Page 109 of The Fine Art of Faking It
“I’ve been busy having a family and breeding horses, jackass. Do you want me to step aside?” Joey offered amicably.
“No!” Jax grabbed his wife by the shoulders and hid behind her back. “Just make her go away.”
“If I laugh any harder, I’m going to vomit forty pounds of food,” Davis told Eden.
Clementine made her move. She dodged toward Joey again, and when Jax shrieked, the goat turned and jogged after the cornbread he’d thrown.
“Was that goat smiling?” Davis asked.
* * *
The inn was still standingwhen they returned. Eden’s phone had been blissfully silent during the day. She only had a handful of guests tonight, and they were all in town visiting family, so their needs were few.
The dogs met them at the kitchen door, and Eden held the door so they could romp outside. “Watch out for runaway goats,” she warned them.
Davis helped her stash the pies in the commercial refrigerator, and together they trudged down the hallway to their rooms. They paused outside of Davis’s door, staring at it. “Do you want to maybe change and come over to my room?” Eden offered. She’d never invited him into her space before. They spent almost all of their naked time in his bed or his backseat or her parents’ house.
“Yeah. That’d be good,” he said.
She unlocked her door and shuffled inside, dumping her purse, coat, and pants as she went. Normally, she was a tidy person to the point of obsession. But tonight was not the night for cleanliness and organization. Tonight was for food comas.
She wrestled her way into a pair of stretchy leggings and a black tunic with an open back. If a guest needed her, she would at least look somewhat presentable. Flopping down on the couch, Eden let out a heavy sigh. Despite the unbearable bloating and stomach pain, today had been… good.
It was interesting watching a family with so many moving parts celebrate together. She’d seen festive family celebrations before, plenty under her own roof. She wondered if she would ever be part of the celebration rather than the organizer or a guest? Would it ever be her family celebrating, arguing, eating until they burst?
She was happy here in the business she’d built. She’d spent so much time building it, she hadn’t really given much thought as to what else she might be missing out on. But watching Donovan fawning over sweet Eva, seeing the heated look Summer and Carter shared over the heads of their kids, it made her wonder. Would she have that? Could she have it? And why was it, when she tried to envision it all, that it was Davis’s face she saw?
There was a soft knock at her door. “Come in,” she called rather than getting up off the couch.
Davis, in athletic pants and a Taco Tuesday t-shirt, came in followed by the dogs.
“Awh, thank you for letting them in,” Eden said.
“I figured I’d save you the trip.”
“Bless you.”
She felt his weight at the end of the couch and opened her eyes she hadn’t realized were closed. Turkey made her eyelids so heavy.
Davis picked up her feet and put them in his lap. “We can just rest here for a few minutes. Get our energy up to get naked.”
“Sounds good,” she said.
“You have a really nice place here.”
“Thanks, Davis.”
“I had a good time today,” he told her.
“Me too.”
“Makes me wonder if maybe there’s something to the whole marriage, family thing.”
“Hmm,” Eden hummed.
“You ever feel that way?”
“They make it look easy,” Eden told him. “Can you imagine our families sitting down for a holiday meal?”
