“Did you just ask if I’ll stay?”
All I can do is nod, because it feels like such a pathetic question, but I need to know.
“Jane,” he says, a smile forming on his lips. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t think you realize just how much you mean to me. How hard and how fast I’m falling in love with you. I want nothing more than to shout at the top of my lungs how I feel about you, but I know it’ll embarrass you and you’ll run off, so I won’t do any of that, but know that I want to.”
I laugh softly, my heart swelling. A gust of wind blows around us, blowing my blonde waves around my face. Reid reaches his free hand up and brushes my hair out of my face.
“You’re falling in love with me?” I ask, the emotion thick in my throat.
“Oh, I’m way past falling. I’m well and truly in love with you. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I say quietly, the only way the words will come out past the emotion.
Reid’s beaming now as he stares at me. He leans down and presses a soft kiss to my lips. I rest my fingers on the back of his neck and kiss him back with everything in me. Every emotion, every thought, every fiber of my being.
“So yes, to answer your question, I will stay. I will stay forever if you want me to. I’m not going anywhere.”
Reid and I take the long way back, only getting lost twice, until we get back to the villa. My feet are aching by the time we walk up the front steps, so the second I step inside, I bend down and pull off my shoes, hooking them in my fingers. Reid walks in behind me, closing the door softly as he steps in.
I look around the villa for my sister, hoping to talk to her before I go to bed so that I don’t have to the morning of her wedding. Not to fight or even to apologize, just to clear the air.
“Kate?” I call.
“In here!” she calls. I round the corner to her room to find her sitting on her bed in a white pajama set, Lydia next to her in a matching pink set. I stand in my wine-stained dress and Reid’s coat taking in the twins.
“What’s up?” Kate asks.
I stare at her for a moment in disbelief. “I thought you’d still be mad at me.”
She tilts her head to the side. “For what?”
The room feels like it’s closing in on me. I swear my eye twitches as I stare at her in disbelief. Because there’s no way that the big blowout fight back there just fizzled into absolutely nothing in the span of a couple hours.
“Are you serious? For someone else spilling wine on my dress and allegedly stealing your thunder.”
She waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, you know what? It’s fine. I’m over it now.”
I gape at her. “Kate, you just yelled at me and kicked me out of your rehearsal dinner for it.”
“When it wasn’t even Jane’s fault,” Reid chimes in.
I shoot him a grateful smile, but subtly shake my head at him. This is a battle I can handle on my own. When I turn back to face my sisters, my eyes snag on a white slip of fabric on a pearl-encrusted hanger dangling from the curtain rod of her room.
My stomach bottoms out at the straps, the neckline, the fabric.
The lace trim and train I fell in love with when I first saw it on the mannequin in the shop window.
“What’s that?” I whisper, pointing at the dress I pointed out to Kate three months ago.
The dress she said was plain and boring.
The dress that’s now hanging in her bridal suite the night before her wedding.
“What’s what?” Kate’s gaze follows my finger pointing over her shoulder to the white dress hanging in front of the window. “Oh,” she grins. “That’s right, you haven’t seen my dress yet.”
“None of us have,” I mutter, dropping my purse on the bed and walking toward it in the same trance as the day I first saw it in the shop.
Kate spins and practically skips to the dress. “Well, Lydia was with me when I bought it. And mom. Since she technically bought it. But otherwise no one’s seen it. What do you think?”
