Dating the Guy Upstairs by Amanda Ashby Page B

you have no idea how happy I am to hear that you and Riley are dating.” Jude enveloped him in another hug before she pulled away and frowned. “Though why didn’t you tell us? Is this because Riley’s still annoyed with me?”
    Will rubbed his chin at the forlorn note in Jude’s voice. Now he understood why Riley screened her calls.
    “Of course not,” he assured her, dredging his mind for a solution. Nothing appeared, and he was just about to wish for a large hole to appear in the floor when Tucker gave him a friendly slap on the back and turned to Jude.
    “Don’t take it personally. The pair of them hid it from everyone. They tried to tell me that it was because they didn’t want to ruin my wedding news. Isn’t that right, Will?”
    No. Not even a little bit. But short of telling them the truth there wasn’t much he else he could do but nod his head and force a fake smile onto his face.
    “Yes, that’s the only reason we were keeping it private. But now that you know, I’m sure Riley will want to tell you all about it,” Will lied, trying to imagine just how many ways his fake girlfriend was going to kill him when she found out. He was going to have to come up with something pretty incredible to get her to forgive him.

Chapter Seven
    “I can’t believe that you told my mother that we were dating,” Riley wailed on Thursday morning. She was attempting to brush her hair while using her foot to encourage Bingley to stop trying to eat the pile of library books that were stacked in the corner, and she failed on both counts. While Will scooped Bingley up and put him back in his hut, she looked in the mirror and realized that she was fighting a lost cause. She tied it into a ponytail and turned her attention back to Will, concentrating on staring at his ears.
    Not because there was anything wrong with them, but because after spending an entire day at work thinking about his mouth and the second kiss that they’d shared, she’d come to the conclusion that the only way to save her sanity when she was around him was to look at his ears.
    Hopefully it would stop her from being so hyperaware of everything that Will did. It was like a disease that seemed to be growing in her mind, because the more she told herself not to think about him, the more she wondered what it would take for him to kiss her again.
No. Think ears.
    “Tucker told her,” Will corrected. “And since I couldn’t exactly deny it, I had to go along with it. Why, what’s been happening? I hope she hasn’t being giving you a hard time.”
    “I’ll tell you what’s been happening,” Riley said as she reached for her cell phone and held it up for him to exam the screen. “So far I’ve had a text message from Jude’s friend who suggests we get married this year because Mars is in retrograde. My father’s arranged for our auras to be cleansed by his prayer circle and his girlfriend, Angel, is making us matching bonding bracelets. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what a bonding bracelet is, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t want one.”
    “Why would she think that we’re getting married? We’ve only been fake dating for three days.”
    “Because you told my mother. She puts two and two together and gets wedding bells.”
    “I had no idea. I’m so sorry. I should never have answered the door when I knew you weren’t home. And then there was the carrot cake
.
I sold you down the river for cake.” He twisted his mouth into a grimace, which caused his ears to move ever so slightly. Why had she never noticed what nice ears he had? They were just the right size, and she loved the way the tips of his hair curled around them. She groaned.
Enough
.
    Besides, as much as she’d wished her mother (and now her father) hadn’t found out about their fake dating status, she always felt bad complaining to Will about her erratic parents. Despite how frustrating she sometimes found them, she loved them and they loved her, unlike Will, with