Chapter 4

Ash bent to get the fritters out of the oven. They’d had plenty of time to heat, and she could escape to her bedroom to change while Burke ate.

“I’m sorry, Ash,” he said, real quiet. The real Burke, the one he hid from everyone but her had arrived. Finally. “I didn’t know about Milo. I mean, obviously, I did, but yeah. I am bad with time and dates.”

She set the tray of fritters on the stovetop and turned toward him again. “It’s fine. I’m going to go change. You eat. And then we’ll figure things out.” She walked away, her heels making clicking sounds on the kitchen tile until she stepped onto the carpet.

In her bedroom, with the door closed and locked, she sank onto her bed and kicked her heels off with a long sigh. She wasn’t sure they could figure things out.

“Maybe if you weren’t attracted to him for real,” she whispered, glad she didn’t even have a pet to overhear her. If his request had come sixty-four days ago, or sixty-five, she’d be fine. She’d laugh and shake her head and start thinking of all the single women she knew she could set him up with.

But now?

Now she wanted to be his girlfriend, and she’d have to pretend she didn’t want to be while she pretended to be….

Her head hurt. Nothing made sense, especially while wearing a tight pencil skirt and a blouse that had a tag that had been scratching the back of her neck all day. She changed into her softest T-shirt and a pair of gray leggings, another sigh escaping now that was more about comfort than confusion.

She returned to the kitchen, stalling for a moment—her third moment that day—to admire Burke’s wide shoulders as he sat at her counter and ate her fritters.

“Good?” she asked, continuing into the kitchen to sit beside him.

“So good,” he said, putting the last bite of a mayonnaise-covered fritter in his mouth.

“Okay,” Ash said, reaching for the notebook she kept on the counter. “What color do we want our agreement in? Pink? Green? Or purple?” She grabbed all three pens from the mug next to where her landline used to be.

“Don’t you just have black?”

“Purple, I think. This feels like it should be in purple.” She flipped open the notebook and wrote at the top “Agreement between Burke Lawson and Ashley Fox.” She had no idea what to write next, so she looked at Burke.

Those eyes, so full of wonder and life and as blue as the day was long, sucked her in and she let herself fall. A sigh may have even come out of her mouth.

“You’re serious about this,” he said.

She yanked herself back to reality. And the reality was, she and Burke were not dating. “Don’t you think we should be?” She sat up a little straighter and resisted the urge to doodle something in the corner of this very official document. “I mean, there might be kissing and stuff.”

Her mouth turned dry at the very prospect of kissing Burke.

He gaped at her. “Kissing?”

She gave him her best dirty look, but it didn’t even faze him. It usually didn’t. “Burke. I realize you haven’t had a real girlfriend for a while, but if we want this to be convincing to your father, kissing is a definitely possibility.”

His gaze turned heated, and Ash had a hard time from melting into him. “A definitely possibility. Maybe we should start practicing now.” He lifted his eyebrows, that playful twinkle in his eyes maddening and swoon-worthy at the same time.

She elbowed him and said, “Nice try,” in a very convincing tone. But if he could see the way her heart was dancing around her chest, he’d know she wanted to kiss him right now.

“So, what goes on this?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d do a whole contract thing.”

“It’s not a contract. It’s an agreement.”

“Can you come to the Petals barbecue in a few weeks? Can’t we just hold hands and act like we’re falling madly in love with each other? Does that have to be spelled out in an agreement?”

“Let me get my calendar.” She heaved a great sigh as she got off the barstool, like Burke was this huge burden she simply couldn’t carry for much longer. But holding his hand sounded wonderful. And she wouldn’t be acting like she was falling for him.

“You know, most people have moved out of the stone age,” he called after her. She didn’t flinch, look back, or respond. A few seconds later, she returned to the kitchen, her paper planner in her hand.

She spread it on the counter between them. “When’s the barbecue?”

“July third.”

“I have a wedding on the second,” Ash mused. “And the Getaway Bay parade is that morning.” She glanced at Burke, not allowing herself to truly settle her eyes on him before looking back at her paper planner. “Fireworks the next night though.”

“We can do it all,” he said. “Parade in the morning. Barbecue that afternoon. Fireworks the next night.”

