“Beer was probably a better choice than wine, then. Not sure if you serve red or white with pepperoni, ham, sausage, hamburger and bacon.”
She laughed and led him into the kitchen, but the amusement died in her throat when he reached for the fridge door, presumably to keep the beer cold, then stopped. He frowned and leaned closer. Peered at the photograph held in place by a brown-eyed Susan magnet. This one showed Emma at a Red Sox game with Sean’s arm draped around her shoulder and the green field of Fenway Park behind them.
He was still frowning. “This creeps me out a little. Isn’t that supposed to be Lisa? I’m pretty sure I was at that game with Mikey and his wife.”
“It was Lisa who did the Photoshopping, not me, if it makes it any less creepy.”
“Not really. Just how many of these fake pictures do you have?”
“A couple dozen, I guess, that Lisa’s done for me over time. We’re not really photograph-happy, which helps, but I’ve got enough so it looks like we’re a couple, at least. And I needed some to take with me when I flew down to visit her.”
“Where was I when you went to Florida?”
“You couldn’t get away.”
“From what?”
She shrugged. “You happened to have a family wedding going on during the only weekend I could spare from work. You’re a busy guy, really.”
He looked like he was going to say something else, but then he shook his head and stuck the six-pack in the fridge, pulling out two bottles before closing the door. After twisting off the caps, he set one down by each plate.
“Anything I can help you with?”
She shook her head. “Everything’s on the table. Go ahead and dig in.”
It didn’t escape her notice that he placed a slice on her plate before serving himself and it gave her hopefulness a little boost. Obviously he’d been raised with good manners, which would not only help him win Gram over, but make him more apt to stick to his word.
Before she sat, she grabbed the spiral-bound journal she’d been jotting notes in since she first joked about her plan to Lisa and set it on the table. “I wrote down a few things. You know, about myself? If you skim through it, it’ll help you pretend you’ve known me longer than two days.”
Instead of waiting until they were done, he set down his slice, picked up the notebook and opened it to a random page. “You’re not afraid of spiders, but you hate slugs? That’s relevant?”
“It’s something you would know about me.”
“You graduated from UNH. Your feet aren’t ticklish.” He chuckled and shook his head. “You actually come with an owner’s manual?”
“You could call it that. And if you could write something up for me to look over, that would be great.”
He shrugged and flipped through a few more pages of the journal. “I’m a guy. I like guy stuff. Steak. Football. Beer. Women.”
“One woman, singular. At least for the next month, and then you can go back to your wild pluralizing ways.” She took a sip of her beer. “You think that’s all I need to know about you?”
“That’s the important stuff. I could write it on a sticky note, if you want, along with my favorite sexual position. Which isn’t missionary, by the way.”
It was right there on the tip of her tongue—then what is your favorite sexual position?—but she bit it back. The last thing she needed to know about a man she was going to share a bedroom with for a month was how he liked his sex. “I hardly think that’ll come up in conversation.”
“It’s more relevant than slugs.”
“Since you’ll be doing more gardening than having sex, not really.”
“Wait a minute.” He stabbed a finger at one of the notes in the journal. “You can’t cook?”
“Not well. Microwave directions help.”
“I’d never marry a woman who can’t cook.”
“I’d never marry the kind of man who’d never marry a woman who can’t cook, so it’s a good thing we’re just pretending.”
He closed the journal and set it aside to return to his pizza. But before he bit into it, he looked across the table at her. “You told her we met while I was home on leave, but did you tell her how we met?”
“It’s on page one of the journal.”
“Paraphrase it for me.”
She really didn’t want to. Somehow the idea of him reading her lies seemed less directly humiliating than her reciting them out loud. But he cocked an eyebrow at her as he chewed, clearly waiting for her to tell the story. “We met at Jasper’s Bar & Grille.”
“Kevin’s bar?”
“You were home on leave and he hadn’t owned the place long, so you stopped in to check it out. Lisa and I had been shopping in the city and stopped in for a Jasper burger.” She felt her face flush and stared down at her plate. “It was love at first sight.”
She heard him chuckle and wanted to glare at him, but she had a feeling that would only turn his chuckle into a full-fledged laugh. “So you wrote to me and I wrote back and then I left the army and here we are.”
“In a nutshell.” She let him swallow his mouthful of pizza, then asked, “You have plans for tomorrow?”