I’ll be ready at nine. Charlie took a screen shot of the text message from Carolina, just so he’d have the evidence that she’d said yes. He wouldn’t put it past her to insist that he’d dreamed her capitulation, complete with that cool stare down her nose, the one that always made him want to do something— anything—to get her to laugh. At least he used to like her laugh. Liked it best when he was the only one who could make her smile. Odds were good he wouldn’t have as much success with that nowadays, but he welcomed the challenge because he was not losing this bet. The producers of the television show had made it clear. He had to prove out his platform or no deal. Of course, they’d been largely ambivalent about how he did that. Choosing Carolina as his target had been all his idea. Clever, right? If he could win back his ex-wife, that herculean feat would go on his permanent resume. And he’d have the perfect opportunity to right some wrongs that had been sticking in his craw for eleven long months. She’d walked out on him hours after their vows, taking a chunk of his heart with her. This time, he had zero plans to let her take anything with her when she went exc ept the knowledge that he’d bested her. It would be worth it to see the look on her face when he declared himself the winner. At 8:50, he parked his truck in the visitor lot of Vivo, the village that Carolina had lived in as long as he’d known her. He’d always liked the self- contained conc ept of the place, which allowed residents to live and work on the same property. Shame he hadn’t gotten to move in the first time he’d married Carolina, but again—the righting of wrongs was even now in progress. Finding her unit wasn’t hard. He knocked, gratified that she answered quickly, which boded well for the rest of the day. Of course, with Carolina, nothing expected ever happened. He’d liked that about her. In fact, that might be the thing he’d fallen hardest for that once upon a time. “You’re early,” she said with the same smirk she’d worn for almost the entire broadcast yesterday, which had fueled his fire and then some. “Eager, much?” And so it begins. This opening volley would set the tone for the rest of their interaction. He had to handle her exactly right or she’d bail. Just like last time. Unfortunately, also like last time, he didn’t have any predetermined set of tools at his disposal to use in this situation. Not on Carolina. She was one of a kind and far too smart for pithy soundbites. Despite what he’d told her, he’d be making this up as he went along. Showtime. “How long have you been staring out the pe ephole in anticipation of my arrival?” he countered and took the opportunity to cross his arms, leaning against the doorjamb with feigned nonchalance. “Speaking of eager. The echo of my knock had barely faded before you yanked on that handle.
You’re going to give me a complex if you ke ep that up.” “Ha.” She slid a once-over down his torso that absolutely shouldn’t have stirred his blood so heavily. “The list of your complexes is long and varied, but you had every last one well before I met you.” Yeah, that was a lie. While he most certainly had a host of things wrong with him, they all had Carolina’s name engraved right across the front. Glutton for punishment being numero uno. Obviously. His ex-wife had somehow grown even more intriguing in the months since he’d last seen her. Sure he’d watched her show numerous times but the camera couldn’t begin to capture the sheen of her skin or the faint whiff of honeysuckle that clung to her. He’d managed to forget how intoxicating it was. Forget how truly de ep her gaze went and how easily its hooks sank into his gut. Why had he thought exposing his soft underbelly to her again was a good idea? “Looking good, CK,” he said with lift of his chin at exactly the angle that annoyed her most. He’d done his time in the trenches with Carolina and he’d use his education to his advantage, specifically so she didn’t get one. Case in point —she hated being called CK, so he did it sparingly. Usually when he needed a minute to get his faculties in order. Like now. “Wish I could say the same, Two-Buck.” He deserved that. But he let a slow grin spread across his face anyway, strictly to demonstrate that no creatures had been harmed by her sharp tongue. “Let’s make a deal. I’ll call you Carolina, and you forget that you hate me.” “I’m kind of in the middle of the last deal you sprang on me,” she said, her eyelashes dropping down to half-mast, effectively cloaking her thoughts. Interesting. “And I don’t hate you. I don’t have strong feelings about you either way. That would take too much effort.” Right. That’s why she’d glanced away as she lied. Something shifted inside his heart, and he wished he hadn’t been watching her so carefully. Because now he wondered. Had she lied about not hating him or lied about the amount of effort? What thoughts had she felt so compelled to hide from him? Carolina Kline was the only person on the planet who could make him curse his psychology degree and wonder why in the blazes he’d even bothered to earn the thing. It did him zero good when it came to her. But he had to get a handle on this more sarcastic, slightly harder-edged woman he’d talked into marrying him again. Somehow. He still wasn’t quite sure what had tipped the scales, but he did know the first entry in Carolina’s field manual was that she always did exactly what she wanted to do. So, if he planned to get anywhere with her, his best tool was to make her think everything was her idea. “Good to know,” he said casually. “Which item on our to-do list would you like to tackle first? I have a show later, so the sooner we make a dent, the better.” “We have a to-do list?” she asked with raised brows. “Your secretary must have forgotten to text it to me.”
