“I’m sorry, what?” Rhett stammered, spitting his beer onto the table. He quickly reached between them and used his hand to wipe it up then rubbed his hand on his pants.

“I could marry you,” Cole repeated, the idea forming more fully in his head the longer he thought about it.

Marrying Rhett was totally feasible and something he could easily convince his family was legit. Rhett’s brother was his best friend. He’d known them both his entire life; it was completely possible that he’d fallen for his best friend’s bookish twin brother.

“I can pay you or something, if you want, to go along with it,” Cole continued excitedly.

“Pay me?” Rhett asked, looking slightly horrified. “Am I a prostitute? We’ve moved from spinsters to escorts?”

“The proper term is sex worker, Rhett, and no, I’m not offering to pay you for sex. I’m offering to pay you to pretend to be my husband.” Cole had already made up his mind this idea was brilliant. This was his chance to save his future.

“How would we explain to Ryan that we’re suddenly engaged?” Rhett questioned.

“Well, we wouldn’t get engaged right away, but we could tell people we’d been seeing each other in secret or something. We wanted to keep things just between us for as long as we could.”

Something Cole couldn’t identify flashed across Rhett’s face and his cheeks turned pink.

“What?” Cole asked. “Why are you blushing?”

Rhett’s hands flew to his cheeks and covered them, eyes wide and head shaking side to side.

“Tell me,” Cole pressed, leaning over the table closer to Rhett.

He inhaled sharply and pulled back, confused. Had Rhett always smelled this good? Like clean sheets and fruit, the smell resonated with Cole, imprinting a fantasy in his head of Rhett wrapped in luxurious cotton sheets, eating strawberries and drinking wine.

Cole shook his head to clear it, unsure of where a thought like that had materialized from. He’d known Ryan and Rhett since they were kids. He’d always been closer with Ryan, the more outgoing of the twins. Rhett was always around, though, with his wire-rimmed glasses and his nose in a book of some kind, not quite as classically good looking as Ryan, but nothing you’d want to shake a stick at. He’d just been different. Ryan and Cole played tennis and took swimming, while Rhett was in AP Physics and math club.

He’d never looked at Ryan as more than a friend, and he’d definitely never looked at Rhett as more than that either, but suddenly he couldn’t shake the new picture in his head that Rhett’s scent evoked.

“I lied to him,” Rhett whispered, dropping his hands into his lap. “I told him tonight that I was seeing someone so he’d leave me alone about it.”

Cole grinned and clapped his hands. “This is perfect, Rhett! He already thinks you’re seeing someone and, if you didn’t tell him who, we can just let him know it’s me.”

“You need to slow down, Cole,” Rhett said, holding his hands up between them.

Cole suddenly liked the way Rhett said his name and liked the fact that he talked with his hands. He finished off his beer in an attempt to drown his new fascination.

“Even if we convince people we’re in a relationship, that’s one thing. But you’re talking about getting married.” Rhett lifted his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“People get divorced all the time. Like fifty percent of people,” Cole offered.

“How long would we have to be fake married for?”

“Until my Nan dies, probably. She’s the one saying I need to be settled down.” Cole clenched his jaw, upset all over again at the ridiculous and frankly medieval insistence that he legally bind himself to another person to inherit what should by all rights be his. He was the one who ran the vineyard; he was the one that had put in the hours and the work. More than his parents and definitely more than his sister.

“And when is that going to be? Although to be honest with you, I feel like a giant creep having this conversation.” Rhett winced.

“It is gritty,” Cole agreed. “We should have another drink.”

He grabbed their empty glasses and jumped out of the booth, practically skipping to the bar. He ordered two fresh pints and dropped them back on the table, finding Rhett’s face wearing the same pained expression as when he got up.

“A few years,” Cole finally answered, taking a long pull of his beer.

“So you expect me to just be celibate the entire time we’re fake married?” Rhett asked, that brilliant blush from before creeping down his throat. Cole hadn’t ever seen someone blush in reverse before, but somehow with Rhett, it made sense.

“You could fuck other people,” Cole advised him, even though the thought of Rhett fucking anybody frankly made him rage with jealousy.

Where the fuck did that come from?

“They just couldn’t tell,” he added.

Rhett exhaled and took a small drink of his beer, then a larger one, and an even larger one.

“And what about you?” Rhett asked him, shoving a lock of chocolate brown hair out of his face. “You’ve been sleeping your way through the valley for years now. You’re just going to give that up? Because there’s no way the amount of men you go through is going to be able to keep quiet about your extra-marital affairs.”

Cole winced, scratching at the side of his forehead to hide the look on his face.

“Is that what you think I do?” he asked, hoping he masked at least a small portion of his hurt at Rhett’s insinuation.

