“You know how to waltz?”
I look up at him curiously. “No. Why?”
“Count the triple beats.” He steps forward, and I fly into a fit of giggles when he starts dancing me around the kitchen.
“You never did this at the club in New York,” I reminisce.
“And miss out on watching you use me like a stripper pole?”
“I did not!” I baldly retort, knowing full well I did just that. I got so drunk that night, downing tequila like it was water, hoping it would erase the pain of remembering.
“Agree to disagree,” he says, pirouetting me under his arm.
My cheeks hurt from the huge smile cemented across my face by the time he finishes and dips me low to the floor.
“You just fulfilled one of myDirty Dancingfantasies,” I tell him.
“Never seen it,” he says, not wasting the opportunity to kiss me.
His kisses leave me breathless. Every damn time.
“We’ll remedy that tomorrow night. I’ll even recreate the sexy kitten crawl.”
My body flies forward when he lifts me upright in his arms, and I catch the heated interest in his gaze. “Have no clue what that means, but I like the sound of it.”
Kissing the hollow of his throat, I ask, “Want a preview?”
His grip around my waist tightens. “Fuck, yes.”
I jump when a throat clears. “Hope we’re not interrupting,” Daniel says from the archway, Drew right beside him.
“You are,” Fallon replies, and I smack his chest before wriggling out from his grasp and launching myself into Daniel’s arms.
“Missed you so much,” I exclaim, then reciprocate my enthusiastic hug with Drew. “Missed you, too,” I tell him, kissing his weathered cheek.
There was a time when we thought we’d lose him to the brain tumor, but with surgery, chemo, and new therapies, Drew won his battle against the glioma. He’s been in remission ever since. But every cancer is different, and no matter how hard Ryder fought to live—god, how he fought with everything he had in him—the cancer ultimately took him. I could never go back to my job at Duke after that. I couldn’t continue to work there, knowing the disease I spent my adult life researching was the one that stole my husband from me.
Daniel holds out his hand for Fallon to shake. “Fallon.”
“Mr. Carter. Mr. Mayfield,” he says to Drew.
Drew loops his arm around me as I balk at their familiarity with one another. Daniel and Drew never met Fallon in person, not even at the wedding, because Fallon stood in the distant background, watching from afar, then left right after Ryder and I said our vows.
“How do you know each other?”
“Business acquaintances,” Fallon replies, but I’m not buying that’s the whole story. “I’ll let you and Elizabeth catch up.” I get a quick kiss before he exits through the back door and out onto the veranda.
Daniel and Drew watch Fallon go, silence filling his wake.
Knowing what’s coming, I busy my nervousness with getting out the carton of eggs and grabbing the bottle of olive oil from the back counter. “Ready to be put to work?” I ask, setting the oven to preheat.
“Delaying tactics won’t work, sweetheart,” Daniel says.
“I can try. How was the conference?”
Finding the baking pans in the bottom cabinet, Daniel passes them to Drew, then starts cracking eggs into the large metal bowl of my stand mixer.
“Eventful.” Drew grabs a stick of butter from the inside upper drawer of the fridge and rubs it over one of the pans to grease it.
