When he’d told her he wanted intimacy, he’d expected her to balk. It was supposed to put another barrier between them, a reminder that he wanted a home and hearth kind of woman, not one who threatened to incinerate every bone in his body.
This time, when he pulled back, she let him go, her arms falling into her lap. She blinked, reorienting herself, apparently as befuddled as he was by what had just happened.
“Did she get the shot?” Trinity murmured, and instantly it was business as usual.
“She better have.”
If not, he was done with this farce. There was no way he could keep this up. Because it was starting to feel way too real even when they weren’t behind closed doors.
* * *
When Logan’s phone rang at 8:00 a.m., Mom was the last name he expected to see flashing on the screen.
He groaned and put a pillow over his head, but it still felt like each chime of the ringtone cut straight through his temples. He knocked the phone onto the bed without looking and dragged it under the pillow. “Don’t you have church?”
“Hello to you, too.” His mother was way too chipper for a Sunday morning. “I’m about to leave, yes. You should come with me.”
“I have a game today,” he reminded her, which she should know, since she had box seats and came to most home games. When he was free, he didn’t mind taking his mom to the church she’d attended with his dad for over thirty years. He hated that she had to go by herself now.
“Judging by the pictures your grandmother forwarded me, you’d do better to come with me to church,” his mother said and he could hear her raised eyebrows in her tone. “Who is this woman you were kissing like you wanted to swallow her whole?”
“Trinity Forrester.” He could not have this conversation at 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday. Or any time on any day, for that matter. How did he live in a world where Grandma got her mitts on photos posted to the internet and tattled to his mother about them? “And it was just a kiss.”
It was so not just a kiss, and odds were the photographer had captured the scene at the club last night at the height of the frenzy. Logan hadn’t seen the pictures yet, but they must have been really good if they warranted an early-morning call regarding the subject of his eternal soul.
“Would it be too much to ask if I could meet her? Since you’re seriously involved and everything?”
Logan groaned. “Mom, I’m not marrying her. We’re just...dating.”
“That’s not what the caption says.”
He sat up, knocking the pillow to the floor. “What? What does it say?”
“‘Billionaire owner of the Dallas Mustangs celebrates as Fyra Cosmetics executive says yes to his proposal.’” She cleared her throat. “That’s verbatim. I’m reading it straight off my screen.”
Since he didn’t need any more invitations to church, he bit back an inventive curse. “It’s...complicated, Mom.”
He couldn’t flat-out deny it, not until he knew if Trinity had planted the story on purpose. She better not have. He’d already told her his views on a fake engagement. His temper set off at a slow boil.
“Oh. So are you engaged or not?”
He couldn’t lie to his mom, either. They’d always been close, but since his dad had died, Logan made sure that his mom wanted for nothing. They’d made the agonizing decision together to sell McLaughlin Investments, the online stock trading company his dad had founded, and then split the money in half. It had bonded them in a way nothing else could have. “I’ll call you later and tell you. How about that?”
“As long as the answer is yes, sure.”
Of course that was what she’d say. She’d been bemoaning the lack of a daughter-in-law for going on ten years now and recently had started in on the lack of grandchildren. You’re not getting any younger, she liked to remind him, and I’m certainly not.
He had a ticking clock in his head, too, and didn’t need any help feeling like the life full of family and kids that he saw when he closed his eyes did not even slightly resemble the one he lived every day. The line of eligible women wrapped the block twice, but he couldn’t seem to find the right future Ms. McLaughlin. Certainly he would not increase his chances by parading a fake one around.
A shower did not improve his mood, and neither did the images that had been flashing across his mind since the undressing of last night. Trinity’s body was the stuff of legends, and he was not the nice guy she’d painted him as.
Oddly, thinking about that second kiss put more wood in his shed than visualizing her perfect breasts as he peeled off that outfit made of sofa cushion material. So horrible. But once it was gone? So beautiful.