“You’re not Emily.”
“Nope. I’m Emery. I checked in yesterday,” I say with a smile.
“I remember. And now I’m confused.” He turns to Michael. “Did you show up for your blind date? You know, the one I set up for you?”
“I showed up.”
“So how…” Luke gestures between Michael and me. “How did you two end up together?”
“Everything is fine,” Michael says. “Text Emily if you want to hear what happened. It’s a long story.”
Luke’s already walking away. He puts up his hand in awave. “I’ll let you fill me in tomorrow,” he says. “Have fun, you two.”
Michael turns to me. “I’m sorry about my nosy-ass cousin.”
I laugh. “Maybe we should go somewhere private. I don’t want to disrupt the hosts.”
“We can go to my cabin if you’re okay with that.”
I amsookay with that. “Sure,” I say in what I hope isn’t a squealing-with-excitement-and-lust kind of tone. “That would be nice.”
He puts his arm around me as we start walking back toward the cabins. “You and I never said the names of our friends who set us up, did we?”
“I guess not. I didn’t put it together that one of your cousins set you up. That probably would have clarified how we’d jumbled things.”
“Most likely.” He leans in and nuzzles my cheek. “Although you know what I think?” His whisper is a promise in my ear, and I shiver.
“What?”
“I think we didn’t want to figure out the mix-up,” he says. “Because then, we might not have started talking at the bar.”
“True.” I twist my neck and look up at him as he puts his hand on the small of my back and guides me around the bend in the tree-lined path. “But I disagree with you on that last part. I think weweresupposed to be together tonight. I like to believe in fate.”
“I never was one for things like fate.”
“You’re too logical for that?”
“I’m too pessimistic. But tonight did feel…I don’t know, it felt…” He trails off, and I hear the hesitation in his voice.
I laugh. “It felt like we were destined to meet.”
“Maybe. For me, I felt hopeful for the first time in a long while.” His hand on my back is hot, and I swallow down myurging to ask him to take me right here in the middle of the public walkway.
“Hopeful?”
“Yeah. The second you walked through the door of the bar,” he says, “I had hope.”
Hope.
The word gives me chills.
“What did you hope?” My voice is so quiet I’m not sure he heard me, and he doesn’t answer right away.
But as we reach his cabin and he unlocks the door, Michael says in a low tone, “I hoped you were there for me. I hoped you were my date. To be honest, as soon as you walked away from me outside the coffee shop, I wanted you back, Emery.”
He leans down, and his lips brush mine.
I look into his dark eyes, and the constant current between us sparks into full-on flames.
