Page 108

Paul takes a step forward. “Who on earth are you?”

Hunter flashes his charming smile and holds out his hand. “Hunter Rourke. Pleasure to meet you, mister…?”

“Paul. Paul Blanche.”

“Mr. Blanche. Lovely party, isn’t it?” Hunter seems completely at ease. He’s got his hands in his pockets now, rocking back on his heels like he’s at a neighborhood barbecue. Like he belongs here. Like belonging is something you carry with you instead of something other people decide to give you.

Mary and Jackie do not share his ease. They’ve gone pale and stiff, clutching their drinks like shields. Beau and Emmett are hulking behind Hunter, just standing there, not smiling, not performing, just existing in a way that takes up more space than this room knows what to do with. Mary and Jackie shrink away from them and I get a spark of realization. They all see my men the way I did when I first arrived at the cabin. Rugged, rough, and almost frightening. But I know better. I know these men better than I’ve known practically anyone.

The whole room has gone quiet. Not all at once. It happens in a wave, like a ripple moving outward from the front door. Conversations die mid-sentence. Champagne flutes pause halfway to lips. Heads turn, one after another, a slow cascade of curiosity and alarm. I can feel the weight of every pair of eyes in this room shifting from me to them and back again. Whispers start up almost immediately, the kind that travel behind cupped hands and over the rims of glasses. Loads of rumors and theories are being born right here, right now, and I can practically hear them forming. Who are they. Why are they here. Is that who she was with. Look at them. Look at her looking at them.

I open my mouth to say something, my heart in my throat, but before I can, Mom is hustling over with Dad in tow. She moves through the crowd the way she always does, a woman who has never once doubted her right to part a room. But her eyes are panicked. I can see it in the tightness around her mouth, the way her smile is pulled too wide, the way her hand is gripping Dad’s arm hard enough to wrinkle his sleeve. She’s terrified, and she’s hiding her terror behind the sharpest smile in her arsenal.

“Josie! Who are your friends?” Mom asks, her voice strained. She says friends the way you’d say cockroaches.

“Hi! I’m Hunter, this is Emmett, and that’s my brother Beau. We met Josie in the mountains.” Hunter gives her his classic grin. The one that could charm the bark off a tree. It has absolutely no effect on her. She looks at him the way she looks at a stain on a tablecloth, something to be dealt with quickly and never spoken of again.

“You—” Mom turns to me. “This is who you stayed with?” she hisses through her teeth, low enough that only the nearest guests can hear, which is still too many.

She doesn’t wait for a response before sizing the guys up. I see them through her eyes and my stomach drops. The worn boots, scuffed and salt-stained. Emmett’s wild beard. Beau’s tattoos, visible where his sleeves are pushed up. Hunter… well. Hunter’s just big and covered in flannel. He’s the most presentable of the three and he still looks like he wandered in from a logging camp. I see the judgment crystallize in her eyes, sharp and final, and I cringe. I wouldn’t change them for the world, but I have to wonder if they wish they were wearing different clothes under her scathing gaze.

“I see,” Dad says, stepping up beside Mom and backing her the way he always does. His voice is mild but firm, the voice of a man who has spent thirty years agreeing with his wife in public. “And why are you here? This is a private party.”

Hunter turns his beaming smile to Dad. “Josie invited us, of course.”

I did? When? How? I don’t know, but I’m going to go with it for their sake. I nod, a tiny, jerky motion that I hope looks more confident than it feels.

“Did she not tell you about the dress code?” Mom asks, still trying to be polite. Her voice has that brittle quality it gets when she’s one wrong answer away from dropping the act entirely.

“She told us to dress festive,” Hunter explains, and I still don’t remember telling them anything of the kind. “What’s more Christmassy than flannel?”

A few people in the crowd laugh. Nervous, uncertain laughter, the kind that happens when nobody knows whose side they’re supposed to be on. Mom’s head snaps toward the sound and back, her cheeks blooming with two bright-red spots.

“Well, we’re at capacity. We can’t have more guests.”

“Two couples left as we were arriving,” Hunter points out. “You’re well under capacity now.”

Mom huffs, her polite demeanor cracking like thin ice. She takes a step forward, looking up at Hunter like she’d prefer to be eye-to-eye and toe-to-toe with him. She barely comes up to his chest. The height difference would be comical if the tension weren’t so thick.

“You know, Josie was once engaged to the most eligible bachelor in the city. Now she’s ‘friends’ with you cavemen?” She turns on me, glaring, and I can feel the full weight of her disappointment like a physical thing pressing on my chest. “You’ll never find anybody better than Preston,” she declares.

Hunter snorts. “That wet rag will never find anybody better than Josie.”

The silence that follows is deafening. I hear someone gasp. I hear a glass clink against a table. Mom’s mouth drops open and she makes a scandalized noise, a sharp intake of breath that she turns into a huff. She shares a look with Dad, who simply shrugs. They’ve emptied their arsenal, and they can’t force the guys to leave without causing an even bigger scene than the one that’s already unfolding.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Mom hisses at me. She takes Dad’s arm and turns around, stalking away from the guys with her back ramrod straight and her heels clicking on the hardwood like punctuation marks. The crowd parts for her the way it always does. Dad gives me a look over his shoulder, not angry, not disappointed, just tired and a little bit curious, before he follows her.

I watch them go, then turn to the guys. I’m still stunned to see them, and couldn’t get my mouth working that whole time. My hands are shaking. My eyes are burning. The room is still watching us, dozens of faces turned our way, but for the first time tonight I don’t care. I don’t care what any of them think. I don’t care what stories they’re building in their heads right now. Because Beau is smiling at me. His beautiful, quiet, rare smile, the one that changes his whole face, the one that makes his eyes go soft and warm and makes me feel like I’m the only thing in the world worth looking at.

“You weren’t kidding about your family,” he says in a low voice. “They are a lot.”

I huff a laugh, but it comes out shaky and wet. “They are. But seriously… why are you here?”

Beau shrugs, like driving hours down a mountain on a winter night is nothing. Like it was the obvious choice. “You called. You said you needed us.”

My breath catches. The voicemail. Oh god. The voicemail.

Emmett’s lips turn upward a little behind his thick, mountain man beard, his gray eyes soft in a way that undoes me completely. “We looked up your parents on social media. Your mom posted about the party. She’s not very savvy about internet safety, is she?”