Heath, Adam and Nate had loaded my mattress and bedroom furniture. I’d purchased those with my first check from Draco after sleeping on Heath’s den couch for a month. Then came my few measly boxes of books, keepsakes and appliances. A few suitcases with my clothes in them. And that was it.
As it drove off, the truck rattled from being mostly half-empty. We could have easily done this with a pickup truck. I followed that truck in my Honda the full twenty-minute drive to Lucas’s house in Irvine. And it took even less time to unload and stack my worldly belongings in one of the empty bedrooms—which I’d hastily explained would be used for “storage.” No one had to know that I’d be sleeping in the guest room. I’d ask Lucas’s permission to set this room up for my Twitch TV livestreaming channel.
“Yeah, just load it all in here and then I can unpack from here later.”
Lucas got home from work about five minutes into the procedure and he didn’t seem surprised to see us. Though he was a little nonplussed to see Adam there actually pitching in to help. They almost ran straight into each other before Lucas silently set his bag aside and pitched in himself.
“Honey!” I said, trying with every ounce of my measly acting ability to make it sound genuine. I leaned in for a quick peck but we even screwed that up. He aimed for my mouth while I aimed for one of his whiskery cheeks and our noses ended up colliding.
Adam and Mia both started laughing. “Going to need to perfect the Honey, I’m home greeting,” Mia said.
Afterward, we hit a nearby restaurant—there were no neighborhood pubs in this part of Irvine—and had some drinks at the bar.
“Thanks for all your help moving her in. Drinks are on me,” Lucas offered generously.
I reached out and squeezed his hand where the other two could easily see the affectionate gesture. It felt—weird. Not just because we were playacting but because it felt like I was lying to two of my closest friends. Which, in fact, I had been doing for some time now. But this lie felt more real.
But there was something… the way it felt when I put my hand over his where it rested on his hard thigh. My hand curled around his—for authenticity of course—and for a split second, I felt him respond. The thigh muscle under his jeans hardened, his thumb hooked around my hand, and very quickly, almost automatically, the pad of it stroked my finger.
Yeah, there were tingles all the way up my arm from just that simple touch. It was just the dry spell talking. The long slog through the desert before I got my divorce papers. Then I’d be able to go out and have a proper hookup and sow those wild oats. My wild oats were raring to go and didn’t like being held back. And they very much liked that simple touch from the man who was, in name only, my husband.
“So why haven’t you been wearing a ring?” Mia joked. “Were you planning on staying secretly married or something?”
Lucas stiffened beside me as he swirled his whiskey on the rocks. “I’ve got the rings at our house. This all happened so quickly that we haven’t decided what we’re doing.”
Mia frowned and looked at my drink, looked at my waist, then back at my eyes. Holy shit… did she think I was pregnant or something? To counteract any question of that I held my mug of beer up and took a deep draught from it. Then I licked the foam off my top lip with a satisfied sigh.
“Yum.” I said, barely holding back the burp that wanted to rise up and be set free. Thank God this bar had Canadian beer on draught and I didn’t have to drink the donkey pee that passed for beer in this country. I’d sooner have wine.
Mia sipped her cosmo, then set it aside and bent over the table toward me, her long brown hair hanging around her face. “So are you keeping your name or are you going to be Ms. Walker?”
“Actually it’s not Walker it’s—”
Lucas’s hand leapt up and squeezed mine hard. “No, actually she’s keeping her name, aren’t you, sweets?”
I blinked. He sure was sensitive about his name—that other name. Like it was some kind of secret. Shit that Dutch name was a mile long and practically unpronounceable, so I could understand why he’d prefer to use