But when Layla Bailey suddenly bumped against him—the blade of her right shoulder against his chest, the curve of her ass against his hip, even the sharp point of her heel pressing into the top of his shoe, against a couple of his toes—absolutely no part of him hurt.
He made a noise, though. A muffled grunt that had nothing to do with the held-breath silence Griff had long ago practiced keeping when he was in pain. It was shock, that was the thing, and pain never really shocked him anymore.
But this did. The feel of her did. Her body against a part of his he hadn’t prepared for. Not like a few seconds of holding her soft, cool hand, not even like setting his own to the impossibly smooth skin of her arm. Those were the sort of deadened, rote actions he performed with something else in the front of his mind: get her out of the car, get her away from this pursed-lipped mother-of-the-bride woman who already had a bead on something going on between Michael and Emily. If those actions felt nice or not, he didn’t let himself notice.
Or he didn’t let himself linger on the noticing.
But this was something else.
This was the sort of feeling you got when you were fully alive, and Griff couldn’t remember the last time he’d been that.
“Oh!” she said, lifting her foot from his, taking a step forward, but he had not yet taken his hand from her arm, which was a decision he could not explain except to say that it was not a decision at all. So now, he stood behind her, a narrow slice of air between them, something huge and unfamiliar beating against the sealed-shut coffin of his body, hoping she couldn’t hear it.
Still touching her.
That’s how he knew, in the end, that the ex had shown up—from touching Layla. Another thing he could not explain: what precisely he felt that told him so. Nothing so simple as a change to her posture, which settled quickly back into the straightness he’d now seen each time he’d been in her presence; nothing so obvious as goose bumps or a flush of heat on her still-smooth, cool skin.
Butsomething.
His fingers curled of their own accord, pressing lightly into the soft cords of her bicep, his confused, ticking-time-bomb of a body grasping blindly at trying to figure hers out.
Meanwhile, hewasstill seeing—at a remove, maybe, given the chaos happening throughout the rest of him—but he was seeing. The man who’d just arrived, her ex, tall and tidy and dark blond like Emily, clean-shaven and smooth-skinned, a guy with the kind of blandly handsome face that you might see reading off the news on your local channel, a smile quirking when the story was uplifting, a brow furrowed when the reporting was grim.
Like it was now.
When he looked at Layla.
Griff immediately, irreversibly hated him.
“Jamie,” Layla said quietly, which made Griff hate the man even more.
She stepped away then, his fingers curling on nothing now, and something in him—the huge and unfamiliar something, the fully alive something—said,Wait.
But with no small effort, he silenced it. Dropped his hand to his side, tucked it back into his pocket, pretending that he was pressing his palm over the mouth of that rogue voice. No time for new voices. He snapped his eyes to Michael, who had a protective arm around Emily, both of them looking between Layla and the new arrival with expressions of barely contained dread.
Fuck.
Before the collision that had momentarily distracted him, Griffin had been doing exactly what Layla Bailey had dared him to do, which meant he’d been watching. At first, her easy smiles and self-assured small talk had impressed and annoyed him in equal measure, but neither feeling had been enough to get him to look away. Instead, he’d been watching when cracks started showing up in the facade: first, when she’d been speaking to the woman who was wearing what looked to Griffin like a triple string of gigantic chestnuts around her neck, and then, a few minutes later, when she’dmade her way over to interrupt a tense conversation between Emily and her mother.
Even from where he stood, Griffin had been able to see the way Layla’s skin blanched at whatever was being said. By the time he’d heard Emily’s voice rising into a near-hysterical pitch, he’d been on the move, an old, flailing anger rising up inside him.
All he wanted was to help Michael, help him get the happiness he deserved, and why couldn’t any of thesefuckingpeople do what they were supposed to do and let it happen?
And now, the ex was here, and he knew that whatever conversation had made Layla turn gray-white had to do with him.
Or him and—as Griffin realized now—his guest.
Hisguest. A young woman, mid-twenties, maybe, surely no older than Emily. Short and scared-looking, in a bright, floral-printed dress and a pair of heels she was teetering in.
He made a fist with the hand in his pocket, controlling an impulse. It didn’t make any sense to want to grab Layla’s arm again.
He did not grab anything unless he absolutely had to.
Instead, he went back to watching: this time, with the keen awareness that everyone on the deck of this boat seemed to be doing the same, a collective breath-holding that Griffin probably could’ve registered as being an added cruelty, were he not so focused on what additional mess this was going to cause to an evening that was already going off the rails.
“Jamie,” Layla said again as she stepped forward, but this time it sounded different—pleasant and welcoming, as if she herself were the hostess of this whole thing. She extended a single arm—not the one Griffin had been holding—and leaned into the man in a perfectly executed half hug. Shoulders leaned in, hips tilted back, no lingering, not even long enough for Jamie to get a hand all the way around her waist.
Griffin wondered whether it hurt. Whether even that fleeting touch made everything inside her curl and shrivel and scream.
