Small Town Pretender by Brighton Walsh
“Well, that could’ve gotten better,” Asher said.
To be fair, it had gone exactly as Nat had expected it to. The entire table had stared at her in shock for several seconds before erupting in chaos. Her sisters certainly weren’t going to be actresses anytime soon, but thankfully, her parents and Gran had been so preoccupied with the news that they hadn’t paid a lick of attention to her sisters’ abysmal acting skills.
While it wasn’t a big deal—and certainly not her first rodeo in lying to her daddy—she didn’t like doing it to her mom. And she absolutely hated that she was lying to Gran. Though from the way Gran’s eyes had stayed locked on her and Asher through the meal, Nat wasn’t so sure they’d gotten anything past the older woman.
“Ya think?” Nat said before sliding into bed.
Asher snorted, pulling off his T-shirt before tossing it into the laundry basket along with his sweatpants. It was the same move he’d done every night, but it hadn’t stopped her mouth from going dry. She’d started keeping a goddamn water bottle next to the bed because of it.
“Saw it all comin’, did you?” he said.
“Pretty much called everything.” Nat started ticking off the items on her fingers. “Momma cried. Daddy’s face turned tomato red like it usually does. And Gran wanted to know if there’d be an open bar.”
Asher pulled the covers back and slipped into bed, turning off the lamp and plunging the room into darkness. “I thought the actual marriage would be the shock. But apparently not havin’ a reception is a far greater crime.”
Nat turned on her side to face Asher. It was dark enough that she couldn’t make him out, but she somehow knew exactly how far away he was, the air seeming to crackle between them. “It was pretty funny when Rory realized that, had this actually been a surprise, she would’ve been equally as put out as Momma and Daddy, so she had to get in on it, too.”
“I guess the big question is, did we pull this off?” Asher asked, his voice just a whisper in the room.
“Honestly, I’m not sure. My mom reads enough romance novels that she’ll buy into this hook, line, and sinker—lifelong best friends finally see the error of their ways and fall for each other, only to get swept up in a whirlwind romance and want to get married?”
“So that’s the story we’re goin’ with?”
“It’s the most believable, isn’t it?”
“I’m surprised they let me drag you away. I thought your momma was gonna have a coronary over us seein’ each other tonight before the big day tomorrow.”
“June and Owen are pretty great—and I’d think this anyway—but I especially love them for now givin’ me an excuse to escape my parents.”
It was quiet for several moments, and Nat wondered if Asher had fallen asleep mid-conversation, like he’d done dozens of times when they’d been teens sneaking off to sleep in the tree house. Her daddy had built it for far less nefarious purposes. Well, her parents had thought her use of it was nefarious—she and her two male best friends, sleeping over, Nat wanting to do what all of her other friends got to do. What her sisters got to do. Namely, have sleepovers with her best friends. But because those best friends happened to have one very important appendage, it was expressly forbidden.
Well, Nat didn’t do well with forbidden anything. So, she would give the excuse that she was staying at someone else’s house, pack up her shit, and march to the tree house right on their property. Thank God the estate was big enough that her parents were none the wiser.
Nash had always been the first to fall asleep, no doubt thanks to his after-school job of manual labor working for his family’s construction company. That meant she and Asher had whispered long into the night, until suddenly it was just her talking to herself as Asher’s soft, barely there snores greeted her ears.
“Are you asleep?” she whispered, her words hardly a breath.
The sheets rustled, and suddenly, Asher’s arm was around her, pressing against her lower back and tugging her into him.
He lifted his head from the pillow and buried it in her neck, squeezing her tight. “Thank you, Nattie.”
Automatically, her arms went around him, and she forced herself to pay attention to his words and not the way the length of his body fit against hers. How the tips of her breasts brushed against his chest through only the thin cotton of her tank top. How she suddenly, though she’d never been one to shy away from showing her body and had frequently walked around in nothing more than panties and bra, somehow felt that the boy shorts and cami she wore weren’t nearly enough. She might as well have been naked for the way her body responded.
“You don’t need to thank me,” she said, running her hand down the bare expanse of his back, ignoring the tiny zings of electricity at their skin-to-skin contact. “This is all part of the best friend gig, right?”
“It’s not, and you know it. I just…I don’t know what I’d do without you. I don’t know what I’d do without them, and you’re makin’ sure I don’t have to.”
She wasn’t sure how long they lay like that, both of them sharing her pillow. His breaths swept against across her breasts, peaking her nipples even more than they had been before.
But this was fine. No big deal. She’d felt attraction to men before and hadn’t acted on it. True, those men weren’t her best friend who she was around all the time. They also weren’t her current bed partner, so it had been a little bit easier to avoid the temptation. But all those things combined didn’t even hold a quarter of the weight of what was about to be true tomorrow.
Because, come four o’clock, she was about to be Mrs. McCoy. And this man she was suddenly attracted to—an attraction she couldn’t act on—was about to be her husband.