The Love Wager

Jack

“So last I heard, you were messing with him on the app. Now you’re actually dating?” Chuck, Hallie’s best friend and also maybe her relative(?), whisper-shouted to her across the aisle.

As soon as Hallie and Jack got upgraded to first class, Chuck and his girlfriend, Jamie, had done the same. Which was good, because he wanted to get to know her friends, even if sitting with them made him a tiny bit nervous.

Feeling unsettled was quickly becoming his default state.

Because he had a lot—huge fucking heaps—of guilt about how things went down with Alex. He’d fully intended to mess with the guy, but he hadn’t meant to get Hallie dumped, and he’d never imagined it would make her cry like that.

God, he hated himself for making her cry like that.

Every hour or so, he considered confessing, but selfishly, he didn’t want to risk her rage when he was dying to tell her how he really felt about her.

“Yep.” Jack listened as Hal told Chuck all about their bet and Taco Hut meetups, and he found himself riveted when she finished it with, “Then I realized that I was having a better time at our Taco Hut dates than I was having with any of the people I was seeing.”

That was exactly how Jack felt.

“Wow,” Chuck said. “And this is drunken hotel sex guy, right?”

“Oh, my God,” Hallie whisper-shrieked. “Yes, but don’t say it like I have more than one occasion of drunken hotel sex to my name.”

Jack couldn’t stop himself from laughing and adding, “Someday I’ll tell you about her desperate search for her missing bra.”

“Jack.” Hallie rolled her eyes at him, and then shrugged. “Okay. Now I have to hear it. Tell me how ridiculous I looked from your point of view, because all I know is that I was trying to get the hell out of your room without waking you up.”

“Holy shit, yes,” Jamie said, tiny-clapping. “I need to hear this.”

“You sure?” he asked Hallie.

“Go ahead,” she said, laughing. “They already know my worst.”

“Okay. Well.” Jack looked at the freckles on the tip of Hallie’s nose and wondered how he’d ever thought of her as just cute. “I don’t know if she knew it or not, but our friend Hal here had, at some time during the night, fallen asleep on my feet. Like, my huge feet were her fucking pillow.”

“No shit?” Chuck said.

“Oh, my God,” Hallie groaned, already regretting that she’d asked to hear this.

“So I felt it the second she woke up, because blood flow returned to my extremities.”

Jamie started cackling.

“I was about to lift my head and say something charming when she literally—literally—rolled off the end of the bed.”

Hallie started laughing. “Oh, my God, you watched me roll?”

“I watched you roll.”

“Was it hot or horrifying?” Chuck asked.

“Hilarious,” Jack said, and Hallie gave him a look. Her eyes stayed on his face as she smiled, and he added, “In a hot way.”

“Oh, bullshit,” she said.

“So then . . . ?” Chuck prompted.

Jack was having a hard time not laughing. “So then she crawled over to her clothes and—”

“Wait.” Hallie was grinning when she said, “I looked at you when I was putting on my pants, and you were sound asleep.”

That made him laugh. “I closed my eyes pretty fast when your head swiveled in my direction.”

She smacked him in the arm with a laugh, which made him grab her hand and sandwich it between his.

“She must’ve realized the bra was in the bed,” he said, “because she tiptoed over and started moving her fingers on top of the sheets like she was trying to find it without jostling the bed.”

They were all laughing. Hard.

“And then—my angel right here—she muttered ‘fuck it’ and ran out of the room.”

Jamie and Chuck started applauding, and Hallie just shook her head at him while wearing a grin. He felt her index finger slide over his palm—she was still playing—and he had no fucking clue how the weekend was going to shake out.

Because she really seemed to be enjoying the game, leaning into the fake dating thing, but he was already having a hard time remembering it was a game. Every time she leaned against his arm or held his hand, he was a little shook.

And the way she’d kissed him back at the airport—holy shit. He’d assumed it would be a flashback of their night in the hotel, but everything had changed since then, and it was totally different.

That night had been all about hot chemistry with a stranger.

Kissing Hallie in the security line—that was something else entirely.

That was like coming home.

Hallie

Jack is so good at this.

She put her head back on the seat and closed her eyes, relaxed by the sound of Chuck and Jack’s conversation. There was something about hearing the deep voices of her two favorite people that made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

But as she listened to Chuck hit it off with Jack, she wondered if she should just tell him. He was terrible with secrets, but she hated lying to him.

Aside from Chuck, though, she would’ve thought she’d be stressed or concerned about what they were up to, the whole fake dating bit, but she wasn’t. At all.

It felt too good.

For once, when facing a family event, she wasn’t even the tiniest bit stressed—and it was all because of Jack. It reminded her of when she was a kid and everything was somehow tolerable when her parents let her bring a friend along. He was her favorite friend, and his presence was making everything okay.

And that included the idea of seeing Ben.

She was very aware that once she was face-to-face with her ex everything might change, but at that moment, the thought of it didn’t make her lose her neurotic mind.

And yes, Jack’s PDA made her hot and bothered—she was only human, for God’s sake. The man kissed like he was going to be murdered if he didn’t pull off the world’s hottest kiss, like a gun was pointed at his head and his only shot at life was to weaken her knees with his mouth.

Any human would need smelling salts after Jack Marshall’s mouth touched their mouth.

But she was kind of attributing it to what Jack said before, about their bodies knowing each other. They had slept together, so it made sense that their sexual chemistry would skew less on the friends-faking-love side and more toward the raging-wildfire-scorching-thousands-of-acres end of the spectrum.

She wasn’t even fazed.

In fact, she thought the one-up game sounded like the most fun she’d had in ages. She spent the rest of the short flight with her eyes closed, but she was far from sleeping. She was downright giddy as she thought about messing with him, of amping up the PDA in delicious ways.

And if she was giddy at the thought of her own actions, she was downright obsessed with the thought of his. What one-ups would Jack Marshall be capable of?

She heard him say to Chuck and Jamie at one point, “I think she’s asleep.”

Not asleep, Jack, she thought, forcing herself not to smile. Just lying in wait.