Charlie held up three fingers. “Marriage license. Move in. Work on strengthening your feelings. To the positive side, of course.” “I agreed to you picking me up at nine. Not the rest.” “Hey, give me a break, why don’t you?” That had come out a littler harsher than he’d planned. He blew out a breath, which did nothing to center him. Only sticking his head in a bucket of ice-cold water might have a prayer of helping. What had he expected, though? That Carolina would magically fall in love with him during the first five minutes of this experiment? Not likely, but when he’d taken one look at her, he’d lost his ever-loving mind. Like always. She was stunning in the most literal definition of the word, frazzling his senses. “An arm or a leg?” she inquired sweetly which just made him laugh. Proving the point eloquently. Carolina would be the death of him. But he’d go with her thick in his blood. What man could ever erase her from his soul once she’d taken up residence? A far better man than Charlie Wilson. “Either one. As long as I can get a double dose of morphine to dull the pain of your sarcasm,” he said and clutched his chest in mock agony. “Choose your poison. I have my stuff in the truck downstairs, so I’m pr epared to be put in the game at a moment’s notice, Coach.” Carolina shook her head, setting the blond waterfall of her hair in motion, which immediately settled back down around her shoulders in that way that always made his fingers itch to smooth it back. Or to thread it through to the knuckles as he caught her tight against him in a torrid kiss that erased every bit of sanity from his head. Maybe that was what she needed to soothe her savage beast. An intro to how the next two weeks were going to go—namely that he had every intention of getting very close to her, very fast. “You haven’t changed a bit, I see. So, we’re not going to treat this ridiculous experiment of yours any more seriously than we took our real marriage. Noted.” He lifted both hands and shot her a quizzical look. “I beg your pardon. I take all of our marriages seriously. You don’t see me standing on the doorst ep of any other ex-wives, do you?” She rolled her eyes and jammed a hand down on her hip. “Marriage license. Downtown will be a mess later on.” Duh. That was why he’d come by to pick her up so early, but instead of meekly following him to his truck so they could get on with it, she’d taken her sweet time flaying his hide from his bones. Charlie sw ept his hand to the side, bowing and scraping enough to get a smile out of his tough customer. “Your carriage awaits, my lady.” “Why, exactly, do we have to get married again?” Carolina asked out of the blue once he’d settled her into the passenger seat of his truck.
Carolina had serious fight or flight syndrome when it came to commitment. Frankly, he was shocked she’d agreed to that part of the deal. He’d thrown it in as a treat to himself—because it pleased him to force her to do something she so clearly didn’t want to. A marriage license wasn’t guaranteed to get her to stick around any better than it had the first time, which was why he planned on ke eping her armed and ready for combat instead. “Makes it harder for you to resist me,” he informed her and mimed shooting her in the arm with his index finger. His signature gesture. If he’d been on the air, he’d have accompanied it with a kachow, which his viewers loved. “And because, as I told you, my viewers are trying to ke ep their relationships together, not hook up.” “And how are they going to take it when we split up again?” The better question was how he’d take it. Badly, was the answer, which was why he couldn’t let her get under his skin again. More to the point, he couldn’t let her know she’d gotten under his skin because he had a feeling that ship had sailed the moment she’d opened the door. “Who said we were splitting up?” He shot her a lazy grin. “My plan is to be so amazing of a husband that you never want to leave.” “Ha. Since it’s my condo, I already don’t want to leave.” “Mission accomplished. That was easy.” In a totally unexpected move, she leaned over the center console and let her fingers trail up his arm, exploring all the peaks and valleys that he worked hard at the gym to maintain. He swallowed as his skin heated under her fingertips. “Well, you know,” she purred. “It is hard to resist you.” “Uh... it is?” “Sure. I mean, who wouldn’t want a piece of that pretty face? And your shoulders.” She squeezed the area in question playfully, accompanying it with a tiny growl that rumbled through his chest. “Poetry.” “Since when do you care one whit about what a man looks like?” he asked even as his eyes crossed hard enough to blur the center line on the pavement. Carolina had gotten dangerous in all new and different ways. “I figured as long as we weren’t taking any of this seriously, I should get in on that action.” She batted her big blues at him like the coquette she’d apparently tried on for size—and wore brilliantly, not that he’d tell her that. “What is your fascination with whether I have the capacity to be serious or not?” he asked her. “I’m marrying you, aren’t I? That’s as serious as a heart attack. Probably as deadly too.” “Just wanted to be sure what I was dealing with here.” She stared out the front windshield, a tiny, enigmatic smile on her face. Her fingers were long gone from his arm, the heat of which he keenly missed. “Still the same old Charlie.” It wasn’t like he had any shot at being anyone else. “Same Charlie that millions of people love.”
