Faking with Benefits : A Friends to Lovers Reverse Harem Romance by Gold Lily

Author:Gold, Lily
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

FORTY-THREE

LAYLA

I lift one of his trembling hands. He stares at it for a moment, then threads our fingers together. I lean forward, pressing my lips to his. It’s a slow, gentle kiss, with none of our usual fire, but heat still simmers through me. When I finally pull back, blood is pumping through my body, and Josh looks vaguely more alive.

I trail my lips over his cheek, then look up, finally noticing the corkboard he has pinned over his desk. It’s covered in small cards and slips of paper, and it takes me a second to realise what I’m looking at.

“The infamous wall of wedding invites.” I reach out, brushing one of the embossed cards with my fingertip. “I thought Zack was joking about this.”

He tilts his head against mine. “Is it weird?”

I shake my head, running my eyes over the collage. There must be over a hundred invitations here. Cream, pink, white. Some are handwritten. Some are embossed. Some have photographs, or floral details, or watercolours. There’s so many that they’re overlapping each other, pinned two or even three pages deep. It’s incredible. “Do you go to all of the weddings?”

He shakes his head. “We did at the beginning. Now there’s too many. We make them if we can, though.” He points at a line of photographs at the bottom of the corkboard. I lean in to get a better look.

They’re wedding photos. In each picture, all three boys are standing in suits and ties, with their arms around an assortment of beaming brides and grooms. In a couple, Zack is wearing a tartan kilt, which is doing fun things to my insides.

“That’s so cute,” I whisper, glancing across the line. My eyes automatically focus on one photograph, tacked right at the end. Unlike all of the others, it’s not a wedding photo; it’s a black-and-white headshot of a middle-aged woman, smiling brightly at the camera. I immediately recognise the silky black hair and intensely dark eyes. “Is that your mum?” I point. Josh nods slowly. I examine her. “She’s lovely.”

“She was.”

I glance across at him. “She’s dead?”

“When I was nineteen. Car crash.”

I look down, leaning back against his chest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

His voice is robotic. “I didn’t tell you.”

I squeeze his elbow, my heart thudding. God, no wonder he’s locked away in here, having a breakdown. The rest of England is spending time with their mums today, and he’s stuck here with no one.

I try to think of the right thing to say. “She’d be so proud of you, for everything you’ve done.”

He sighs, his breath rushing over my cheek. “I hope so. She was the reason I came up with the idea for the podcast in the first place.”

“Did she like advice shows?”

He shakes his head. “Her and my dad’s relationship was… bad.” He stares at the photo, his face blank. “He met her in Vietnam, on a month-long business trip. She was a maid at the hotel he was staying at. Working fourteen hours a day for pennies, while rich men spent ten times her daily salary on one drink in the hotel bar.

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