I promise I used all fresh ingredients in yours.” I kind of wonder if anyone’s accidentally poisoned someone with one, you know? Like, God forbid, at a funeral or a wake? What if they’d accidentally used old mayo or bad eggs or…” He blinked up at me and blushed as red as his old beater car out front. I know it’s not much, but… I wanted to apologize for the way I snapped at you the other day, and Uncle Beau says no one’s ever gone wrong with an apology casserole.” He blinked rapidly and began looking everywhere but at me. He took it delicately between two fingers and began to write the instructions in tidy penmanship before placing the sticky note onto the tinfoil. Lemme see…” I rooted around in the nearby junk drawer until I found a sticky-note pad and half-chewed pencil. That was it? He wasn’t going to ask me what kind of crack I was smoking and why I’d claimed him as mine before we’d even officially met? I glanced up at him from the door of the fridge. I forgot to write down the reheating instructions. “So… this is chicken pot pie with bacon-and-cheddar biscuits.

I didn’t have much in the way of food right now, so it was mostly an excuse not to have to meet his eyes after throwing him under the bus like I had.

“Thank you,” I said gruffly, turning away to look for enough space in the fridge to fit his chicken dish. It may have been small and really run-down on the outside, but I’d been working hard to fix up the inside myself, and I was proud of it.

Despite baby crap everywhere, my home was clean and bright. I followed his gaze as he looked around at the honeyed wood paneling I’d installed on the walls and ceiling in the kitchen and the living area just beyond it. There’s nothing hotter than a tall, gruff, bewildered, tattooed mountain of a man cuddling a sweet, orphaned baby, so you can tell yourself that you’ll resist him…Īnd when that man asks you to do him a favor and pretend to be his very temporary, very fake fiance to help him get custody of that adorable baby, you can pretend you know better than to say yes…Īnd when you actually get to know your kind, strong, pullet-loving prince of a fiance, and all his crazy, lovable, meddling neighbors, you can tell yourself you’re not really falling for Diesel Church and the town of Licking Thicket…īut that might be the biggest lie of all.

Fakers by Lucy Lennox