When Blake couldn’t find Sully, he faced me again, opening his mouth to say something I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
“Congratulations,” I cut in, flashing him a smile. When his brows furrowed slightly in confusion, I added, “The wedding, the wife, the dream.”
Understanding dawned, and a look of peace and comfort trickled over Blake’s face. “Thank you,” he said warmly. “It certainly has been a dream.”
“I’m so glad.”
And I was. Delaney, his longtime best friend turned wife, seemed lovely. I’d heard about her many times, but we’d never actually met prior to today. Blake would talk about her—almost incessantly, giving Theo and Sully far too much fuel to tease their older brother—when he’d come home during breaks in medical school, and she was essentially everything he’d said: a pretty blonde who was smart and poised and kind.
We’d chatted for a long while earlier. Like Blake, she was a cardiologist, and after she’d learned about my career as a web architect, we took a deep dive into the EHR—electronic health record—that Suffolk County Medical Center uses and how it could be improved. Yes, it was a nerdy-as-hell conversation, but if there was anything that could distract me from the presence of my ex-boyfriend, it was coding. Especially coding that could positively impact critical infrastructures in society, such as hospitals. My day job didn’t have a whole lot of that, unfortunately.
“I would just think that in this day and age, I wouldn’t have to manually input the responses from patient surveys into their charts. Shouldn’t there be some kind of…” She’d waved her hand in the air, trying to conjure the right word.
“Interface, yeah,” I’d filled in for her. “To do it for you.”
“Exactly.”
I’d tapped my lips. “I’ll have to think on that.”
“Oh, you don’t have to.”
“No, I want to,” I’d told her, because I did. Ilikedthat kind of thing. So we’d exchanged numbers, even though I really didn’t need another link to the London family in my life.
But I liked Delaney, I really did. And I was glad that Blake and Noah were proof that at least some of us got everything that we’d ever wanted.
“How have you been?” Blake asked, shaking me out ofthoughts of his wife while cocking his head to the side. He watched me with an intensity I’d come to recognize as uniquely Blake London.
“Pretty good.” I shrugged. “I’m actually in town on a work trip, otherwise I wouldn’t have crashed the party?—”
“You didn’t crash it, Ellie.”
“But I just really wanted to see Chloe while I was here, and Nat says thatmanis picking her up after this because it’s his weekend with her.”
I hated my best friend’s ex with a passion.
Blake’s lips twisted ruefully as he nodded. “Yeah, Chloe’s about to leave with him. I was out front a few minutes ago when he pulled up. Had to walk away because the urge to punch him was becoming too strong.”
I chewed on my lip. “Do you think Nat’s okay? Should I go up there?”
“She’s okay,” Blake assured. “Cameron’s still there, watching the Chloe exchange and unnerving the hell out of Korey.” The corner of his mouth tugged upward.
I raised one brow, glancing at him with interest. Just the fact that Blake was willing to walk away and leave Natalie in her lawyer’s capable hands while dealing with her abusive ex-husband told me all I needed to know about Cameron and their situation.
“Maybe I’ll just check in with her,” I said, and Blake nodded, letting me slip away. “Catch Chloe to say goodbye if I can.”
My best friend and her daughter were probably fine.
But I had a feeling that if I stood there for too long with her eldest brother, he’d turn the conversation back to me again. Or worse, start talking about his brother—the youngest London.
The boy I knew better than anyone else, who grew into the man who knew me better than anyone else.
And now we were like strangers.
It was easier that way, I think.
But I wouldn’t expect Blake to understand that.
Natalie dropped me off at my hotel once the party wrapped up. After I’d caught Cameron asking if she wanted to come over to his place tonight, I had to convince her to leave me to my own devices. I wasnotgoing to be the reason that my best friend didn’t get dicked down by her hot lawyer on one of the rare nights she wasn’t saving lives or being a super-mom.
