From Enemies to Expecting(25)

The woman. The kiss. The way she’d made herself vulnerable to him, both on that bed as he’d stripped away all of the outer trappings that hid Trinity from the world and on that bar stool as he explored what he’d found. So amazing.

He palmed himself and took care of the worst of the aching need, but he suspected he wouldn’t ever fully absolve it until he gave in to the inevitable.

Which wasn’t happening.

When he got out of the shower, he hunted up something to eat in the enormous kitchen that had come with the house he’d bought in Prosper because it was close to the Mustangs training facility and the school district was one of the best in north Texas.

Yeah, it had occurred to him that the woman he eventually married might like to pick out her own house, but he’d fallen in love with the property the moment his Realtor showed it to him. Twenty rolling acres spread out around the main house with plenty of room for kids and dogs, and a stable sat up on a hill overlooking a lake that he’d stocked with fish. Now all he needed was the wife.

Apparently he’d been granted step one in that process without his consent, and since he really couldn’t put it off any longer, Logan snatched his laptop from the built-in desk near the fireplace in the great room and booted it up as he mainlined coffee.

The shot spilled onto his screen, and yeah, it was hot. He was standing between Trinity’s legs, back to the camera and his hand on her thigh. The photographer had captured the kiss perfectly to show Trinity’s face and expression—rapturous.

Logan’s entire body cued up at the memory. This wasn’t a picture of two people faking it for the camera. They wanted each other more than they wanted to breathe, and it was all there in full color for the world to see.

That’s what his mom should be worried about, not whether the caption had any validity, although it did say exactly what she’d said it did.

Trinity Forrester was not the woman of his dreams. Fantasies? Sure. It would be impossible not to think about finishing that kiss with all her clothes on the floor. But the idea of her being his fake fiancée did not sit well. At all. He needed to call her, but it was barely nine o’clock on a Sunday and despite all of the evidence burning up his laptop screen, he did have a small sense of decorum left.

His phone beeped with a text message from none other.

Looked like she wasn’t a late sleeper, either.

Did you see? It’s all over my social media. I need a ring.

That pushed far more buttons than he should have allowed, and his temper flared. A fake relationship was one thing, because frankly, it wasn’t all that fake. They were dating, and no one had asked how serious it was, so there had been no reason to lie. Until today.

He called her. Some things couldn’t be properly conveyed via text message.

“Isn’t it great?” she gushed by way of answer. Clearly she’d been sitting on her phone waiting on a return text and was perfectly fine with a conversation instead. “My publicist already called me. She’s thrilled with the response. One of her trackers says the picture with the proposal caption has been shared twenty-five thousand times.”

The phone nearly slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers.

“Twenty-five thousand? Really?”

God, the nightmare just kept going, didn’t it? How was it possible that people cared so much about something as unimportant to their daily lives as two people they’d never met getting engaged? And it was a lie, besides.

“That’s just the one with your hand on my thigh. The other one is better, but it’s not getting as much traction, probably because it’s not as splashy.”

The other one? Wedging his phone against his ear, he did another search and so many results scrolled onto his screen, he could hardly fathom it. There. He clicked.

The photographer had gotten a one-in-a-million shot in that moment after Logan had pulled away, in between the first and second kisses, just as Trinity had started to reel him back in. They weren’t kissing, not yet, but the raw desire on her face was unmistakable. This picture was worth a thousand words, perfectly encapsulating what he’d felt as he’d been sucked into her—as if flesh and bone had dissolved, leaving only their essence behind.

She’d felt it, too. And he hated sharing what should have been a private moment with the world.

He hated a lot of this.

“I’m not buying you a ring,” he muttered. “Are you the one who planted that caption?”

“No, I was just as surprised as you were. It might have been my publicist, but she won’t admit it.”

“We have to set the record straight. That’s nonnegotiable. I don’t mind letting a bunch of strangers think we’re dating, but it’s not fair to the people in my life to let them think there might be a wedding in our future when there’s not.”