Abby groaned. “I don’t want to talk about it. Besides, I’m pretty sure I can get out of it.” Or at least she was going to try like hell. She fumbled with her phone, pulling up the text from Holly. “Here. Read this crap.”

Sharon laughed. “Oh my god! She’s got some nerve, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, she was always so sure of herself. I’m actually looking forward to seeing her reaction when she meets Nic.”

“You’re leaving in the morning? At what ungodly hour?” Sharon asked as she snapped a carrot in half with her teeth.

Abby bit into her sandwich. “Four,” she mumbled around a bite. “It’s a ten-hour drive. Well, eleven by the time you count stops along the way. We’ll pick up breakfast and lunch and eat in the car. We gain an hour when we cross time zones, so, with luck, we should be there by two thirty, three at the latest.”

“Are you nervous?”

Abby jerked her head up. “Yes,” she said honestly. “I don’t know if it’s because of Nic and our agreement or if it’s Holly. She’s so competitive, I can see her ignoring the fact that I brought a girlfriend—fake girlfriend, but still—and trying to get me into bed with her. And what if I break? What if I do it? Then I’ll have cheated on my fake girlfriend. Can you imagine the drama then?”

“And what about Nic? How are you going to get out of having sex with her?”

She shrugged. “I’ll just say no.”

Yes, that was her plan: to renege on her agreement with Nic. Just because she’d agreed to her counteroffer—to sex—didn’t make it so. Once they got up there, what was Nic going to do if she refused to sleep with her? Well, she supposed she could spill the beans about the whole charade, but would Nic really do that?

When she’d called her with the details, Nic had seemed almost normal. There’d been no mention of her compensation. In fact, she seemed rather nice and maybe even a little bit excited about going. Or maybe that’s what she wanted to read into Nic’s demeanor.

“We talked,” she said. “I called her yesterday and we talked. I think it’ll be fine.”

“But what will you talk about for eleven hours stuck in a car together?”

“We’re going to get to know each other so that when we are around my family, it won’t be quite so obvious that we’re strangers. And we’re going to rehearse our dating history and how we met and all that.” She put her sandwich down. “Aren’t you sick of salads?”

“Yes. And my diet stops on Christmas Eve. I—like millions of others—will start it again on New Year’s Day.”