Free Pretty in Ink (Voretti Family Book 3) by Ava Blackstone

swear to God, they’re staring at me. If I didn’t want to help, I’d be drinking a beer by the pool.”
    “Really?” She laid a hand on his chest and looked up at him with those wide eyes. They weren’t filled with tears anymore. They were wide and bright and inviting, and he wanted to climb inside.  
    Shit .  
    He pulled away.  
    If he was going to do this, he needed rules. Parameters that would ensure his destructive emotions weren’t allowed to take over. The key was to maintain some mental distance. To remember that Liv wasn’t his future. If he ever got married, it would be to someone like Joslyn. Someone who calmed him instead of confusing him and stirring him up.
    He cleared his throat. “I have a few conditions.”
    “Of course.”
    “I don’t want to make this more complicated than it has to be. Your parents are already convinced there’s something going on between us, so we can play off that. At the rehearsal dinner, we’ll tell everyone that we’ve been secretly dating. They’ll see us together then, and at the wedding the next day. After that, we can quietly break up.” He listened to the words coming out of his mouth with a mounting sense of disbelief. This had to be the worst idea he’d ever had. But he couldn’t watch Liv cry again. The mere idea of it did terrible thing to his self-control.
    “The rehearsal dinner isn’t for four weeks,” she said. “Why wait?”
    Because I have a date with the woman I might spend the rest of my life with. Because I’ve always wanted you more than I should. Because you scare the shit out of me. “Because the key to a good lie is to keep it simple. The less time we have to pretend to be a couple, the less chance we’ll get busted.”
    “But our story is supposed to be that we’ve been having this secret relationship, right? Once we tell my family, they’re going to think back over the last few months, wondering how they missed the clues. My parents caught us here together, so that’s one point in our favor. But the stag and doe weekend is—”
    “The what now?”
    “Stag and doe weekend.” Liv smirked. “You know. Ella and Brandon’s combined bachelor / bachelorette party. Ella gave it a cute nickname just in case an entire weekend trapped at a remote mountain lodge playing bridal charades wasn’t painful enough already.”
    Damn . He’d forgotten about that. He mentally cursed Ella for being so paranoid about her fiancé getting a lap dance that she’d insisted on going co-ed.
      “We’re both going to be there, in front of my entire family. If we don’t at least give each other some hot looks, no one is going to buy that we were secretly hooking up.”
    “Not hooking up.” He paced the small room, as antsy as if he’d been locked up in solitary. “Having a relationship.”
    Liv rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You know what I mean.”
    “Okay. We’ll go public at the stag and doe weekend. Happy?”
    “Thrilled. Anything else we need to work out?”
    He debated telling her about his date with Joslyn, but there was no reason to go into that. It’s not like Liv was actually his girlfriend. He wasn’t cheating on her. The date was well before the stag and doe weekend, no Vorettis would be in attendance, and he wasn’t in the mood for another lecture about lack of sparks. “Nope.”
    She gave him a sunny smile. “Then let’s make it official.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake, like they were closing a business deal.
    Which was exactly the way he was going to treat this. Like a business deal.
    But her skin was softer than he expected. Hotter. She curled her fingers around his palm like she didn’t want to let him go, and he felt her inside, burrowing into the quiet, dark places he never let anyone see.  
    He pulled free abruptly.
    “Second thoughts?” she asked, softly.
    He cleared his throat. “No.”  
    He had roughly a million second thoughts, but none of them mattered. He’d felt her hand in his. Looked