Until that point, I was lost in a haze of lust. I was lost inhim. I was lost in the fact that the man I’d been crushing on for over a decade was finally noticing me. It felt like a dream, and I never wanted to wake up ... at least not until he was about to cross a line that we couldn’t come back from.
Kissing is one thing, but going any further? We shouldn’t.
No, Odette. Notshouldn’t. Can’t.You can’t afford to get your heart broken again. You can’t get distracted by a crush that will go nowhere. Focus on your business. The curse is already destroying that. Don’t let it destroy you too.
I zero back in on the wedding planning and drag my eyes away from Noah, who looks entirely too good as he moves around the bar doing even the most mundane things.
“What if we put the deejay over here and move the gift table there?” Izzy points to two spots on the roughly drawn barn layout I sketched. “Then that would leave us more space for the dance floor on this side.”
I think about the barn and its current layout, envisioning how it’ll look once it’s all done. “Yeah.” I nod. “I think that will work nicely. Then we can do the cake table here.”
“Yes,” Izzy says, extending the word and kicking her feet excitedly as I label each table on the drawing.
I’m excited too. It’s all coming together. Major progress is being made on the barn. And when I’m not rearranging the taproom, I’ve been booking new vendors, as many have reached out since they heardabout the renovation. My bank account is no longer screaming at me, so it’s definitely all looking up right now.
As long as I can get Izzy and Craig to nail down their seating chart, we’ll be in perfect shape.
“Craig, any objections?”
When he doesn’t answer, I look at him.
His nose is completely buried in his phone. He wasn’t even paying attention.
“Craig?”
Izzy’s voice knocks him out of his stupor, and he nearly drops his phone, barely recovering before it hits the table.
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry,” he says, tucking his phone back into his pocket. “That was a work thing.”
“On a Saturday?”
He smirks at her. “You’re marrying a busy man, babe.” Then he winks, and I swear my best friend melts in her seat.
I resist rolling my eyes at them and shove the sketch between them. “Well, Mr. Busy Man, any objections to the layout?”
He frowns. “We’re having a deejay? I thought we were doing a live band.”
“A live band?” Izzy sounds like this is the first she’s hearing of it. “I thought we’d do a deejay. They’re cheaper.”
“Yeah, but are we paying for it?”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard a groom say something along those lines, and it always annoys the crap out of me, but this time? It really bugs me. I know Brian and Lydia. I don’t like hearing them talked about like that.
“You know what?” I push to my feet. “Why don’t I let you two discuss this in private? I need to use the restroom anyway.”
I don’t wait for any objections—and may not get any since they’re already locked in a heated argument—and make my way past the bar and down the hall to the bathrooms.
Truthfully, I needed more than a break from Craig and Izzy. I needed a break from Noah too.
I can’t seem to stop myself from looking over at the bar with every noise he makes. Every time he laughs at something Ezra says, or every time he scowls. My attention keeps being drawn to him, and it needs to stop. I need to put our kiss out of my mind.
It will never happen again, so why bother obsessing over it?
I finish up in the restroom and pull open the door to find a dark figure leaning against the wall.
My heart leaps right into my throat, but not because I’m scared.
It’s because of who it is.
