Chapter 4

Lilith had never once envisioned her wedding day with any amount of detail, but for something that the studio had thrown together in a few short hours, it was shaping up to be glorious. So far, she’d spent the morning lounging in bed until the absurdly late hour of nine o’clock, then the Bride at First Sight’s assistant had fetched her coffee from Java by Brydie with almond and brown sugar scones on the side. To further cap off perfection, she and four of her closest friends got a spa day courtesy of the network.

True story—she’d casually mentioned to the producers that they might want to film a girl’s day at the spa as a lead in to the wedding scene and then just as casually talked them into paying her to close down Relâcher. The staggering amount they’d settled on well exceeded her typical receipts lately, so it had been a no brainer. As a sincerely awesome bonus, Tina, her best massage therapist, had finally worked out that knot at the base of Lilith’s skull.

“So be honest,” Eliza said around a mouthful of prosciutto and Gouda on a baguette, also courtesy of the show’s back office. “This guy Dane McClarren is a creep, right?”

Figured she’d jump right into that the second the camera crew took their own lunch break. They’d vanished, leaving a handful of Relâcher staff members plus Lilith, Eliza, Katie, Carolina, and Nomi Hannon DuMar, whom none of them had gotten to see much lately since she’d recently launched a new business venture with her husband.

“Don’t get used to the catering,” Lilith advised with a nod at Eliza’s left hand as it inched toward another sandwich. “All this pampering isn’t going to be typical for the show’s regular episodes, according to the warnings Melanie has copiously parroted.”

Melanie was the director’s assistant and got all the cruddy jobs no one else wanted to do, or so the college intern had confessed when Lilith had asked the girl to join her for coffee and scones this morning. She was a cute girl with a head on her shoulders and could do much better for herself than shadowing that sexist pig of a director, who still called Lilith sweetheart mostly as a pointed dig, she was pretty sure.

“What?” Eliza intoned with a shrug. “The food is here. I’m eating it. Not like I have a hot boyfriend in the wings to stay skinny for.”

“Nice deflection, by the way,” Katie said without opening her eyes, as an esthetician worked on spreading clay across her face that would rehydrate her skin better than a full glass of water, money-back guaranteed. “You haven’t said a word about Dane yet, which is telling in and of itself. He’s pretty delish, no?”

Lilith made a face and got a stern look from the esthetician doing her own facial. She let her cheeks relax and waved a hand in Katie’s direction. “You saw the promo spot advertising the show. He’s good-looking. What more is there to say? I like him. He’s great.”

And not expecting a love match, which was the brilliance of all of this. Lilith could do her thirty days on the show, ensure some strategic camera shots featured Relâcher’s logo, and move on. If only she could see the look on Rohina’s face when her sister realized that the business she’d been trying to sabotage was being featured front and center on a heavily hyped wedding episode of the new season of Bride at First Sight. It was a dirty shame there were no flies on that wall…

“But that’s the point,” Katie argued calmly. “If he’s great, why is he appearing on a reality show that plans to marry him off to a woman he’s never met? Please. The whole thing is suspicious. He must have something wrong with him.”

“This was your idea, if you recall,” Lilith informed her friend primly. There would be no rain on this parade, thank you. “You and Carolina cooked up the idea of having a wedding party spa day in the first place, remember? And guess what? The network loved the idea. Voila. If you don’t like free facials and the chance to be an extra in the episode, feel free to bow out.”

“The reality show was your idea,” Carolina reminded her with a smirk. “We never said you should fake marry a guy for real.”

“You guys are making my head hurt,” Nomi said with a laugh and flashed the diamond ring on her left hand pointedly as she jumped into the fray. “Just keep in mind that fake marriages don’t always stay fake. Malone and I never expected to fall in love when we did it.”

“You and Malone were made for each other.” Katie waved that off with a knowing laugh. “You just figured it out in an unconventional way. Besides, he’s not a creep. We all knew him before he became your fake husband. This Dane guy? Unknown entity.”

“But that doesn’t make him a creep,” Lilith protested. Far from it. He had beautiful eyes and a voice that settled inside her like hot chocolate. All of which she had every intention of keeping under wraps or she’d never hear the end of it. “If you’re saying there’s something wrong with a guy because he’s unmarried, then something must be wrong with me too, right?”

Yeah, okay, she did sound a little defensive, but come on. All this lip about Dane could easily be reflected back on her and besides, it didn’t matter what his reasons were for doing the show. Hers were far from altruistic. She who lived in a glass house did not pick up a rock.