Ash didn’t dare hope to spend that much time with Burke. Sure, they saw each other often—running on the beach alone was an hour every day. They sometimes met up at night, especially if Burke wanted to perpetuate his party animal reputation. He’d make a brief appearance somewhere, then slip off into the night, wander down the beach to her cottage, and sleep on her couch.

But this was a different kind of time. This would be family time. Company time.

Girlfriend time.

Ash wrote the events in her planner in pencil. She’d learned long ago that even the most solid of plans could change. “What about between now and then?” she asked. “Are we keeping this relationship secret, or…?”

“Well, it seems like we’ve been doing that for a few weeks,” he said, reaching for the last lobster fritter. “Right?”

“Oh, so we’re ready to make the relationship public.”

“Yeah, I think so. I mean, now that my parents know.”

All at once, Ash sucked in a breath. “Oh, my mom.” She moaned out the last two words. “Burke, I can’t—she can’t—if she thinks I’m really dating someone seriously enough to meet his family, she’ll start to see white dresses and silver bells everywhere.”

Panic flowed through her with the strength of a tsunami, and she did look fully at Burke this time. His face was blank, though, which didn’t comfort her at all.

“She doesn’t leave the house much, does she?” he asked.

“No, but Leo goes over there a lot, and she has friends who come visit. She’ll find out.” She pushed the notebook away and dropped the pencil over her planner. “I don’t know, Burke.”

He finished his fritter and got up to wash his hands. With him on the opposite side of the counter, Ash could think a bit clearer. Did he know his cologne called to her? It was like it was specifically engineered to make her pulse pound and her cheeks heat.

“Maybe we should go talk to your mom tomorrow,” he said, weight and caution in each word. “Tell her we’re dating, and it’s casual for now, and you’ll keep her up to speed with everything.”

“My mother is a bloodhound,” Ash said. “Have you forgotten she taught kindergarten for thirty-two years? She knows a lie from down the hall and around the corner.”

Burke pressed both palms into the counter like he needed the support to keep standing. “What do you want to do, Ash?”

When he spoke her name with that much compassion, the emotion real and raw, she wanted to confess everything to him. But she held her tongue. This wasn’t the first insane crush she’d had on the man, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

Well, unless he got married. Or she did.

She shook her head. No, she wasn’t even looking for a date, not after Milo had taken her heart and skipped across the ocean to Cancun.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“So you don’t have a plan for everything.”

She jerked her attention to him and found that charming smile on his face, those eyes practically dancing with mischief. “I don’t have a plan when my best friend wants me to pretend to be his girlfriend.”

Burke’s smile faltered. “What are we going to tell Leo?”

Ash cocked her head, trying to find more in what Burke had asked. “What does he have to do with any of it?”

“Nothing, I guess.” But Burke turned away from her and started cleaning up the tray where she’d warmed the lobster fritters. She let him drop the subject, though she wanted to urge him to share more details.

She’d tried before, and Burke was particularly tight-lipped when he had to be.

“Let me feel out my mom,” Ash said. “Okay?”

“I’ll follow whatever you want me to, Ash.”

She nodded and closed her planner, their evening clearly concluded. But Burke didn’t leave, and Ash sat next to him on her living room couch while he flipped through her channels. She had a scuba diving lesson in the morning, and when she reminded him about it, he grinned from ear to ear.

“I’ll go then,” he said. “You’ll probably want to stare at the ceiling and fret for a while before you fall asleep.”

“I will not.” She practically shoved him toward the front door. “Now get out.”

He laughed as he stumbled out onto her porch, and she closed the door behind him, quickly darting to the living room window to watch him saunter over to his black, sporty car. He got behind the wheel, cast her house one last look—which caused her to duck below the windowsill—and drove away.

Ash indeed did lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for a while. A long while. But it wasn’t the following morning’s scuba dive that had her stomach in knots and her heart skipping beats.

It was Burke.

He’d never looked back to her house like that, like he had more to say but didn’t know how. With such seriousness in the set of his strong mouth. With such indecision in his eyes.

“Indecision,” she told the plaster. That was what she’d seen. But what did it mean?