Erika gave a sound of triumph as she clicked through the pictures on her screen. “Look at this.”
It was a great shot. They were gazing into each other’s eyes. “I love it.”
“That’s beautiful,” Jeannie agreed.
“Rhett, come over here and see this,” Sandy called to her son. She was ready to go back in the house and drink some coffee to warm up. Mission accomplished.
RHETT had forgotten his mother was anywhere near them. He pulled back from Shawn and made a face, realizing they were still stuck doing the photo shoot. They wouldn’t be allowed to go back inside until his mother deemed a picture romantic enough. He was starting to think he’d go down on a knee in the damn mud if it got this business over with. He wanted to take his wife home and snuggle on the couch for a couple of hours until he could strip her naked and have his way with her. It was the way the last three days had gone, and he was digging it, he had to say. This marriage business was damn convenient.
The whole getting-to-know-you thing was sped up by them living in the same house. The majority of the time, when Rhett wasn’t at work or the gym, he was with Shawn, and already their days had taken on a predictable pattern of dinner, a little TV or a beer at the bar up the road, maybe some darts or pool, then a few delicious hours in bed together before they fell asleep. Honestly, he wasn’t sure he could ask for anything more perfect.
And the more time he spent with Shawn, the more he realized that his initial attraction to her was growing into something more, deeper, truer.
Hell, he was falling in love with her.
When his mother called him over, and he and Shawn saw the image Erika had captured with her camera, it was there for him to clearly see. Oh, yeah. He was falling in love with her.
Given the way she gazed up at him with limpid eyes in the photo, Rhett was inclined to think he wasn’t the only one suffering from the affliction. Shawn looked . . . soft. Gushy. Wide-eyed. It made his heart swell all over again.
“What do you think?” his mother asked. “Isn’t this a great shot?”
“That was devious, Momma,” he told her, his throat tight. He didn’t trust himself to agree with her assessment, or he might get overly emotional.
“It’s candid, honest,” his mother protested. “This is way better than anything we could have gotten with you posing.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Shawn said.
Rhett glanced down at her. Her face was pale, nose red from the cold, and she looked thoughtful, teeth digging into her bottom lip.
“Well, let’s go in the house, then, before we lose our fingers.”
His mother was all smiles, promising coffee and cookies. Jeannie grinned at him. “You’ve made her day.”
“That was my goal,” he told her sarcastically. “What is she going to do with these pictures anyways?”
“Hang them on the wall with the pictures of the rest of us from our engagement shoots. And I have to tell you, I’m jealous. Photography is so artistic now. When I married Mark, we had those horrible canned shots with his hand on my shoulder, and we’re wearing matching sweaters. I mean, seriously?”
Rhett laughed. He had spent some time as a child studying his mother’s hall of marital fame photos marching along the beige wall to the bedrooms, and he had to admit he’d been entertained by some of the fashions. “Sammy’s picture was worse than yours. Bill’s holding the cat, for Chrissake. Shawn, you have to see these pictures, seriously. It’s like an alley of awful.”
“Hush,” his mother yelled back to him.
But that only made him laugh more, glad the mood had lifted. Shawn was smiling as they went into the house and kicked off their shoes. He led her over to the hall that started with his oldest sister Sammy and descended on down to Nolan, the last Ford to get married.
“I don’t think I realized how big your family really is until just now,” Shawn marveled as they strolled down the hall, checking out his sister Rachel’s underwater scuba engagement shot, to Dawn and her husband sitting on a horse fence holding hands.
Nolan was smiling in his picture, Eve tucked up against his chest. She wasn’t smiling, which was typical Eve, but the way she clasped his hands tightly against her rib cage spoke volumes if you knew her. There was an empty spot next to them on the wall, and suddenly it wasn’t so funny anymore. Rhett knew that his picture with Shawn would be printed out, framed, and hung to fill the final spot in the Ford family puzzle. Only it wasn’t real. And in six months, he would be the first Ford to get divorced and break his mother’s heart.
Not to mention his.
Suddenly, the full impact of what he had done, agreed to, hit him hard, and he squeezed Shawn’s hand.
Most people didn’t fall in love in two weeks.
But he wasn’t most people.
He couldn’t expect her to feel the same way anytime soon. But he could give her reasons to eventually feel that way. He could be the best damn husband anyone could ever ask for, in bed and out.
Shawn looked up at him, puzzled. “What are you thinking?”
“You don’t want to know,” he told her. They were thoughts that would probably scare the living shit out of her. Thoughts of forever and love and family.
“I can’t believe we have this wedding party in eight days.”
“Yeah. Me either.”
If the party didn’t scare her senseless, Rhett had five months to convince her to consider that their relationship might be real. He was confident he could do it.
He wasn’t letting Shawn go, now that he had found the woman for him. End of story.
SHAWN knew Rhett was right—she probably didn’t want to know what he was thinking. It was probably something along the lines of being horrified that he had agreed to this fake marriage and how guilty he felt over duping his family. Shawn didn’t really want to hear that said out loud, because then she would feel even more guilty than she already did.
Every day she spent with Rhett, she grew more and more confused. If this was a business arrangement only, then it was a shitty thing to be doing to the people in their lives, loss of Hamby Speedway or not. But if it wasn’t just a business arrangement—which most of the time it sure didn’t feel like that—then what the heck was it?
Rhett, despite his reputation as being serious and intense, was the easiest man to be around she had ever encountered. All her previous relationships had felt like she was jockeying for position, a teasing game of one-upmanship, communication centered around taking jabs at each other under the guise of joking. Like two guys in a locker room, not a man and woman who claimed to care about each other. It wasn’t like that at all with Rhett. He was kind and considerate, he asked her opinions, and he listened to her woes and worries. He offered useful advice, and he got excited over her successes.
Then in bed, well, there were no words to describe how absolutely sexy he made her feel, and how totally absorbed by pleasure she was when he was of a mind to have sex with her.
So what did it all mean? She had no clue. All she knew was that the last week had been one of the best of her life. She was pumped about the opportunities she and Rhett were planning for the track, she was pleased to have a partner to even discuss them with, and while she’d never been lonely in her house before, Rhett fit into her home perfectly.
But here at his parents’ house, the images of his siblings and their spouses blending on one long wall of happiness and expectation, Shawn felt torn between wanting this to be real and horror with herself for violating something so clearly sacred. The Fords weren’t her family. They respected marriage. Shawn found that she herself did, more than she had ever realized before all of this.