Besides, it wasn’t real. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be doing it. The marriage license they’d “applied” for a few days ago had been nothing other than a photo op. The camera guy had rolled his eyes as Lilith signed it on the dotted line earlier today with a loopy flourish as he’d filmed the whole thing, which the editors would splice into the show after the ceremony to make it seem like everything had been done in the right order. Ironic how unreal a reality show actually was.

“No one’s trying to call out you or Dane,” Carolina jumped in to soothe the ruffled feathers. “We just want you to be careful. When I recommended to Katie and Nomi that they should find fake relationships to fix their specific problems, the volunteers were both guys we could keep tabs on. This is totally different.”

“Well, the good news is that we’re filming here at Vivo,” Lilith reminded the room at large because it was sweet how much her friends cared about her. Who needed a man when you had that? “The studio rented a vacant condo from the sales office, and we’ll live there together for thirty days while under the sharp eye of the camera. You guys are within shouting distance pretty much twenty-four seven. The studio isn’t forcing us to share a bedroom, and anything risqué is off limits. It’ll be fine.”

And all the businesses under the Vivo umbrella would benefit. Even Ask Carolina could pick up new viewers as a result, not that the love guru needed any help. But still. Lilith did feel like she owed her for the suggestion despite her friend’s recent claim that it hadn’t been her idea at all.

The camera crew returned from lunch to capture the tail end of the beautification session and scattered again as the ladies used the changing rooms to dress for the wedding. Vivo management had offered the public courtyard for the ceremony, and in a rare Divine thumbs up, the weather had cooperated, clocking in at a balmy seventy-five degrees in September. It was meant to be.

Lilith slipped into the dress Melanie had picked out from the studio wardrobe coffers, a sleeveless, straight-line sheath with seed pearls painstakingly strewn across the bodice and skirt in a geometric pattern. It was both chic and feminine, and utterly the perfect dress for a woman who appreciated form above function. The costume supervisor hadn’t had to alter it with so much as a single stich, and the woman had clucked over the luck for a solid minute as she evaluated the fit with a critical eye. If Lilith didn’t know better, she’d think this dress had been made for her.

“Oh, honey.” Eliza paused for a moment as she came out of her own dressing room clad in a mauve sheath of a similar style minus the seed pearls. Her dark hair had been swept up in a curly, artfully messy waterfall. “You look breathtaking. It’s too bad this is all for show.”

Lilith waved that off, especially the emotion in Eliza’s voice, because no crying was allowed after forty-five minutes in the makeup chair. “What’s too bad is that people save dresses like this for a ridiculously overpriced wedding ceremony. I’d love to wear this to a club or a play. Our culture is weird.”

“You’re such a romantic.” Eliza rolled her eyes with faux frustration. “I get that your dad screwed you and your mom over, but that doesn’t negate the thousands of other marriages that work. True love still exists. I hate that you’re still so cynical.”

Sometimes she hated it, too, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t tried. She’d walked into that relationship with Nick readily enough, hadn’t she? Heart wide open, cautiously convinced that her friends were right and not all men sucked. That had been one time she’d have been okay with being wrong.

“The cynicism is just a bonus,” Lilith joked and drew Eliza into a wedding-day hug that hopefully told her closest ally in this thing called life how much she meant to her. “I’m not completely dead inside. Just when it comes to men. I’m still crossing my fingers you’ll find someone though, if that’s what you want. All that happily ever after nonsense is just not for me.”

Eliza nodded, careful not to mess up her hair—it had taken her best stylists almost an hour to pin and curl into place. “I just want you to be happy. You deserve it.”

Just then, Melanie ducked into the changing room and held up a hand with five fingers spread to tell them the wedding would be starting momentarily. Lilith nodded at the intern and told Eliza, “I have you and Relâcher. What more could I possibly want?”

After Melanie finished going over what Lilith should do during the ceremony, fate walloped her with an answer to at least one thing she could want—Dane McClarren in a tuxedo. Like all the time. Twenty-four seven. The Bride at First Sight people should have included something in his contract that required him to wear one. She should have required that. Because dang. That man filled out a suit. He dominated the space at the top end of the makeshift aisle between sets of chairs coving the grassy area of the courtyard.

Where was a fan when a girl needed one?

How lucky was she that she got to be fake married to a man who looked like that? And she didn’t even have to worry about any of the normal boy-girl stuff like pretending she didn’t notice how gorgeous he was or analyzing everything he said in a marathon session with her friends. She could just admire the heck out of the tall, dark-haired perfection that had volunteered to help Relâcher out of the Rohina-induced hole it had fallen into.

Of course, he didn’t know that. Yet. She’d mention it sometime when the cameras weren’t rolling, if they ever even found themselves together when they weren’t on set.

