Page 9 of Make Her Mine

“I’d love to see that,” she says.

We smile at each other again.

So we have four things in common—loving my siblings, loving our hometown, loving Alex Fallon, and hating Zach Nelson.

“You know,” Sloan muses. “People would believe if you two were dating.”

Harlow and I both turn to look at her.

Then I look around.

Everyone else in the room is nodding.

I turn to Harlow.

She stares at me.

Then we both start laughing.

CHAPTER 3

JEFFERSON

Sloan shrugs. “I’m serious.”

“We hate each other,” Harlow tells them. “The whole town knows that. We fight all the time. “

“You treat each other differently than you treat anyone else,” Sloan agrees. “You are both so nice to everyone else, but you’re rude as hell to each other. You bicker. You argue. But I guarantee, if I told five people in this town that you two were dating, four and a half of them would not be surprised at all.”

“How do you get half?” I can’t help but ask.

“They would be surprised at first, but when they thought about it, they would realize it made sense,” Sloan says with a smile. “The other four would just believe it right from the beginning.”

“You’re crazy,” Harlow tells her.

“There’s a fine line between love and hate,” Graham pipes up.

“Most importantly,” Sasha says. “It would bug Zach so much if it was Jefferson.”

That much is true. I think Zach would hate to think that Harlow is taken and not waiting for him no matter what. But if the guy she was dating was his arch nemesis, that would definitely hurt more.

“That’s not a terrible…” I start.

“No way,” Harlow says. “You don’t think Graham and I could pull it off because we have no chemistry. How the hell would Jefferson and I pull it off? We’d be out in public and start screaming at each other and everyone would know it was fake.”

“We never scream at each other,” I protest. “We needle each other. We definitely bicker. We love to poke at each other. But we don’t scream and throw things.”

She lifts a brow.

“Okay, we almost never throw things.”

There was that one time she threw a shoe at me. But I easily ducked that. And there was the time she threw a water gun at me. But that was because it was empty, and I had cornered her during the water fight. And I guess I did then throw a water balloon at her. And soaked that see-through white cropped tee she was wearing and exposed the white and red striped bikini top she had underneath…

“There’s definitely passion between you,” Margot says with a grin.

Harlow is shaking her head adamantly. “No. That’s a terrible idea. Besides I don’t need to have a boyfriend to fend Zach off. I will just tell him I am not interested. Which I am not.”

“Fine,” I say, throwing up my hands. “I’m going to look like an idiot in front of the guy I hate so fucking much I’d rather chew glass than admit I lied to him. But it’s my fault. He drives me nuts. He started mouthing off and I just spoke up without thinking.”

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