Her eyes widened. It wasn’t a declaration of love by any means, but for AJ it was a big deal. She knew that. And it meant more to her than any casual ‘I love you’ that had been said to her by every boyfriend and most of her situationships.
She wanted to say something equally romantic, on the same poignant playing field, but before she could, footsteps thundered up the stairs, and Niko appeared at the top landing, hair tousled and out of breath.
“Bro, did you get the ring?”
“No.” AJ didn’t spare his twin even a glance.
“Did you get lost?” Niko’s tone was incredulous.
“I’m going now.” AJ’s eye contact never broke from Poppy.
“Whatever.” Niko turned and went back down the stairs.
When he was gone, AJ said, “I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
AJ’s hands lowered, and he shot her one last look. She couldn’t quite decode it, but it made her feel like he was memorizing the shape of her face, and then he turned and walked into the hall to the library.
The moment he was gone, everything felt heavier. Poppy pressed her palm to her forehead and let herself sway against the wall before walking down the hall back to the sunroom in a daze.
Would every interaction with AJ make her feel intoxicated? Would they all be that potent? Would she ever build up a tolerance or become immune?
She’d never been afraid of desire before, but this was different. This wasn’t a crush or a fling or even love at firstsight. This was something deeper, hungrier, and scarier—a kind of gravitational force that threatened to pull her apart from the inside out.
Because after last night she knew that she didn’t just like AJ. She like-liked him. Super-liked. If they spent a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months together and then he fucked off to whatever new adventure he had in store, where would that leave her? If she let herself fall for AJ,reallyfall for him, then what? What if he left again?
She knew the answer to that question. It would leave her “fresh start” in the town she’d always dreamed of living in filled with a bunch of memories of a man she was madly in love with who happened to be her sister-in-law's brother.
Yeah, AJ was a bad idea. Very, very, very bad idea. The problem was, he was also tempting. Very, very, very tempting, and she’d never been good at resisting temptation. Especially when that temptation came in the form of a six-foot-three, chiseled jawed, honest, intelligent, insanely sexy, best-sex-she’d-ever-had package. So yeah, she was in big, big, big trouble.
21
As the tideof the wedding party swelled around AJ, he found himself in the paradoxical position of being surrounded by people, while simultaneously feeling lonely and distant from the one person whose attention he wanted. He stood at the edge of the sprawling white tent that had transformed Liam’s backyard into another world, strung with fairy lights and garlands of eucalyptus, hoping to make himself invisible to the rest of the attendees while he worked out why Poppy was looking right through him.
The scent of peonies hung thick in the air, they were Frankie’s favorite and must’ve been imported because there was no way they grew like this so late in the season. There was a hardwood dance floor at the tent’s heart, surrounded by a perfect symmetry of twelve round tables, each topped with hurricane lamps and spilling over with more blooms. Poppy flitted from group to group, a social butterfly pollenating each table with her infectious smile, warmth, and authenticity.
He watched her the way he’d observed kinetic gas particles in chemistry class, bouncing off the walls, colliding with other molecules, always in motion. If AJ didn’t know any better, hewould swear that Poppy was avoiding him. At dinner, the seating chart had placed her next to him. He had nothing to do with that. It was how Frankie had designed it autonomously, with zero input from him. But Poppy never even approached their table.
AJ was reduced to observing her from a distance, laughing with the bride, conspiratorially whispering with his aunts, doing the electric slide and Macarena with her nieces and nephews, and sneaking into the kitchen to grab a couple wedding cookies when she thought no one was watching…he was. Which is how he saw tension in the set of her jaw and the way her fingers squeezed the back of a chair until her knuckles turned white. She was, quite literally, white-knuckling it. When he’d run into her in the hallway, she’d mentioned food poisoning. It could be that. But it felt like more. Something was off. Wrong. He’d studied her, memorized her breathing patterns, her speech cadence, her macro-expressions, catalogued them, and was convinced she was suffering.
He was so deep in his worry loop he didn’t register Niko’s approach. His brother materialized beside him, holding two flutes of champagne in one oversized hand.
“What’s goin’ on with you two?” Niko asked, nodding toward Poppy, who was helping her niece fish a cherry out of a glass of ginger ale.
“I don’t know,” he answered neutrally.
Niko eyed him, skeptical. “You like her?”
“Yes.”
“But I mean, do youlike her,like her?” Niko repeated.
AJ understood that by his brother repeating the phrase, there was a different connotation. He also understood they were in their thirties, and he should just ask what he wanted to ask.
“Is she the reason you’re not reenlisting?” Niko pressed, lowering his voice conspiratorially, like this was the kind of thingthat could get back to Uncle Leo and start a civil war. “Is she why you’re moving out here?”
AJ found it absurd that his brother would suggest he’d make life-altering decisions based on what would essentially be the equivalent of a crush. He had no relationship with Poppy. There was no commitment between the two of them. He could measure the effect she had on him, but it was clearly not reciprocal. He couldn’t even get her to look in his direction.
“I never said I was moving here,” AJ corrected his brother.
