“When is the ceremony?” Leelyn asks.
I grip his hand tight. “Did we decide on a date?” I ask.
His fingers grip mine back. “Two weeks from today.”
CHAPTER 12
RAFE
“So we have to plan a wedding. In two weeks.” Paige is pacing in front of me.
Despite the late hour and the breeze, the room is still hot. Too hot. I undo the top two buttons of my shirt. Pain shoots through my left hand with every movement. I hurt the wrist fighting and bruised one of my knuckles despite the wrapping.
I have to be better next time.
“Yes. I’m aware,” I tell her. It was my senseless fucking idea. I cursed myself the entire boat ride home.
“That’s a short period of time, but we can do it.” It sounds like she’s psyching herself up for battle. It would be sweet, if she weren’t Paige Wilde. “Would we invite people? Friends? Family? We’d have to, wouldn’t we? If we want it to look real.”
“I imagine so, yes.”
She puts her hands on her hips. She’s in some damned short skirt, and it leaves her long legs on display. She’s kicked off the distractingly tall heels, but her legs still look far too good. “Are you always psychotically calm? This situation calls for a bit of panic, you know.”
“Panicking helps no one.”
“It helpsmefeel better.” She starts pacing again. I lean back against the couch, and maybe it’s the drinks I had at dinner, but admiring her form while she walks isn’t too bad.
I shouldn’t.
But here I am, doing it anyway.
“We’ll need to make it big. Hire photographers,” I say, and reach for my glass of whiskey. Drinking is a surefire recipe for more nightmares, but I need to take the edge off.You’re a killer,she said on the boat.
It had to have been a guess. She reached for anything, however low, to win an argument. There’s no way she knows how true it is.
But my older brother is dead because of decisions I made that day, over fifteen years ago, and I’ve chafed under that weight ever since.
Her reminder shouldn’t bother me.
I lean my head back against the couch. “You can’t jump like you did today,” I tell her. “When I took your hand.”
Her eyes snap to mine. “I didn’t jump.”
“You flinched.”
“I didnotflinch.”
I look up at the ceiling. “Are we going to argue over every single little thing?”
“Yes,” she fires back, “because that’s the only thing we know how to do. And I didn’t flinch.”
“You froze,” I correct, “and it was only for half a second, but I saw it. And so will other people. If we’re going to do this in public, we need to look convincing.”
“I know that.” She sounds frustrated and peeved, and I reach for my drink again. My ribs hurt from the fight. I feel it with every breath. Not enough that there’s a crack. Just a bruise. I’ve learned to tell the difference.
I take a deep breath, just to feel the pain. “Do you haveany family you can invite?” I ask. “I’ll ask mine. Unfortunately.”
Her eyes fall on mine. “I have two cousins that might come, and friends. But are we… do they… are we pretending in front of them too? In front of your family?”
