Chapter 6

The producers of Bride at First Sight had all these ideas about how Dane should interact with Lilith. He didn’t like any of them, especially not the one where he had to come up with a date night at home. But he’d been told in no uncertain terms that it was easier to film in the condo the studio had already paid for, and it didn’t require a lot of releases from passersby that would keep Melanie hopping.

Most importantly, a stay-at-home date night afforded lots of room for intimacy. That’s what the audience really wanted to see—either two people falling for each other or two people tearing each other’s hair out, whether it was real or not. And the ratings for the series premiere had been spectacular, which meant they had to keep the numbers up. The producers wanted high impact drama and they wanted it yesterday.

Fine. He got it. But he could barely think of a destination date, let alone one that took place at home. Watching a movie together seemed like the no-brainer choice, but that had been nixed immediately. A movie fostered lack of engagement. Too much opportunity to lapse into silence. Try again.

Well, duh. That was what he’d been going for. The less he had to converse, the better.

Maybe the producers could toss out a few ideas if his weren’t up to par. But they just gave him a pointed look, told him to put his genius IQ to work, and went back to discussing production costs and audition tapes for next season.

Dane was pretty sure he’d never claimed to be a genius, so he took it as an unoriginal dig and googled how to have a fun date at home.

When Lilith got back from running an errand, the camera crew leaped into action, setting up their endless array of equipment while Dane pulled his wife into the kitchen for a quick off-camera powwow.

My wife. Lilith Parker was his wife.

“Hey,” he said and promptly forgot everything he’d been about to say as Lilith peeked up at him from under her lashes.

Being this close to her set off something inside him that he couldn’t explain. Or control.

“Hey,” she repeated and glanced at the camera crew. “Melanie said we’re filming a date? Did we get a script?”

No, that would be too easy, and who wanted that?

“They decided they like your way better.” When she raised her eyebrows in question, he reminded her. “Like in the audition tape. You refused to read the script. Congrats. Now we have to come up with our own lines.”

Which gave him plenty of room to stumble over his vocabulary and afforded her the opportunity to be as catty about it as she wanted to. And he needed to get a grip. She’d never made fun of him like the other kids, which was one of the reasons he’d taken the plunge at the dance back in high school. That was why her reaction had hurt so much.

“That’s better anyway,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t have to stare at the dumb little screen with the lines on it.”

“Well, I hope you’ll like the date just as much. We’re cooking together.”

It wasn’t his favorite choice, but the list he’d found online included ridiculous suggestions like taking a bubble bath together or doing a puzzle. Poles apart. While he couldn’t imagine throwing down the bubble bath invitation in real life, in his head, he could visualize it all he wanted to. And had.

Which left little room in his brain for anything else like making decisions. So here they were. Cooking. If she hated it, too bad.

“Like food? Or is that a euphemism for something?” she asked with a tiny smile he had no shot at interpreting but spiked through his gut just the same.

Coupled with the residual images in his head of Lilith draped in bubbles, he was one racy suggestion away from needing a cold shower.

“Food.” He swallowed and nodded at his laptop, which he’d levered open on the counter with a YouTube video queued up. “I thought we’d try burritos. It seems simple enough from the instructions.”

Lilith wrinkled her nose and closed the laptop with a click. “I’m not a fan of Mexican. Let’s make cookies. I have my mom’s recipe memorized, and I can send Melanie to get the ingredients from Carolina or Eliza down the hall.”

“That sounds…” Completely the opposite of what he’d planned for. “Great.”

Lilith sprang into action texting her friends, and within a few minutes, Melanie had returned with a bag full of stuff. Sugar, butter, flour, an egg she carried in one palm like it would hatch any minute.

The crew placed their instruments of torture in strategic places around the kitchen, which opened into the living room. Suddenly, Dane felt completely self-conscious. He’d made it through the wedding all right, but only by focusing on Lilith, which hadn’t been a chore. Plus the cameras had stayed at a distance, preferring wide shots to the close-ups they had angled for this time.

“Okay, we need an hour’s worth of footage,” the director informed them blithely. “Make it sizzle. Action.”

Sure. Easier said than done.

But Lilith seemed unbothered. She turned her back on the entire company and smiled at Dane. “Have you ever made cookies before?”

“No. I never saw the point when they already come defeathered and deboned in those little foam trays wrapped with cellophane.”

It was a lame joke, but Lilith laughed and squeezed his arm. “Well, bagging cookies in the wild isn’t so hard. As long as you brought the right shotgun.”

Intrigued by where she was going with the metaphor, which he definitely hadn’t expected her to pick up, he crossed his arms and leaned a hip against the counter. “What you see is what you get.”

She let her gaze slide down the length of him as if truly evaluating the efficiency of the tools he’d brought to the kitchen, stark appreciation painted thick across her expression. “Seems like you’re in a good shape then.”

Yeah. He worked out. Was that what she’d meant? If so, he could roll with that. Dane worked hard to keep the weight off, no easy task when he spent a lot of his day butt down in a chair staring at a computer screen. But he had a weakness for Doritos and ice cream that he couldn’t staunch late at night while still in the middle of debugging a tricky JavaScript method, and if he wanted to indulge, he had to counter the effects.

