My stomach dipped, responding to Zane’s smoldering gaze. All I wanted to do was lean into his warmth, but I couldn’t. I took a deep breath. This was it. Time to be the world’s biggest killjoy ever and call a permanent time-out on our flirting escapades.
“Zane, we need to talk.”
He sucked in a sharp breath. “Ouch! Those are the scariest words a man can ever hear.”
“I’m not trying to be scary.”
“Thank goodness. So, what do you want to talk about? Dinner options for tonight? We can slip out before the rehearsal dinner. No one will notice. Burgers sound good?”
“Zane—”
“No? Steak?”
“I don’t want steak.”
“Lobster? Caviar? You name it and you’ve got it,” Zane said. “Nothing is too extravagantfor my lady.”
His lady?
Heat erupted in my chest and rushed up my neck. Calling me his lady was almost too much, even for Vacation Wren. I bit back a nervous smile as the tingles in my stomach grew so powerful that I clutched my sweater.
He snapped his fingers as if he’d just come up with a brilliant idea. “I know this little place on third street. Low lights, soft music, intimate atmosphere. And they have the best Creamy Pesto Shrimp you’ve ever tasted!”
I stopped walking and turned to face him. “I’m not hungry.”
“But you will be.”
Placing a hand on his solid upper arm, I looked him in the eyes and said, “I don’t want to talk about food.”
“I know,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “But I had to take my shot and try to keep you from saying something we’d both regret. You know how it is.”
I couldn’t help but smile. He couldsense I was pulling back, and I had to admire his efforts to derail my attempt.
“Zane,” a man yelled from the gazebo, “get over here, ya hockey puck! These chairs aren’t going to set themselves up.”
Zane looked at me and beamed. “I’ve never been so happy to be conscripted into manual labor. Catch ya later,” he said, bending down and giving me a quick peck on the cheek.
Electricity raced through my body, tingling from my head to my toes. I rubbed my cheek where he’d kissed me. Whether I was rubbing it off or rubbing it in, I wasn’t quite sure. But I did feel a hundred pounds lighter. If I wasn’t careful, I was liable to float away on the breeze like one of Bri’s golden balloons.
I groaned inside myself as I watched him jog off. Telling him we needed to dial back our flirtatious ways was going to be harder than I’d ever imagined. Bookstore Wren knew my life wasn’t a romance novel. I couldn’t fall for the wildly successful, uber-hot pro athlete and expect a happily ever after to fall into my lap. The real world didn’t work that way.
The voice of reason screamed her warning in the back of my mind, but Vacation Wren didn’t listen. She was too busy admiring the way Zane’s muscles tugged on his shirt as he carried a load of folding chairs across the gazebo lawn. It wasn’t so easy to tell him to turn off the flirting when I couldn’t even look at him without my heart fluttering and my stomach doing a flip.
I plopped onto a bench, Percy sprawling at my feet, and tried to forget about Zane for a few minutes. Bridesmaids lined up at the wedding coordinator’s direction. The florist had a small army of underlings bringing sample after sample to Bri for her final approval. And a group of people stood off to the side, chatting and looking generally confused as to their purpose at this rehearsal.
But no matter where I chose to look, my eyes always drifted back to Zane.
Every. Single. Time.
“He’s Bri’s brother,” I muttered to myself. “He’s an off-limits heartbreaker, and after two days, you’ll never see him again. Leave him alone!” I ran through a mental checklist of all the romance novels I’d seen at the bookstore over the years, where these tropes were the very reasons couples struggled so hard to find their happy endings.
“If living happily ever after is that hard in the books,” I said to myself, pretending to talk to Percy so I didn’t look like the lunatic that I was, “it’s got to be impossible in real life.”
But no amount of self-talk could dissuade my heart from writing Zane and Wren fan fiction that had us driving off into the sunset with Percy drooling all over the backseat.
“Percy’s up,” Bri called, snapping me out of my conversation with myself.
Zane pulled a rusticwagon toward us. The rough wooden slats were draped with tulle, fairy lights, and strings of faux pearls. In the back was a satin pillow the flower girl was supposed to ride to the altar on and a doll who would be a stand-in during rehearsal.
