“So you fell in love quickly?” I ask Mason.
Adrianne is the one who answers, though. “In just a weekend,” she says. She reaches for Mason’s hand, and he turns it palm up, intertwining their fingers. “It was fast and crazy, but…here we are.”
“I knew immediately you were the one,” he says. He looks around the table. “I guess I was just smart enough to know without needingyearsto see it. I mean, Iama genius.”
Everyone laughs as if this is also a commonly heard phrase.
“Well, Carver knew as a toddler,” Kaelyn says, giving her husband a dazzling smile. “He must be the smartest of all.”
Harlow snorts and looks at her fiancé. “Yeah, it tracks that it tookyoua while, huh?”
“Me?” Jefferson says. “I knewwaybeforeyoufigured it out. Who’s the smarter of the two of us then?”
Margot and Graham just look at each other and shrug, then laugh.
I look across the table at Ginny. She looks from her parents to me, her soft smile fading into a look of trepidation.
I mouth,I’m a genius too.
Her smile dies, and she sighs.
CHAPTER 5
GINNY
I’m not shockedto find the light on in the kitchen even at ten after midnight.
There’s no way I’m the only one in the house who is sneaking down for a second helping of pie.
Okay, so it’s my fourth helping. Who’s counting?
Iamvery surprised, however, to find that the person sitting at the counter with a fork in his hand is Everett.
After having dessert with him earlier and watching him eat half a piece of every single kind of pie, I am not surprised that he has the caramel apple pie in front of him, though. He really seemed to like that one earlier. Not that I was paying attention to every single thing the guy did all day long.
Ugh. I was. I totally was. No matter how hard I tried not to.
“My brother told my mom that you don’t like pie,” I say walking into the kitchen.
If it were any other incredibly hot guy, with whom I’d had amazing sex that I’m still not over, I would feel self-conscious about the short shorts and oversized sweatshirt I’m wearing.
But I am trying to convince Everett that he does not want me. Our physical chemistry is impossible to deny, so the more I do to be unattractive, probably the better.
I also have my hair pulled back and my makeup scrubbed off.
I really was trying to sleep.
And if anyone asks whether Everett is part of the reason it was difficult, I will absolutely deny it.
But fuck.
When he looks up at me with a smile, his fork held halfway to his very talented mouth as if pointing directly at those lips that I remember all too well, I take in the way his biceps bulge against the soft cotton of the T-shirt he’s wearing, the dark scruff on his jaw, his tousled hair, and those fuck-I’m-in-trouble glasses.
He’s also wearing gray sweatpants, but thank God he’s sitting down. I can’t take that too.
“I don’t like pie,” he says. “But your mother’s is the exception. Does she make anything that’s not amazing?”
I pad over to the kitchen cabinets and remove a plate. “No,” I say honestly. “It’s all fantastic. I went out for sports in high school just because of her and that bakery. I hate sports. Playing them anyway. I like watching most of them.”
