“Wereyounot listening when I said this note proves he’s into you?” Dante asked, grabbing it from where he’d left it on the counter. “Look how sweet and tender and unsure this is. His hand’s wobbling. You can see he’s thinking about the past from the way it gets bigger as he goes along, like a child’s. All that adds up to him being shaken and thinking about what things were like when you were kids and nothing was complicated.”
“You’re fortune telling withhandwritingnow?” I asked, squinting at the note. Did Harvey’s handwriting get bigger as it went? I couldn’t really tell.
“It’s called graphology,” Dante sniffed. “And they use it in court, so there.”
I thought maybe, if theydiduse it in court, that it wasn’t quite the way Dante was using it right now. People did not get convicted of murder over shaking hands, or they’d never drink coffee, and I’d go out of business.
Theo barked, alerting me that someone was at the counter.
I turned, and my stomach dropped into my ass.
Liam.
With flowers?
He smiled that uncertain, boyish smile that’d always won me over in the past, holding them out to me.
“Heard you got hit by a car,” he said. “Wanted to come in and check if you were okay.”
A suddenly dry throat made me swallow, and every single word I knew chartered a flight to get out of my brain at record speed.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes you got hit by a car, or yes you’re okay?” Liam asked.
“I’ll get a vase,” Dante said, clearly realizingIwasn’t about to get one.
“Yes to… both?” I asked. It wasn’t meant to be a question, but I was already feeling off-balance this morning, and Liam suddenly appearing wasn’t helping.
I’d seen him around town since he’d apologized to me and left me outside the county courthouse to explain to the handful of friends and relations we’d invited that the wedding was off, but he hadn’t spoken to me since.
Liam raised an eyebrow and handed the gas station bouquet to Dante when he came back with an iced coffee glass that was about to start an exciting new career as a vase.
“Also heard you’ve got a new fiancé,” he said.
Shit.
Shit.
I should’ve known that’d come back to bite me in the ass.
“How did you—”
Oh, wait. His sister was a nurse at Otter Bay General.
“Hope says he’s handsome and charming,” Liam continued. “And called Harvey.”
Dammit.
Hope was a sweetheart and I’d always liked her, but she’d really dumped me in it this time.
The bell over the door jingled again, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Liam. Hell, even if I could have, he was close enough and broad enough to completely block the view from this angle.
I could’ve told him the truth, that it’d all been a lie so Harvey could stay with me in the hospital, that he was actually the one who’d run me over, but…
Harveywascharming and handsome, and Liam had left me, and what if he thought, just for a little while, that someone else wanted me?
“Yeah,” I said before I could talk myself out of it. “Yeah, Harvey and I are engaged.”
