two weeks without it being weird.”

I nodded, even though she was wrong. Itwouldbe weird. “Fair enough.”

We continued unpacking in silence. She stepped left as I moved right, both reaching for the bureau without discussion. Years of shared spaces had made us telepathic about traffic patterns.

“You know,” I said, lining up my charging cables on the bedside table, “the pretending to be married thing was easier than I expected on the boat.”

Brie didn’t look up from organizing her clothes, but a faint smile played at the corner of her mouth. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I almost kissed your temple at one point when we were talking to Claire. It felt natural somehow.”