The facility had been built with love, the same love I saw twinkling in Emmett’s bright blue eyes as he explained the origins of their facility to the women—in spite of some of their sideways glances.

To me, the fact that their grandfather made it for her makes it one of the nicest facilities I’ve seen.

When I pass the main farmhouse, it glows from within. Every window is bathed in golden light. I can see Leon and Tina inside.

I slow and watch the elderly couple dancing in their living room. Her arms slung over his neck, his around her waist, her head thrown back in laughter.

And his expression? Pure adoration.

My chest pinches as I regard them, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s what my mom and dad could have had under different circumstances. Hell, it makes me wonder if I could ever have that one day. If nothing else, it looks like something meant more for the movies than real life.

A scoff leaves my lips as I drive past and turn onto the main road, speeding away from the farm that holds so many competing feelings for me. The possibility of finding a love like Tina and Leon’s seems to shrink into the distance, just like their home. Because at this rate, I won’t be meeting anyone anytime soon.

I carry that loneliness with me down the highway, toward my favorite roadside diner. It’s my regular late-night study spot. The owner, Martha, and her wife, Danielle, who runs the kitchen, have become two of my closest friends. They know me by name, keep the coffee flowing, and don’t balk at making my weird custom omelet at all hours of the night.

All of which are the way to my heart.

I park in the lot and turn off my car, and in the sudden silence of my vehicle, my stomach grumbles loudly.

“Jesus, Jules, you should eat something,” a gravelly voice announces from the back seat.

Every last bit of self-defense knowledge or plans for how I’d react under attack evaporate from my brain. My hands shoot up, and all I do is flap my arms in the air and scream like a girl in a slasher movie.

“Jules, Jules, Jules.” A warm hand touches my shoulder, and I slap it away while reaching for the door handle in a clumsy attempt to flee.

“Jules, it’s me. Emmett.”

It takes my panicked brain a few seconds to make sense of the words. I’m halfway out the door before I put it all together. But when I do, I turn toward the back seat and come face-to-face with our bachelor.

He’s still wearing his suit and bolo tie from the elimination ceremony. His thick, sandy hair is tousled, and he’s holding his hands up in surrender.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I yell, making him wince.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay?”

And he does look sorry. Sorry and slightly embarrassed.

“Okay. Stop telling me you’re sorry and explain yourself. Because, Jesus Christ, Emmett, you don’t just pop out of the back seat of a woman’s car late at night. Or ever. It’s fucking creepy.”

“I wanted—” he starts, but my brain is a runaway train, and I can’t stop talking.

“You don’t… you don’t fucking do that!” My voice is shrill. “This is—this is something that Catherine the murder girl has probably read about or listened to on a podcast, except in her version, I get killed and chopped up into tiny pieces.”

“Okay,” he replies, now sounding a little too amused for my taste.

“This isn’t funny! This isn’t cool!”

“Julia,” he says once, forcefully. “I’m very, very sorry. It’s definitely not funny or cool. It’s stupid and humiliating.”

I nod, heart pounding against my sternum. My whole body seems to vibrate with the weight of my fear. In fact, I’m shaking.

Even though it’s Emmett, that fight-or-flight response has taken over every limb.

“I just had to get out of there,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. “I’ve got one delusional girl crying, one miserable girl who’s mad at me for eliminating her. Like, Jules, I’ve known these people for one week, and it’s not as though I’ve spent that much time with them or gotten to know anyone on a personal level. It’s such a load of shit, and here they are, mad at me. And somehow I feel fucking awful about it. And then there’s Handsy Evelyn—”

I snort a frantic laugh and scrub my hands over my face. “Oh my god, she’s so handsy.”

I groan into my palms, thinking back on her while Emmett lets loose a heavy sigh.

I unbuckle my seat belt and turn to face him. He looks oversize in the back of my sedan, sitting in the middle seat with his legs open and his chin dropped. As I listen to him recount what led him here, it’s impossible not to put myself in his shoes. And there’s a part of me that gets it. I signed up for this experience, too, and I can’t say it’s exactly what I thought it would be. So I can only imagine how he’s feeling.

“She was heading straight to my house uninvited, I overheard her say it, and they were all just watching her, waiting for us to have some weird, fabricated moment. Then I… I saw your car sitting there and thought, you know what? Fuck this. I just had to get out.”

He peeks up at me now, with the very tip of a playful smirk on his lips. “And also, you should be more diligent about locking your car. You never know what type of riffraff could stumble in.”

“Emmett, don’t be a loser. You are the riffraff and as such you don’t get to scold me. Considering you hid in my car, let me drive around cluelessly, and then scared the shit out of me by popping up out of nowhere like a desperate jack-in-the-box. You could have said something right away.”

“I know, I know.” He lays one hand over his chest, clearly trying to look genuine and apologetic. “I just saw your car there, and I thought it looked like a hell of a getaway car. I get it. You’re mad at me right now. But I knew I could trust you to get me the fuck out of there and treat me like a person and not a boy-toy showboat for them to drag around and make a dime off of.”

My lips curve down as it hits me how he’s feeling about this whole venture. Mere days ago, I told him to go along with it, to sell it, to make the money. Guilt prickles at my scalp because I hate to think I’ve been a part of dehumanizing him in some way.

“I get it,” I say, the defeat clear in my tone. “Because I’ve gotten off pretty easy where Richard is concerned. But if I were you, I’d want to run from that set screaming. And it’s only been one week.”

“Right? It’s only been one week of this hell, and I have to do it for five more.”

I try to look reassuring when I tell him, “We have to do this for five more weeks.”

He groans, dropping back onto the seat, his body language defeated.

“So what’s your plan here?” I say, gesturing around us. “You’re going to skip town?”

He throws an arm over his face. “I don’t fucking know. My plan wasn’t fully fleshed out, really. I need a little distance. I’ll make my way back to the property at some point.”

I scoff. “Not with me you won’t. They’ve got cameras all over the place. I have no doubt they’ve already seen me going in and out of your house. I don’t know if there’s audio. Or a camera inside—”

He shakes his head. “None inside, and there’s no audio.”

“But you knew there were cameras at the cottage?” I say incredulously.

“I mean, yeah. But you were all bloody and limping and had thorns in your ass. I don’t think me being gentlemanly enough to help you out while you were injured counts as breaking a rule.”

I quirk a knowing brow at him, wondering if we can classify every moment of that interaction as simply gentlemanly.

He pushes off the back seat, inclining his torso toward me, filling the space between us with his bulk. All I can smell is him now, and I wonder how I never picked up on it before. “How are your injuries anyway?”

The right corner of his mouth tips up as he looks me over slyly. Proof that we both know not every bit of that interaction was aboveboard.