Page 7 of Make Her Mine

“Thanks for the warning, I guess,” Harlow says after a few seconds.

“Yeah, well, there’s more. You need to pretend to be dating Graham this week.”

Everyone goes still and quiet. Everyone looks at Harlow. Including Graham.

Her gaze bounces up to mine. “What are you talking about?”

Suddenly the back door to the kitchen bangs open. “You guys, guess what!” Sasha Wright asks as she steps into the house. She stops when she sees me. She visibly deflates. “Oh. Did you tell them?”

“That Zach is back? Yes,” Harlow says.

“And that he now thinks you have a boyfriend and that everyone at the bar is very curious about who it is?” Sasha asks. “I am very curious about who it is and why Jefferson knows and I don’t.”

Harlow looks from her to me. “Boyfriend? Why does Zach think that?” She looks back to Sasha. “Did you tell him I don’t?”

Sasha shakes her head. “Of course not. I wasn’t going to argue.”

“But you know I don’t have a boyfriend,” Harlow says, straightening.

Sasha gestures toward me. “But Jefferson said it. I thought maybe Graham knew and told him or something.”

Harlow turns slowly to face me. “You said I have a boyfriend?”

Here we go. “Yes.”

“Why?”

I cross my arms and meet her gaze directly. “Because he said he was here to get you back. And that’s a terrible idea. I thought you having a boyfriend would make him back off.”

Harlow is staring at me. “What?”

I nod. “He said he’s ready to settle down. He’s finishing his residency, and has a job lined up. So now he’s come home to win you back.” I frown. “And I hate the idea that he thinks you’ve been waiting for him.”

Harlow tosses down the potato chip that she still hasn’t eaten, and crosses her arms, mimicking my stance. “You mean you wanted to make him mad.”

I shrug. “Yes.”

It’s no secret to our friends and family that I hate Zach. Of course, they all think it has to do with his and my history with football. None of them really know the part that Harlow plays in it. And that’s fine. They don’t need to. She doesn’t need to.

Her eyes narrow. “Who does he think this boyfriend is?” Then she looks at Graham, understanding dawning on her face. “Wait, you told him Graham and I are dating?”

“No. But that makes the most sense.”

“When Zach asked who it was, Jefferson said that he was pretty sure Zach could figure it out,” Sasha says with a grin. “Or something like that. Which has the whole bar talking. Because everyone is now trying to figure it out. And…” She turns her attention to me. “Zach is suspicious because no one in town seems to know about this boyfriend.”

Harlow growls again. “Great! So you just left it as some random dude. He’ll never believe that. Especially when the whole rest of the town doesn’t know!”

“They’ll all believe it if it’s Graham,” I say confidently. “You can say that you didn’t want to make a big deal of it before you were sure it was serious, but now it is.”

Everyone goes quiet for a moment. Then they all start laughing at once.

I frown. “What?”

Ginny shakes her head. “That will never work.”

“Of course it will. Harlow and Graham have been friends forever. Now he’s dressing better and is more social. He’s very successful in his job. They’ve grown up. He's been away for awhile so it will be easy to believe they missed each other and then realized they had deeper feelings and fell in love.”

In fact, I’ve been continually surprised that they haven’t. I was convinced for most of their high school years that they were secretly crazy about each other and that they were just keeping it on the down low. Or that Graham was in love with her and it wasn’t reciprocated, which pissed me off and caused me to be…okay, a little mean to her if I’m totally honest.

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