The Wedding Pact Box Set - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,11

only one solution.

She turned around and headed back to her room without another word. Maybe if she went back to bed, she could lie down and hit the restart button, waking up in reality.

“Megan!” her mother shouted after her. “Where are you going? Come officially introduce us to your fiancé!”

Oh, God. She really was hallucinating. Maybe this was some kind of psychotic break induced by extreme stress and pharmaceuticals.

“Megan, come back right now!” Her mother’s tone bordered on slipping out of character. If Megan pushed her over the edge, the consequences would be worse than she felt capable of handling at the moment. “You’re being incredibly rude. Is that how they do things in the Pacific West?”

Megan cringed. Nope. This was real. Her mother was the only person on earth who dropped the North from Pacific Northwest.

Megan turned around and walked back into the kitchen, stopping in the doorway. Mr. McMillan studied her with an expressionless face. What in the hell was he doing here? What had he told them?

As if reading her mind—or perhaps her face—he jumped out of his seat and walked over to her. “Hey, honey. How are you feeling?”

She looked up at him, dumbfounded. Why was he smiling at her like that? Scratch that, why was he calling her honey? “What the . . . How did you get here?”

“We picked him up from the airport, of course. Josh told us what happened,” her mother said, her voice light and breezy again. “He told us that you got airsick when you flew to Phoenix last year, so you took Dramamine on this trip as a preventive measure. You should have seen the way Josh took care of you when you got off the plane.” She gave Josh a look of approval.

Leave it to her mother to wait to give her elusive stamp of approval to a fake boyfriend.

“Wait. Josh . . . ?”

Mr. McMillan put an arm around Megan’s back, his hand resting on her hip, warm and surprisingly comforting. “I told your parents how you insist on calling me Jay even though my name is Josh.”

She shook her head in confusion. “What?” Was this some weird joke, or had she just woken up in the Twilight Zone?

He gave her a patient smile. “Sweetheart, you must still be out of it. Your parents were filling me in on the wedding plans. I know you wanted it to be a surprise, but it’s only a couple of days now. It sounds just as remarkable as I knew it would be.”

She was wrong. This wasn’t a hallucination. This was a nightmare. Anger blazed to life in her stomach, quickly spreading up through her chest. She clenched her hands into fists.

“Why didn’t you bring this young man home sooner, pumpkin?” her father asked. “I can tell he’s going to fit right in with our family.”

Was that supposed to be a good thing?

“And he’s got a cute patootie,” her grandmother added. “I think you kids call it an ass.”

“Gram!” Megan protested in shock.

Josh laughed, his hand pulling her closer. “Funny, Megan was saying the same thing today in the airport.”

Megan’s jaw dropped as she glared at him in disbelief.

Gram shook her head. “For the life of me, I don’t know why you would call someone’s back end an ass. Especially a cute one. Don’t you kids know that an ass is a donkey?”

Megan didn’t take her gaze off Josh for a moment, her temper about to blow. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing—”

Before she realized what was happening, he cupped her cheek and kissed her, his lips soft but insistent. She put her balled hands on his chest with the intention of pushing him away, but her heart began to race in spite of itself, and she leaned closer, inexplicably drawn to him as her anger bled out and her hands relaxed. His muscles were firm below her fingertips and her knees began to weaken, but the arm he’d looped around her back held her up. If this was a dream, she decided she wasn’t ready to wake up.

Josh lifted his face, looking slightly dazed for a moment before he turned toward her family, still holding her in his arms. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I just love her so much I can’t stop myself sometimes.”

Megan gaped at him as if she’d just had a lobotomy. The way her brain felt at the moment, it probably wasn’t too far off.

“He doesn’t look like a donkey,” her grandmother said in a