“Need anything else from me?” She had to shout over the crowd noise.
Diego Vasquez shook his head and blew her a kiss. She returned it with a saucy wink, faking enthusiasm she didn’t feel. Thankfully, the handsy nightclub magnate had been too busy overseeing the launch of his namesake nightspot, the new jewel in his Chicago-area entertainment empire, to sling a heavy arm over her shoulders as he had at every step in the planning stages leading up to tonight. Small mercies.
With one last overly enthusiastic thumbs-up, she slipped out the back entrance, praying to the god of new nightclubs that nothing dire happened to summon her back. Once she hit the sidewalk, her body rejoiced at the slight breeze in the mid-June air. Was she getting too old for the club scene? Surely not. Yet her feet hurt, her eardrums throbbed, and she was dying to get home to free herself from her bra and brew a cup of tea. Granny Ryan, in the hizzy.
She might be achieving senior-citizen status in her nighttime tastes, but the thought of stuffing her overheated body into a train car held no appeal, so she secured her purse across her body and prepared to hoof it home in her going-out shoes.
One block into her trip, she realized her fatal error: she was now alone with her thoughts.
Fucking. Engaged.
No matter how loudly her high heels clicked on the pavement, it wasn’t enough to drown out those two little words.
Erik was fucking engaged.
God, she was an idiot. He’d told her he wasn’t married, and that had been good enough for her. She’d thought it was weird that he knew as much as he did about fancy folded napkins and had chalked it up to his job, but maybe it was because he’d been intimately involved in planning his own nuptials.
She reached the intersection where a cluster of pedestrians waited for theWalksign to illuminate, but her feet refused to carry her into the middle of that laughing, jostling throng. Instead, she stepped off the curb and jogged through a break in traffic, ignoring a trailing honk from an irate cabbie. If she didn’t keep moving, she might collapse.
How had she blundered into yet another unwinnable romantic situation? Find a guy unlike anybody you’ve ever dated—hell, unlike anybody you’ve everknown.Slowly allow yourself to enjoy the subtle nuances of his humor, his facial expressions, his way of communicating. Run headfirst into the extremely obvious pleasure of his big, strong body and too-good-to-be-true lips. Get stomped on anyway. Har. Joke’s on Josie.
Good thing they’d only been palling around for a month or so and her feelings weren’t engaged. Just her brain and her body and her pheromones and her taste buds and…
Shit.
She’d fished around in her purse, popped in her AirPods, and was searching for her loudest, most thought-drowning-out-est playlist when the phone buzzed in her hand.
“Hey, doll.”
“Richard!” Oh, she was glad to hear his voice, even if he sounded slurry from fatigue and the beeping, squawking, and intercom noises she associated with hospitals were blaring in the background.
“How’s Byron?” she asked, pausing under the awning of a pizza joint that was still swarming with customers despite the late hour. Her mouth watered at the lingering scent of tomato sauce. If only Richard were in town, she’d grab some takeout and divert to his place for a nightcap of deep-dish and wine.
Instead, her friend yawned so loudly she heard his jaw crack. “I’m hiding out in Byron’s bathroom so I don’t wake him up, but he’s doing lots better. Hating physical therapy and missing Chicago.”
“That’s amazing. I’m so glad!” She stepped aside to give a hand-in-hand couple access to the menu affixed to the restaurant wall, and their lovey-dovey smiles were enough to send her on her way again. “Are you still on track to be home before the wedding?” Part of her question was selfish; she missed her friend and wanted him back in town ASAP. But mostly she hoped the guys could follow through on the celebration they’d been looking forward to for months.
“Yep. He should be discharged tomorrow, so that gives us two weeks to clean up whatever fires you’ve left burning before the big day.”
“Ha.” The only one she could think of was the dumpster fire she’d ignited with the wedding-cake baker. Not that she wanted to talk about that.
“Hey, what did you do to the wedding-cake baker?”
Her feet stuttered to a stop at Richard’s words. “Why?”
He chuckled softly. “Lordy, don’t you sound guilty. He’s just been texting me directly is all.”
“Oh. Well,” she said, dawdling under a streetlight, “it turns out he’s, um, engaged. Or something. I met his fiancée last weekend.”
“Reeeeeally,” Richard drawled.
“We, uh. We kissed.” Huh. Maybe she wanted to talk about it after all. She ignored Richard’s theatrical gasp and continued. “And then this woman showed up at his door and he told me he was engaged. And then his fiancée told me theyweren’tengaged. And then I stormed out. And it’s been six days, and all I’ve gotten is one text from him saying, ‘I’m not engaged. Sorry.’”
Silence reigned on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” she asked. “Did you flatline?”
“Girl. Are you telling me that you kissed Man Bun’s man buns and then ran away, and he texted to tell you he’s single—”
