Chapter 15

If a coach existed who could help Dane fix the disaster he’d made of his relationship with Lilith, he or she needed serious search-engine optimization tips because Google could not locate a single one. Finally, he gave up and nursed the big knot in his chest that wouldn’t go away no matter how many video game villains he killed.

After a night of very little sleep, he waited until he heard Lilith leave the condo and then wandered to the kitchen to make some coffee. Sometimes the smell alone would get his wife out of bed and she’d emerge, nose to the air, blinking herself awake. They’d drink the first cup together, chatting about nothing and everything.

That wasn’t happening today. Actually, he was lucky he was still living here. He’d expected Lilith to kick him out or call the whole thing off and move back to her real condo on a different floor. But she hadn’t done either.

Dane drank his coffee alone, the way he’d done it for the whole of his adult life. Until Lilith. Funny how he’d gotten used to being around her. Not just used to it. That would do the entire experience a disservice.

He craved her.

And he wasn’t dealing well with being cut off from the one thing in his life he’d begun to anticipate. Enjoy, even. Who would have guessed he’d like being married to Lilith? Not him.

Lilith strolled back through the door before he’d finished his coffee. Should he dump his cup in the sink and make himself scarce? He had no parameters for what it meant to stay out of her way, even though he’d been the one to offer it.

But he waffled too long and she cornered him against the counter. Not the way he’d prefer, boxing him in so he couldn’t escape as she captured his face to hold it still while she slayed him with a kiss.

His entire body leaped in response to that visual but she just stood by the wide island, arms crossed, her expression decidedly neutral. Which was an improvement over last night, so he’d take it.

“Um, hi,” he rasped and cleared his throat. Lack of sleep was catching up with him. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks, I had some at Eliza’s.”

“Okay.”

And that marked the extent of conversational openers he’d come up with on the fly when he’d heard the door open. Funny, there’d been a time when he struggled with filling the silence when he’d first ended up alone with Lilith after the wedding, but it had been a long time since that awkward, uncomfortable void had yawned between them.

How nice that his blundering had introduced it again. “I’m sorry—”

She held up a hand to cauterize the flow of his words and it worked. “Don’t. Apologies don’t fix anything.”

“Well, I’m not expecting them to. But it doesn’t change the fact I want to express it.”

Her eyelids slammed shut as she processed that or for fortification. He wasn’t quite sure how to read her when she fairly quivered with a back-off vibe that made his throat hurt. Just yesterday, if she’d been upset, he would have pulled her into the circle of his embrace and murmured…something he’d made up on the spot until she smiled again. She motivated him to come out of his shell, be the best version of himself, stretch his capacity until he hardly recognized the man he’d become.

Scratch that. He didn’t recognize Mr. Lilith Parker at all. That guy did things like kiss a woman with no apology. He’d brazenly plunked a woman down in the middle of his favorite park and sold the whole experience to her because they’d been in tune. Shockingly so. But as hard as it was to believe he’d done those things, he couldn’t deny he’d been the happiest in that role that he’d ever been in his life.

“Fine,” she said shortly. “Say whatever you’ve got to say, and then it’s my turn.”

“Would it make you feel better if I told you I’m suffering too?”

“None of this makes me feel good, Dane,” she nearly shouted and vised her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Of course I don’t enjoy the fact that you’re hurting. I care about you. That’s what makes all of this hard.”

“You didn’t put that in past tense.”

A sense of hope gushed through his chest before he could slam the floodgates down, easing the knot that had lodged there the moment he’d confessed to Lilith that he wasn’t just a fake but a liar.

“What? Are you seriously playing grammar police right now?” The look on her face skewered him. “I’m not so wishy-washy that I can just make myself stop caring about you just because you broke my heart.”

That was a meat clever to the chest. He rubbed at it, wishing the knot would come back instead. It was far less painful. “Is that what I did?”

Her quick, brief smile poured salt in the wound. “Did you miss the part yesterday where I told you I was falling for you? Because I didn’t. I’d love for that to not be true, but congrats. You did exactly what you set out to do. Get me to fall for you so you could hurt me.”

“But I didn’t do the episode,” he shot back as if that was something he should highlight from his resume. What was he looking for, an award?

“I haven’t forgotten that. It’s the only reason I’m still here,” she acknowledged stiffly. “But you’re forgetting how important the truth is to me. I’ve spent years avoiding men so I didn’t have to sort through the lies they all tell. Only to land in this situation. You cleverly designed this whole thing to get me to let my guard down. And I did. Because I thought you were being honest with me when you told me about the surgery and such. Do you have any idea how stupid I feel right now?”

He shook his head because what was he supposed to say? She’d already told him apologies were useless, and yes, she had told him that honesty was important to her. That’s why he’d confessed. Because she’d needed to know.

“Stupid,” she stressed hotly, and he was glad he’d kept his mouth shut. “Stupid and blind. I found some old pictures online and you do actually still look a lot like you did in high school. I’m just the dummy who couldn’t connect the dots.”

