The Marriage Clause

“Welcome to Harrigans. What can I get you to start off with?”

“Murphy’s Irish stout,” Luca answered, earning a smile from Little Miss Easily Impressed.

Her gaze lingered for a second longer than necessary before she gestured to me. “And your lady?” she asked, clearly on a fishing expedition.

Might as well help the girl out. Do her a solid.

“I’m not his lady,” I corrected her, shooting Luca a pointed look, daring him to say anything different, but the man simply sat there, waiting for me to give Erin my drink order, which only made me look like a bitchy shrew. “We are...uh...business associates,” I clarified with a smile. “And I’ll have a Guinness.”

“Oh, my mistake. You two look so sweet together I just kinda assumed. I’m so sorry. Be right back.” She beamed and bounced away like the human equivalent of a bunny rabbit with giant boobs.

“I think she likes you,” I said, hoping to goad him into saying or doing something that would cement my disdain for him, but he didn’t even nibble at the bait. I tried harder. “Supercute, too. Those boobs, right? Pretty big. If you like that sort of thing. I mean, of course you do. All guys lose their minds over big tits. I think it’s etched in your DNA.”

“You seem pretty obsessed with our waitress’s breasts,” he observed, amused.

Heat climbed my throat to heat my cheeks. “That’s not what I meant... Oh, forget it. Never mind,” I said, letting it go. He wasn’t going to do something so overtly offensive as coming on to the waitress on the first day of our deal. What an amateur move. If I wanted to win, I had to stop thinking so small.

Erin returned with our drinks, and after we both ordered the house burgers, I fidgeted a little, unsure of what to do with my hands. Finally, I settled with my hands in my lap, but I was intensely aware of how an entirely too-small table was the only obstacle between us. Our knees were practically kissing beneath the table.

Was I supposed to make small talk? I had two settings around Luca—head over heels in love and despise with the force of an EMP blast—I didn’t know how to be neutral.

And his seemingly relaxed, taking-in-the-ambience attitude wasn’t helping things. Why wasn’t he acting like he normally did—arrogant or patronizing—so I could find my bearings?

I didn’t know how to reconcile that Luca with this chill dude.

“How’d you know about this place?” I asked, breaking the awkward silence. “Have you been here before?”

“Nope. Dinner locale courtesy of Google Maps. It was the closest to the hostel and had a good Yelp review. I figure we had nothing to lose, seeing as we were already taking our lives for granted by staying in the murder motel for the night, but, hey, life is for the living, right?” He lifted his bottle in salute and tipped it back. “Plus, it reminds me of a few pubs me and my buddies frequented in Scotland. Good times, except for the time I was persuaded to eat haggis on a drunken dare.”

I dragged my gaze away from the spectacle of those sensual lips wrapping around the bottle top and focused on my own drink. I didn’t care for Guinness, but it seemed sacrilegious to order anything less in an Irish pub. Besides, the beer helped loosen the tension cording my shoulders, so I continued to slug it down. “How’d that end?” I asked.

“With my head stuck in a dirty toilet and a bunch of locals laughing their asses off,” he answered wryly. “Never touched haggis again.”

I bit back a laugh, but I rather liked the image of a young Luca puking his guts out in a foreign country.

“You like that, huh?” His slow grin did terrible things to my stomach. “Then you’ll love the story of how I woke up after a wild night in London to find my face a different color than when I passed out. The fuckers sprayed me with the darkest sunless tanner they could find. I went to bed white and woke up a mottled dark brown, and that shit did not scrub off easily. I spent the rest of the week looking like I’d caught a skin disease until it wore off.”

At that I really did laugh. “Was this during your European pub crawl after high school?”

“The very same. How’d you know? You were pretty young then.”

“I always knew what was going on. My circumstances weren’t exactly normal.”

He conceded my point with a silent nod, but before either of us could say much more, our food arrived and we both let it go, choosing dinner over uncomfortable topics.

And I was grateful. I didn’t want to have a deep, soulful conversation with Luca about anything, much less my unorthodox childhood, thanks to his family, and he’d seemed on the verge of saying something distressingly nice or even apologetic.

I couldn’t risk buying into anything he had to say, even if a part of me craved it more than I wanted to admit.

I’d long since stopped wondering how things might’ve been different if Luca had apologized in the slightest for breaking my heart... I wondered if I would’ve granted my forgiveness. I knew the answer—of course I would’ve. I’d been helplessly in love with the jackass. I was pretty sure stars had twinkled in my eyes like a cartoon character whenever he’d been around.