When I couldn't bear the weight any longer, I edged my chair closer to the table and tapped my fingertips on the surface. "I-I'm sorry but what did you just say?"
"I need you to be my fiancée." He met my eyes before quickly glancing away. "Just for a week."
"I'm surejust for a weekmakes it all make sense to you," I said, my hands turning into little birds and fluttering around me as I spoke, "but that doesn't clarify anything for me. One week is very specific. Why this time frame? What's happening in this week? Is it a specific week or are we just tossing darts at the board to see where we hit?"
What I really wanted to ask wasAre you just looking for the most painful ways to punish me?
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "Do me a favor and dial it down, okay? There's zero need to shriek."
Everything inside me cooled. "I can promise you I'm notshrieking. I might have a few things to make up for but if this is how you're going to treat me, you'll be waiting another decade." I held his eyes for a long moment. Longer than he'd expected, if that flicker of surprise could be believed. "We can talk about all the things that went wrong and I can apologize for each of them but I'm not here for your fake-engagement games."
"No games, Saunders. I need you to be my fiancée for a trip to Arizona to visit my mother. We'll go next week, if that works for you."
I tried to swallow this piece by piece but the more I chewed it over, the less it made any sense. "Why?"
"Because my mother was dying," he said, the words broken off and heavy. "She'd taken a turn and it didn't look like she'd pull through. I would've promised her anything if I thought it'd make her comfortable, if it would've brought her some peace."He reached for his coffee but didn't drink. He just held the glass, sliding his fingertips through the condensation. "She wanted to know I'd be all right when she was gone. Not just with Percy but that I'd find…someone. It mattered to her, and the only thing that mattered to me was putting her at ease."
"I can see that," I said, all hesitance, "and I understand you wanting to make her comfortable." I still couldn't choke this down. "But I'm still not sure I understand howIfigure into this yet."
He stared at the table, his gaze far away. I desperately wanted to put this into a comprehensible order, give him what he wanted—if I could, and I had some doubts about that—and then get the hell out of here. There wasn't a world where I could talk about being engaged to Jude, even as some kind of side quest, without feeling like my belly was filled with steel wool.
"I told her we'd reconnected and—" Jude waved a hand between us as if that explained anything. "Yeah. Well. She pulled through."
We.At least eighty-four different emotions flashed across my face and I was working too hard at continuing to cosplay as a regular, functional human rather than the howling hound inside me to hide any of them. "Wereconnected? And somehow that translates to us gettingengaged?" I leaned in, pressed my palms to the heat flaming my cheeks. "Jude, what? And why? Also, how? Just…how did that happen?"
"I didn't think she'd make it through the night," he went on. "She was in and out of it. Heavily medicated. Half the things she said made no sense, but then she'd be clear as day for a few minutes. She wanted me to get married, said it was important for Percy and…for me."
He shoved a hand through his hair and then let it fall to the back of his neck, gripping and kneading the muscles for a minute as he stared out at the café. The move highlighted the bicepsstraining under the fine, soft weave of his shirt. His arm was a solid mass I'd struggle to get both hands around.
Eventually, he dropped that hand to his leg, his broad palm flat on the denim while his fingers tapped out a hurried rhythm. "I told her what she needed to hear, that I'd picked out a ring and was waiting for her to make it through that last round of treatment to propose. I just wanted to give her something to hold on to. Something good, even if none of it was true."
"And now you're stuck with it."Stuck with me.
He shrugged. "More or less."
That was when I realized that between all of our rocks and hard places, we had a real problem on our hands.
I frowned at the dishes between us and started consolidating the half-eaten muffins and empty glasses. "Wouldn't it have been better to pick someone less"—I laughed to myself—"complicated to fulfill your mother's dying wish?"
Jude pinned me with a stare that told me precisely how little he wanted this complication in his life. "Yeah, it would've," he said, "but there's nothing I can do about it now."
I picked at the muffins, pressing the pad of my finger to the crumbs. "What exactly are you asking me to do?"
"Come to Arizona with me. Spend a few days with my mom. Let her throw us an engagement party," he said, ticking off the list on his fingers.
I shook my head but didn't tear my focus away from feeding myself tiny bits of muffin. Much easier than eye contact. "You want me to—what? Pretend we're together? That we'reengaged? How would that even work?"
And why did you choose me?
"We both know you owe me one, Saunders. Help me make this happen."
I blinked up at him, half expecting to find a smirk on his face or some indication this was an elaborate joke constructed tofuck with the last of my frayed nerves. But no, there was nothing but cool, unwavering seriousness in his eyes—and a challenge we both knew I'd accept.
"What about your little boy? Won't it be massively confusing for him?"
Jude's lips firmed into a tight line. "Penny's mom has him for six weeks every summer. He won't know anything."
At least that wouldn't be an issue. There was no way I'd involve a kid in this sort of thing. It was bad enough that we were talking about taking our fraudulent engagement on tour.
