He opened the door and stepped outside. The Rocky Mountains filled the horizon, a breathtaking panorama, and a wide, clear stream gurgled below with a thick border of yellow aspens on either side.
He braced his arms on the railing and took a deep breath of Colorado air.
“I have good news and bad news.”
Jack heard her step out onto the balcony, but he didn’t turn around. “Of course.”
“The good news,” she said, wrapping her arms around him and leaning her cheek against his back, “is that we don’t have to move to a room on the third floor.”
Jack could feel every tiny movement of her fingers on his chest, could feel her voice rumble soothingly against his skin. He swallowed and managed, “Nice.”
He looked down at the ten pink fingernails that were spread out on his chest. Fuck.
“But the bad news,” she said, kind of giggling as she spoke, “is that we have to stay in this room.”
“What?” He turned around and stared down at her face. She looked startled by his reaction, and her hands fell to her sides as he said, “You’re telling me they can’t find a single room?”
She blinked. “Well, they do have a couple of rooms, but they’re on the third floor.”
He said, “So let’s move.”
“By my family.”
“So?” he asked.
“So we just made a whole big thing about wanting a private sex room.”
She was seriously going to kill him with her Hallie-ness. He sighed and said, “We never said anything about a sex room, for the love of God.”
“It was implied,” she said, as if he were the ridiculous one. “So how do I explain the change of heart? We didn’t want to have wild sex in the same bed, we like to use two? We prefer to sleep separately after we bang?”
“Will you stop saying ‘bang’？”
“You don’t like ‘bang’？” She smirked and said, “You, Jack Marshall, don’t like ‘bang.’ That’s right; you prefer ‘jostling’ and ‘railing.’？”
He sighed. “No one will have to know we’re down there.”
“They’ll know,” she said.
He tilted his head and cracked his very-tight neck. “I’ll make sure they don’t.”
“Can you just do this for me?”
“No,” he barked.
“Why not?”
He knew he must sound totally unreasonable to her. He said, “I just think it’s a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He very nearly yelled the word as he tried getting through to her. “Sharing a bed while pretending to be in a relationship? That doesn’t seem like it’s treading something that could fuck up a friendship?”
She shrugged, and something about the gesture made him want to pull her coat tighter around her body and make sure she was warm enough. She said, “I get what you’re saying. I mean, even though we don’t ever talk about it, this friendship means a lot to me and I’d hate if something got in the way of that. But . . . ”
He clenched his jaw together as he waited for her to continue.
“We don’t have a normal friendship. We became friends after we slept together. Sex and feelings can’t get in the way, because we drove over them right at the beginning.”
He swallowed. Why did it irritate him that she was so cool about it, so positive that more intimacy wouldn’t add feelings?
Dammit, he knew he was all over the place and making zero sense.
But the reality was that he hadn’t considered how much of a mindfuck the fake dating might be for him. He didn’t like that it felt real when she wrapped her arms around him, and he didn’t like the way he felt when he kissed her; it felt like everything he wanted. And since she was, in fact, faking it in accordance with their agreement, if he acted on his feelings under the guise of faking it, that felt like lying. Or fraud.
He wanted to tell her how he felt about her and then give her time to explore her own feelings and respond accordingly. But if he told her how he felt now, would she think it was part of the game? Or a result of the game?
Or, worse, would she confuse their pretend relationship with her true feelings for him?
The best thing to do, as much as he didn’t want to, was wait until they got back to Omaha to discuss his feelings. They needed to fake date for her family like he had agreed to do, keep their hands off each other in private, and revisit what was really going on once they were wheels-down at home.