I stand and put my hand in his. “Fine.”
He wraps one arm around me and tucks our intertwined hands between us.
I angle my head so I’m looking over his shoulder, and for the first time tonight, I follow his lead, swaying my hips with his. This isn’t the Shag, we’re just dancing.
“Not so bad, now is it?” he says into my ear.
“Worse, actually.”
He vibrates with a laugh before tightening his grip and pulling me flush to him. Awareness follows at every point of contact.
“I’ve missed dancing with you,” he says easily. “Isn’t it weird that it only took three months of us being together to make something I’ve missed for eight years?”
I grip him a little tighter. “It was ninety-nine days,” I correct him.
“Was it?”
It was. “Four days of May, all of June, July, and August, then three days of September.”
I know I’m not wrong because I relived our days together for years. Analyzed them like tea leaves, trying to predict his return.
“Ninety-nine days then.” We sway. His palm slides down the line of my hip before slipping to the small of my back. “Ninety-nine days and I still don’t love the idea of you marrying someone else.”
I let out a breath. “Okay, well I don’t think that’s your concern.” A rumble of thunder rolls across the night sky. “Just like the fact you have a ring to do the very same thing isn’t my concern.”
“And what if I told you that ring wasn’t for anyone else?”
My chin jerks back so I meet his eyes. “You just collect stunning rings in your drool-worthy nightstands?”
“Ah,” he says knowingly. “So youdothink it’s stunning.”
I pin him with an annoyed look as his fingers tap a line up my spine.
“Humor me,” he continues. “If the ring wasn’t for anyone else—” He releases me to twirl, then pulls me back to him. “If I told you that I saw it one day years ago and it reminded me of you, so I bought it on the off chance you’d show up one day.”
I stop dancing and drop my hands by my side. “Did you?”
“If I did?” he asks. “Hypothetically.”
He did. It’s all over his face and supercharges the energy in the air. Inflates it with yearning. So much yearning that I’m betraying Jonathan by simply having the thoughts I’m having, even though not one of them is sexual. Every single thought I have toward Nash right now is centered around the bone-breaking wish he never left to begin with.
I bat my tongue around my mouth. “I’d tell you that you wasted your money.” Thunder rolls and the air fills with that classic rain-on-dirt smell that comes right before the sky opens up. “And remind you that I’m engaged and the history book on you and me closed after ninety-nine days.”
His lips tug to one side. “Then I’d ask what this guy has that I don’t.”
“The ability to sit still, for one,” I snark.
“I’ve been here for three years.”
“He’s in Fontain.”
“I can be in Fontain.”
I scoff, voice raising slightly. “Then why haven’t you been? Huh? If it’s just that easy, Nash, why didn’t you come back?”
“You told me not to,” he counters, heat creeping into his voice. “Remember that? I think what you said was, ‘Grow the fuck up and never come back.’ Ring a bell?”
I glare at him. “And yet you forgot to do the most important part.”
