Page 14 of The Hanukkah Hoax
“Good night, Scrooge,” Alec said.
“It’s Marl?—”
Alec ended the call before Cal could get the last word in and looked over at Hugh. The dog was nestled in his couch divot, snoring away without a care in the world. No worries about his future. No cares about anything other than the cushions beneath him.
For once, a present-minded focus didn’t sound half bad. If it was good enough for an occasionally ornery mastiff, it could be good enough for Alec as well.
The only worry he couldn’t shake, however, was whether he’d be any good at this whole fake boyfriend thing. His career wasn’t the only one on the line. Marisa’s candy making business relied on their deception just as much as his.
He couldn’t change what he’d agreed to tonight, but if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was to strategize as a unit. He hadn’t been chosen as captain of first Scotland Sevens and then Great Britain’s Sevens teams for the past several years for nothing.
It was no different than a match, really, with the Crystal Christmas Ball serving as the pitch he and Marisa would play on, while Phoebe and her plant army stared them down from the other side.
The only thing that remained to be seen was the sort of tactics Marisa was poised to employ.
Because he could think of several that would knock Phoebe down a peg or two.
But first, he needed to meet with Marisa. The thought of it made his chest lighter, and he couldn’t help but smile thinking about the tiny woman who’d dragged him by his bulk and chucked him into a stairwell to let him have it.
There was a whole lot of fight packed into that curvy frame, and he couldn’t wait to learn what it would be like to fight alongside her.
Chapter 6
Few things made Marisa happier than hearing the targeted beep of her restaurant supply store’s membership card being scanned upon entry. Some safe places designated themselves as such with signs, inclusive graphics, and open-armed social media campaigns. Others, like Dining Depot, were innately safe, especially during the holiday season, for one particular reason.
Only those in the catering and restaurant industries could garner a membership, thus keeping out the general public who would happily judge a woman for buying an eighty-piece bucket of blueberry candy canes.
Which Marisa, with Eden in tow, needed post-frickin’-haste.
“All right,” Eden said, doing her best to keep pace while balancing an egregiously large tub of red and green kettle corn on her hip. “So, you have a boyfriend now.”
“Fake boyfriend,” Marisa huffed out, quickening her steps.
“I don’t know. He looked pretty real to me. Nothing fake about the way those muscles filled out that suit. I could see the contouring and definition all the way from the bar, even with the shitty lighting.”
“Still a fake boyfriend. Now, where the hell are they? They had the peppermint ones out front, but not the blueberry. Ugh. I hate when they rearrange the seasonal displays. Can’t they just keep everything in the same place?”
Marisa’s worried thoughts had successfully managed to chase her to the next aisle before Eden, with all that superhuman barkeeper’s upper arm strength, hooked Marisa’s elbow and yanked her to a halt. Cornered in front of the twenty-pound buckets of fondant, Marisa had no choice but to get good and right with the woman leveling a tub of kettle corn under Marisa’s chin like a fencer’s épeé.
Eden shifted her shoulder to block the candy canes that Marisa was still straining to see. “No, no, no. You don’t get to change the subject. For the first time in?—”
“Don’t say forever.”
“—forever you have a boyfriend, a booming opportunity to score a spot on Monica’s coveted List at the holiday event of the season, and we haven’t even gotten into the birthday festivities yet!”
Marisa cringed and tried her best to shrink away from the wall of atrocities that was corn syrup, sugar, and water, but it was no use. They both knew she couldn’t continue to ignore the scary pile of life-changing events climbing onto her back.
Or the occasionally scarier enthusiasm of her best friend hopped up on Red 40 and Green No. 3.
There was a damn good reason Marisa insisted on using natural food dyes in her candy, and she was looking at it.
“I’m not avoiding anything.” Mostly. “I’m having dinner with Alec tonight at Sal and Enzo’s. We’ll figure out what this whole charade should look like, and we’ll go from there.” Despite her best efforts to infuse the lowest amount of chill into the remark, even Marisa couldn’t keep back a wince. Nerves tended to have that effect. So did spending the past day and a half since the cocktail party reliving every single horrifying rumpled shirt-stained detail of what she must have looked like striking a dating/business bargain with a sports star.
One whose gracious smile she couldn’t stop thinking about, a smile she’d be seeing a lot more of very soon.
But she could hardly focus on that when she’d run herself ragged brainstorming what she could serve at the Crystal Christmas Ball and how to entice untold numbers of people to come visit her booth.
Beyond upping her meager ad spend and making more social media posts that the algorithms would suppress into oblivion anyway, she was at a complete loss for how to achieve the latter.