“Is it not?” Rhett retorted, eyebrows raised in symmetrical arches over the frame of his glasses. His golden brown eyes held oceans of curiosity.

Fuck. Had he ever looked into Rhett’s eyes before today?

Cole chewed his lip between his teeth, unsure of how truthful to be with Rhett before he reasoned he needed to be completely transparent if he was serious about trying to make him his fake husband.

“I don’t sleep with all of them,” he admitted. “And it’s not like I’m a slut or anything. Even if I had fucked them all, it wouldn’t make me a slut, but I just didn’t get along with them. Like, it’s fine for a bit, but when I get to know them I can just tell it won’t work so what’s the point of dragging it out?”

Cole swallowed and rubbed his palms down the condensation on his pint glass. Rhett didn’t say anything for a long while and Cole hoped he hadn’t overstepped, but he found himself surprisingly unable to look up and check.

They sat in the booth, the silence growing between them. Cole drank his entire beer, and Rhett still hadn’t spoken. He dared a glance up and found Rhett’s stare focused on a blank spot on the table.

“Rhett?”

Rhett looked up, blinking, like he hadn’t realized how long they’d been sitting there in what was quickly becoming an increasingly uncomfortable silence.

“I don’t want your money,” Rhett finally spoke, “necessarily.”

“What does that mean?” Cole asked, hopeful this meant Rhett was considering the proposal for the fake proposal.

“I want to have my own business,” Rhett told him, drawing a shape on the table with a long finger.

“Okay…” Cole said, leading him to continue.

“I want to be an event planner.”

“Isn’t that what you do? Like, your family already anyway?” Cole asked, confused.

“No. My dad owns a rental company so we rent out all the stuff people need for events, but don’t really do the planning. I want to do the planning,” Rhett corrected him.

“Oh.”

“I don’t have the resources to get that off the ground though.”

“Alright,” Cole said, still not following.

“You do.”

Oh.

There it was.

“You want my connections?” Cole questioned, tipping his head to the side and assessing Rhett, who had apparently picked up negotiating skills in one of those books he’d spent so much time in when they were kids.

“I want your help,” Rhett told him.

“How can I help? I mean, I can give you money,” Cole started, but Rhett silenced him by waving a hand between them.

“Not everything is about money, Cole,” he hissed sharply.

“You need money to start a business, Rhett. Everyone knows that.”

“I have money,” Rhett informed him. “I’ll probably need a little more capital, but I’ve been saving. I need help with marketing and stuff like that. Connections to people who need events planned. Like, if you could drop my name around the vineyard, that’s what I need. Things like that.”

“So you’re saying I help you get your business started and you’ll pretend to marry me?” Cole couldn’t believe the solution was this simple. He’d get the vineyard and he’d get to have more fantasies about Rhett? What could be better than that?

“I can plan our wedding,” Rhett whispered, his eyes scanning around the table like he was building a blueprint or something. “I can plan our wedding!” he repeated, looking up and grinning so broadly at Cole that it made his chest tight.

Cole’s hope tripped up inside of him.

“Speaking of weddings,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “This might kind of be a crash course in being my boyfriend.”

“What?” Rhett asked him with a twisted look on his face.

“Kristen is getting married next weekend in Tahiti,” Cole told him, fully aware that Rhett had to know about it because there wasn’t anyone in the valley that didn’t know about it.

“I know,” Rhett snarked at him, clearly not understanding the implication.

“So, if I have a boyfriend that is so serious I’m going to be proposing to him in the near future, he’ll probably need to come to the wedding with me.”

Rhett’s face paled and he leaned back in the booth, thumping his head against the black vinyl with a thud.

“Tahiti?”

“Five days. Four nights,” Cole confirmed.

“Well,” Rhett said after a minute had passed. “I’m overdue for a vacation.”

Cole’s jaw dropped.

“Are you serious?” he asked. “You’ll do it?”

Rhett scrunched his face together and shrugged his shoulders. “I guess, yeah. I mean it’s not like I have much else going for me.”

“Rhett, you’re a literal lifesaver!” Cole jumped up from his seat and slid into the booth beside Rhett, wrapping him in a hug, trying to not smell him again.

“Well, you’re an actual business starter,” Rhett exhaled into Cole’s embrace.

“What’s going on here?”

A familiar voice from behind Cole turned him and Rhett both to stone. Cole listened to Rhett’s harsh breaths as they fell against his ear before he turned and looked over his shoulder at Ryan standing a few feet away with his arms crossed over his chest. Not only was he taller than Rhett, but he was broader, and blonder, and his brown eyes stared down at them with ferocious curiosity.

“Uhm, well,” Rhett stammered before Cole could find words. “I guess I should introduce you to my boyfriend.”