“That’s not fair. I don’t even see myself in the mirror. How could you have been expected to figure it out?”

She lifted her hands in a shrug. “Because I should have been looking for the scam. All men are scammers. I thought you were different, so I didn’t treat this relationship the way I should have from the first. So that’s what’s going to happen here from now on. I’m not quitting the show. I need the exposure for Relâcher too much to quit. But we have no off-camera relationship. And I’d appreciate it if you treated me like a roommate that you don’t especially like or care to speak to.”

He nodded and skipped the part where that would be impossible. “Okay.”

She turned and left the kitchen. He let her go.

At least she wasn’t quitting. He clung to that. Along with the earlier confession that she hadn’t been able to stop caring about him—that had to mean something. Maybe even a chance to change the tide.

But when the crew arrived, she’d gained a layer of frost everyone noticed.

“Sweetheart, you have to loosen up,” the director called as he staged her in the living room, his expression decidedly frustrated. “McClarren, get over here and do your thing.”

“Which thing is that?”

“We need a nice, steamy kiss,” the director announced. “The ratings are always higher for those shows than the fights. The cookie episode is the one to beat.”

Great. So his fake wife was for real done with him, and he had to depend on his acting skills to get her the ratings bonanza she still needed. Of course the kiss would be excruciating all on its own, a reminder of what he’d had and lost. But this was what he’d signed up for, what he deserved.

Might as well get it over with. He marched across the living room and pulled Lilith from the couch, engulfing her in his arms. Mistake. His entire body went on high alert, hungrily sniffing around for the source of her scent, yearning to touch, to feel, to indulge.

The ice in her gaze nearly made him weep. So he shut his eyes and dove into the kiss. The second their lips met, she softened. All over. She kind of melted in his arms, leaning into the kiss, adding fuel to the fire that he hadn’t prepared for.

With a groan, he let himself go, falling into the kiss in a way he’d vowed he wouldn’t. How was he supposed to protect his bruised insides if he went all in like this? Answer—he couldn’t. There was no way. She owned him completely, and had from the first moment he’d seen her in the hall at Carrol Senior High. This was his penance for contriving this ridiculous revenge scheme—a complete and utter gutting at the hands of his fake wife.

All at once, Lilith yanked her mouth out of the kiss, leaving him breathless and his chest heaving as if he’d run fifty miles.

“I can’t,” she whispered and buried her face in her hands.

Of course his natural instinct was to pull her back into his arms so he could make it better, which wasn’t going to work. He kept his hands at his side. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear that. I wish there was something I could do.”

The cameras were still rolling, so he chose his words carefully. They’d long abandoned the idea of a script. Usually he tried not to think about the crew too much, so he didn’t freeze up, but this was uncharted territory. It was Lilith’s show to run. He was just along for the ride.

“I just… It’s so unfair,” she cried. “You’re getting everything you wanted out of this marriage.”

A complete and utter lie, since he’d only just started to identify the things he wanted. “How do you figure that?”

“You wanted me to fall for you. I did. You wanted to hurt me. Here I am, being forced to kiss you while everyone watches. What they can’t see is that when you touch me, it feels like a thousand razor blades are slicing through my chest.”

“It’s like that for me too,” he murmured, pretty sure she had no interest in hearing about what was going on with him. But dang if that wasn’t a great way to describe the exact sensation he’d just gotten when she’d wrenched away from his lips. “And for the record, at no point did I want you to experience that. I had a childish, misguided notion that it would be great if you could see things from my side. Understand firsthand what it feels like to want something that’s been denied to you through no fault of your own.”

She nodded grimly. “You got that too then because I understand that perfectly now. I got nothing out of this. What about what I want?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to feel like I’m enough for someone,” she blurted out with so much anguish laced through the words that suspicious moisture gathered at the corner of one of his eyes. “I’ve never had that. My dad couldn’t be happy with just me. He needed a second daughter apparently. One girlfriend wasn’t enough for Nick. And even you never wanted to just be with me. There had to be this underlying agenda. Is there something wrong with me that every man in my life needs more than what I can give him?”

“Sweetheart, no. That’s not how it works. None of this is on you.” Desperate to make her see the truth he felt so clearly, he knelt in front of her so she didn’t have to look up at him and grabbed one of her hands. “I’ve always been in love with you. Since high school. You’re it for me. More than enough. I messed all of this up by concocting this horrible idea to make you pay for not returning my affections. And in the process, I lost what could have been between us.”

A million things flashed through her expression and he understood none of them. Until her face closed in and she shook her head.

“You can’t say things like that to me.”

“What, that I’m in love with you?” He shrugged. “You should make me repeat it a million more times. In case you’re wondering, it is pretty humiliating to tell a woman that you love her and not hear her say it back, even when you have zero expectation of reciprocation. So you’ve gotten your perfect revenge on me.”

“Except I didn’t want revenge. None of this is what I want.”

And with that, she shoved the camera, pushing it away from her face, and fled the room, ignoring the babble of voices that erupted in her wake.