She stared at him, her face a new one she hadn’t shared before. One filled with uncertainty and vulnerability. “I shouldn’t have asked. It was dumb.” She shifted her gaze back at the towel and the spot where their fingertips touched.
“Jodi.”
She hesitated and then lifted her face again. She looked kind of sad.
“I’d give anything to be able to answer your questions. All of them. And I will, in twenty days. Every single one. Okay?” That was more than he should have said. All he could do was pray she would keep their interactions to herself.
The corners of her mouth lifted briefly as she blew out a breath. “Twenty days is a long time to watch you playing house with a blond model who rarely wears any clothes and flings herself at you every time you come through the door.”
“I know.” He was asking a lot. He wasn’t even asking anything at all. There were no question marks at the end of his phrases. Everything between them was unspoken.
Jodi inched slightly closer, her fingers threading between his, increasing the contact. “I should stop watching.”
“You should.”
“I won’t though.”
“I know.”
“Twenty days?”
“Yep.” Not one single moment longer.
“Isn’t there a season finale that day?”
“Yes.” It ought to be a doozy too.
She held his gaze, licking her lips as she did so. “We should unlock the front door.”
He nodded. “Will you put on more clothes and stop trying to play detective?” he teased, knowing his daily request would go unheeded, and she would switch back to one of her fake frustrated moods, breaking the intensity of their interaction.
“Nope.”
“Figured.”
As she slid her hand away and then headed toward the door, he watched her. He loved the way she moved, so comfortable in her skin, so casually. Nothing about her was fake or pretentious. She was just Jodi. The smart, sexy, funny woman he was falling for more every day. A woman who was forced to spend her mornings watching him play house with a fake wife who made his skin crawl more with each passing hour.
Twenty days was a damn long time. It seemed like a lifetime. Why the hell did he have to meet a woman who made him want to be a better man while he was in the middle of the weirdest three months of his life?
Jodi brought light to his otherwise dim world. He’d been dragging his ass ever since leaving the SEALs. At least Cold Feet had forced him to stop moping. But now he’d gone from worrying all the time about finances and his mother to blocking out every one of his issues for at least a few hours every day while he interacted with the only ray of sunshine he could have asked for.
Even when he wasn’t specifically talking to Jodi, he was always aware of where she was in the room and what she was doing. He did so partly because he felt responsible for her protection, but mostly he just liked being near her. He liked looking at her. He liked watching her laugh or frown or joke or have a serious conversation with a customer.
Jodi. Damn. He wanted her. He didn’t deserve her, and there was a good chance she wouldn’t survive the next twenty days waiting on him, but he prayed he might get lucky. If she thought things were crazy and intense so far when he was with Katia, she had no idea what the coming weeks would bring.
He didn’t really know either, but the stakes kept getting higher. There would be bigger fights on camera. Crazier makeups. More intensive fake interactions with his fake wife in his fake apartment.
Hell, he wasn’t sure he could weather the storm and come out of it breathing, let alone expect Jodi to. And she had to do it with no information. All she had was hope. She hadn’t known him long enough to put that much faith in him. Would it be enough?
Chapter 6
“Please tell me you’re not watching that YouTube shit again.”
Jodi jumped in her seat at the sound of her father’s voice, jerking her gaze from the computer screen to watch him walk across the kitchen toward the refrigerator. “Jesus, Dad. You nearly gave me a heart attack.” She pulled off her headset and set it next to her mouse. “And it’s not on YouTube. The show has its own app and website.”
He grunted as he grabbed the juice and came to the table. “Whatever. If you didn’t spend every waking hour engrossed in that stupidity, you would have heard me coming into the kitchen.”
“You’re exaggerating,” she lied. “Besides, I would think you’d want to know more about your newest employee too.”
He poured a glass of juice and lowered onto the chair opposite her. “We have several employees. I don’t ask any of them what they do when they’re not here. Liz, Jacob, Stan, Roxie… You following all of their social media religiously just in case they say or do something you don’t like while they’re off work?”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“It just is.” She was digging a deep hole here. Her dad was right. She was obsessed. It wasn’t healthy.
“Go for a jog. You used to run every morning until Tuck walked through the door.”
He was right about that too.
He sighed. “Look, I wasn’t born yesterday. I see the way you look at the man. I get it. You’re gaga over him. And I don’t blame you. He’s quite a package. But,” her dad lifted a finger to make his point. “No matter how real or fake that stupid show is, he’s still married. You watching a play-by-play of his daily interactions with his wife is going to give you an ulcer. He’s not yours.”
She took a deep breath. “I know that,” she murmured.
“He has two more weeks in his contract. I hate to see you spend all that time watching his every move on a stupid live feed. You can’t unsee that stuff. What if he does end up leaving her? How are you going to erase the visuals of the two of them together that will remain burned in your head forever?”
Jodi nodded. Why did her dad have to make so much sense?
“People have lots of relationships in their lives. Most of us don’t have the ability to watch a play-by-play of our partner’s previous relationships.” He shuddered. “It’s weird. I was married to your mother for forty years. I dated a few girls before we met. She dated a few guys. We didn’t discuss it. I never saw pictures of her previous boyfriends. I didn’t show her pictures of my previous girlfriends. I burned them after I met your mother. Thank God we didn’t have videos or internet or social media. Nothing was frozen in time. I can’t imagine how our relationship would have ever gotten off the ground if she had been able to sit all day and watch every detail of me with my old girlfriends. No one should be able to make those kinds of comparisons. It’s not natural.”
Jodi glanced down at the computer screen, chewing on her bottom lip. Tuck was standing at the door of his apartment. She didn’t need sound to know Katia, who stood a few feet away with her hands on her hips, was whining about something. She usually was.
Tuck looked like he was barely holding it together. Honestly, Jodi couldn’t figure out how he kept from throttling her most days. He was so damn calm. At least on the outside. She could tell by his grip on the door handle and the way his lips were tight and the stiffness of his spine that Katia was way under his skin.