Exc ept for the one woman he’d wanted to love him. But this little reunion wasn’t about rehashing a dead relationship for the fun of having his insides shredded again. It was about winning. Period. He parked at the marriage license office and blessed the fact that Carolina didn’t give him any trouble. She glided through the building by his side as if she had zero problem with him. Which was great, since they generated a fair bit of interest. He wouldn’t have said either one of them were famous, per se, but they had upwards of thirty million viewers between them, so the odds of at least a few passersby recognizing them were high, especially while they were together. Great. There was no bad publicity. “We should have just gone back to Vegas,” Carolina muttered after the third fan requested a selfie with them. “I’m thrilled to hear you want to be married to me so badly that you’d jet off at a moment’s notice.” The idea had crossed his mind, but he’d categorically rejected it for less than intelligent reasons—he hadn’t wanted anything about this second chance to be like the first marriage. Call it superstition or whatever. Stacking the odds in his favor, because he needed as much help as he could get. “But no,” he continued. “This way you have time to get your cold feet in order. In three days, you’ll be Mrs. Wilson, for better or worse. No surprises. You want out, now’s the time to concede.” She crossed her arms and stared down her nose. Instead of scouting around for a way to make her laugh, he pretty much just wanted to kiss that snooty look into oblivion. Where had that come from? Well, technically, he’d never stopped wanting to kiss her—among other things they’d never gotten to after the marriage ceremony—but it had always been a sort of nebulous ache in the back of his heart. This was pure reaction. “You can’t scare me away so easily,” she countered, and he didn’t bother to hide his grin. “I’d never hear the end of it if I didn’t go through with this. My viewers are eagerly awaiting me to chronical this debacle. I can’t disappoint them. Where do I sign?” Tool number one had done its job: as long as it felt like Carolina’s idea, everything worked like it should. They waited in line for longer than either of them would have preferred, signed the papers, and loaded up into his truck without any more bloodshed. Since the experiment was only for two weeks, it didn’t take long for Charlie to cart a few boxes from the parking garage to her condo. Their condo. For better or worse. For fourteen days and change, at least. Carolina showed him to the extra bedroom she’d been using for an office, graciously skipping the commentary. Either she was saving up to blast him over dinner or she cared less about him invading her space than he would have assumed. In another unexpected move, she didn’t vanish the moment he crossed the threshold of the room. As he unpacked, she wandered to the bed and flung herself across it. He’d expected her to make herself scarce
now that they technically didn’t have to interact any longer, but then they hadn’t really established how any of this would go. Other than not sharing a bedroom. She’d been extremely clear on that point. “You know the clock doesn’t start ticking until the ceremony, right?” he asked her as he tucked away the last of his clothes in the distressed wood dresser that had Carolina’s taste stamped all over it. She sat up and crossed her legs in the dead center of the bed that he was somehow supposed to sle ep in after she’d laced it with her honeysuckle scent. “What? That wasn’t part of the deal.” “It was too. I said honeymoon. No dictionary on the planet will help you define honeymoon as starting before the wedding.” Her expression darkened. “I don’t need a dictionary to know that you’ll take every advantage, even the ones I don’t give you. Fine. Have it your way. Then that means I don’t need to be here since I’m not on the clock.” She slid off the bed, but before she could es cape, he snagged her arm, halting her progress. Her hair waterfalled down her back as she stared up at him, uncowed, uncompromising, and definitely not in the frame of mind to give him any quarter. Good. He didn’t want any. This was a challenge in every sense of the word, and he thrived in less than ideal circumstances. It was probably one of the reasons he’d been so attracted to Carolina in the first place. What fun would it be to earn the love of a woman who was already slavering over him, eager to slide into his arms at a moment’s notice? But to know that this one had come, willingly, after so much resistance? That was a prize worth having. They stared at each other as the space between them crackled with energy. “Make no mistake. The clock is still ticking, Charlie,” she informed him coolly. “I don’t know exactly what you’ve got up your sleeve, but the second our time is up, so are we.” “So sure about that, are you?” he murmured, letting his gaze trail down to her lips. Boldly. No apology. Because it suited him to let her see his intentions— and there would be lots of physical contact in her future, despite all the line drawing about sle eping arrangements. “I’m one hundred percent certain.” He caught the tremor in her voice. She wasn’t as unaffected as she’d like him to believe. “Then it won’t matter if I kiss you now or later.” He let that sink in for a moment, gratified to see the flicker of heat climbing through her gaze. Pleased that she hadn’t tried to hide it, still boldly staring up at him. “Since the end result will still be the same.” His fingertips tingled as he slid them from her arm to her jaw, cupping it. Still she didn’t move, not even a hair, and she stood so close that it would be so easy to drag her into his embrace.
But there was something to be said for it being her decision. So he tilted her head away and kissed her cheek, releasing her in the same motion. As he st epped away, her gaze burned with something he couldn’t interpret. Probably didn’t want to anyway. “That was a point in your favor,” she advised him with lifted brows. “Don’t expect any others to come so easily.” He didn’t stop her this time as she flounced from the room, and it was only once she was out of sight that he allowed himself to rub the spot on his chest, where it hurt the worst. She thought that was easy? It had taken a supreme amount of will to stick to his tools. Especially when he had no guarantee they would work. The problem was that he’d be in the thick of the fight. Subjecting himself to all the things that Carolina made him feel, the ones he’d locked away in the box called History. Opening that hinge was more painful than he’d anticipated, with less satisfaction. He wanted her to ache too. To keenly feel the loss of what they’d had, what she’d so easily thrown away. To experience nirvana for a brief, bright second, and then have it ripped away. Like he had. Vindication. He wanted it. Badly. And he was only just now realizing the price he’d pay to get it. Because he’d be losing her all over again.