Judging by the way her gaze lingered on his flexed biceps, he’d done all right.

One of the camera men changed positions. Dane avoided glancing at him, per the instructions they’d gotten the first day, but it broke the haze she’d caught him up in. Of course Lilith hadn’t forgotten the crew was there. She’d been flirting it up in response to the sizzle directive.

If that was how it was going to be…couldn’t he do the same? None of this was real. He had every reason to take a shot at moving the big reveal episode forward and zero reason to believe he’d been reading her wrong.

As she moved toward the refrigerator, he whipped out a hand and snagged her by the waist, pulling her into his embrace.

“What’s your hurry?” he murmured and settled her snug against him, half-convinced she’d wiggle out of his arms with a scorn-filled expression. “The cookies aren’t a flight risk, are they?”

Something long and liquid unfurled in her gaze as she stared at him, but she didn’t seem all that bothered to have her progress toward the ingredients impeded. Looping her arms around his neck casually, as if they’d done this a million times, she treated him to a saucy smile.

“What cookies?”

He kept his face neutral as best he could but he had a feeling he was failing. Miserably. He had a hot woman in his arms and orders to give the viewers something dramatic. Plus, it was Lilith. “My thoughts exactly.”

And then it was an easy thing to lean into the kiss that had already been a foregone conclusion. She rose up on her tiptoes to deepen the angle, and he groaned as her taste filled him.

The kiss got a little out of hand. His fault. He needed more of her under his fingertips, skating down her back with little strokes until he finally pressed his entire palm against the small of her back, shifting her closer still.

This was way beyond sizzle. His skin felt like it had been set on fire.

She mewled and threaded her fingers through his hair, holding on with somewhat desperate little pulls. That didn’t cool him down any.

With another groan he was pretty sure conveyed every bit of his momentary instability, he pulled away and ran the back of his hand down her cheek in apology. “Maybe we pick that up again when the cookies are in the oven.”

“Sure. I like burned cookies.” Her voice was a little breathless with a lot of texture that thrilled him.

He’d put that slightly flushed look on her face. And he’d do it again. Strictly in the name of Bride at First Sight, of course. But it didn’t hurt that he’d dreamed of having Lilith respond to him like this.

“We’ll set a timer,” he assured her, and when she grinned at him, he realized he might actually be having fun. “Show me how to make these mythical creatures you’ve been promising me would appear if we stayed quiet and still behind these bushes.”

She set to work dumping butter and sugar into a bowl, went through the steps of adding everything together with marked patience, and handed him a large wooden spoon so he could mix everything.

“You have the muscles for it,” she explained with a wink, which worked extremely well to get him to spring into motion.

If part of this exercise resulted in her admiring him while he rotated a spoon around a bowl, he could buck up. And that’s exactly what she did, chin in hand as she monitored his blending style while letting her gaze rake over his body. He wasn’t at all ashamed to admit he enjoyed every minute of it.

“You’re a fascinating person,” she said out of the blue, nearly making him drop his spoon.

“What? I am not. I’m incredibly borin—” Shut up. That was Eugene talking. Dane led an exciting life of fast cars and faster women. Except he’d forgotten his made-up bio when he’d shown Lilith his computer earlier, and now it just seemed dumb to try to continue that farce. “I mean, why do you say that?”

“You just have this unique blend about you. You like different things than anyone I’ve ever known and your job is cool. Plus there’s just something comfortable about you.”

More pleased with that assessment than he should be, he glanced at her. “Nobody thinks my job is cool.”

“I do.” She shrugged. “I mean, I know how to infuse oil with lavender but anyone can learn that. What you do is well beyond the realm of understanding and I don’t know, it makes you kind of mysterious.”

That was a new one on him. “Like the Zorro of the internet or something?”

Her smile widened. “I can picture you with a rakish black bandana over your eyes. You have the perfect mouth and jaw for it.”

As her gaze traced the area in question as if she might like to take a bite out of him instead of the cookies, the back of his neck went hot again. He was definitely going to have to get used to the way she looked at him on camera. The problem was that she did it off camera too. That made it so much harder to remember it was fake.

Though he had a vested interest in making sure she didn’t think this was all fake. Didn’t he? Funny thing about revenge schemes—it helped if you knew how they were supposed to work. Probably he should have done less imagining how good it would feel to finally get Lilith on the receiving end of humiliation and more research into the actual steps after the producer had sprung the whole idea on him. Because right now, he didn’t feel all that great about leading her down this path. Eventually, there was supposed to be a big reveal where she found out who he really was.

The problem was he didn’t have a good handle on that either. And it had taken being in Lilith’s orbit to realize that there was more to both of them than he’d credited. Did he really want to ruin the dynamic that had unexpectedly sprung up between them? Everything was different than he’d imagined it would be.

The only thing he could do at this point was hang on. At least until he figured out how this should go. Maybe he could get away with filming the show, spending time with Lilith as an adult, and then move on with her none the wiser.

“Cut!” the director yelled as Lilith slid the cookie pan into the oven. “Take five.”