The production team had lined the public courtyard with white wooden chairs and staked the ground with sticks wrapped in mauve ribbons to mark the path the bridal party would take to where the minister stood waiting. And Dane. Piped music rang out overhead and the crowd that had been pressed into attending what was essentially the filming of a TV show turned to watch Eliza waltz down the aisle.

Then it was Lilith’s turn. She fixed her gaze on Dane with what she hoped passed for an adoring expression, but he locked on her as well, his pretty blue eyes warming with more and more appreciation the closer she got. The longer he looked at her like that, the greater chance she’d start to drool.

Men didn’t usually register on her scale of importance. Sure, she might admire a Hemsworth on occasion while watching a movie, or note the nice shoulders on an actor in a razor commercial when they went out of their way to show the guy wearing nothing but a towel draped around his narrow hips. But she had little time to notice a man in real life. Nick had cured her of that.

But Dane was most definitely real, standing right in front of her as she arrived at the spot where Melanie had instructed her to stand. He even smelled nice, like a cross between citrus and something faintly spicy that she couldn’t place.

“Hi,” he murmured and took her hand in his, engulfing it in his long, lean fingers. Probably Melanie had instructed him to do that, just as she’d painstakingly gone over the drill with Lilith back in the changing room at the spa before the ceremony.

But her skin didn’t seem to have gotten that message. Or the one about how all of this was fake. Because the shock of his touch jolted straight up her arm and forked through the rest of her body. A little stunned, she blinked up into his eyes, noting they weren’t just blue from this angle, but the color of the Caribbean. Sunlight had shifted them from merely pretty to devastating.

And then he smiled, curving up his cheekbones. “You look spectacular.”

A line. Melanie had coached him on what he should say. But that didn’t seem to matter either, and she blessed the color match foundation she always wore because hopefully it covered the pink that most definitely had just climbed through her cheeks. “Thank you. Same goes.”

Lame. She couldn’t just say hey, you’re hotter than any suit model I’ve ever seen? The man had rendered her stupid with a touch. And now she was all off kilter.

“Shall we?” he murmured and turned toward the minister but didn’t let go of her hand.

More thrilled than she had a right to be, she faced the minister but heard none of what the guy said. He was a passable enough actor, likely an extra the show had hired along with several of the people in the audience—she assumed anyway since she didn’t recognize hardly anyone, a rarity in a place like Vivo where she’d long grown accustomed to running into someone she knew on a minute-by-minute basis.

As the minister droned on, she developed this heightened awareness of Dane that she could not shake. When he eventually got to the end of his speech, traditionally, a kiss came after that.

Would Dane try to gloss over it or go for broke? Would she? Which way did she hope it would go? Oh, goodness. If the wedding wasn’t real, they didn’t have to really kiss. But then again…it wasn’t real. It didn’t count. Who better to kiss than a fake husband? Especially when she’d recently developed a bit of a crush on her soon to be husband.

And then the ceremony sped up, as if the sole act of anticipating the end put the whole thing in a time warp. The moment of truth came sooner than she’d been expected.

The minister said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

Her pulse scattered. You may kiss the bride. That was her. Should she lean in or stand on tiptoes?

Dane didn’t suffer from the same hesitation. Immediately, he guided Lilith to face him with their hands still joined and leaned down, touching his lips to hers. Holy cow. They were kissing. In front of people. On camera.

Then she had no more time to think because her brain melted. That was her excuse for why she dropped his hand and cupped his jaw with both of hers to prolong the sheer bliss of being kissed by Dane McClarren.

He didn’t argue. If anything, the little noise he made in his throat could only be described as a growl of approval. His fingers found a hollow near her ear and tilted her head up to change the angle, and it was indeed an improvement. The kiss deepened, unfurling inside her with long, lovely waves.

After an eternity, one of them—she wasn’t sure who—finally drew back enough to end the kiss. They were supposed to run back down the aisle holding hands, smiling and waving at the crowds. Neither of them moved. As they stared at each other, she was pretty sure he was as sorry as she was that they weren’t someplace a little more private where they could explore what had just happened more thoroughly.

For a fake husband, he surely didn’t kiss like one.

Not that she had a lot of experience with husbands, kissing or how either were supposed to make a woman feel, real or otherwise. All she could do was rate this one, and it was one hundred percent wow on a scale of one to ten.

“I think we’re supposed to…um, go,” he murmured and that jarred her brain loose.

“Yes. We are.” That meant the one and only wedding she’d ever have was officially over. For some unknown reason, the thought made her sad. Ridiculous. She squared her shoulders. “Let’s do this.”