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“Don’t get any ideas,” she said. Then, “Finn, get off my bed.”
I had put her bag down, and I stretched my legs out on the bed and propped pillows behind me against the headboard. “There’s nowhere else to sit,” I argued innocently, and then I patted the bed next to me. “Have a seat. I’m a gentleman, I swear.”
She didn’t take me up on it. “Go fuck yourself,” she said, but I didn’t miss the way her gaze darted over me before landing back at my face. My coat was off, and I had a regular routine of running, sit-ups, and push-ups. I wasn’t bulky, but my stomach was flat, and my biceps were decent below the sleeves of my crisp white T-shirt.
“Finn,” she said, unaware of the way my name in her mouth made the hair prickle on the back of my neck. “How do you know where I live?”
I gave her a grin. “I have an inside source.”
“Alistair?”
“Alistair doesn’t have your address, only your phone number. I figured you would hang up on me, so I had to go deeper.”
She looked horrified. “You called my mother?”
“Josie likes me,” I argued. “She thinks I’m charming and sweet. I sent her flowers for her fiftieth birthday.”
She was so easy to read. She hadn’t known that I sent flowers to her mother. Juliet was very good at willfully ignoring the fact that we were part of an extended family. That ended now.
“Oh, God,” she said, as if reading my mind. “Is this visit about that fucking wedding?”
I nodded. “This is, in fact, about that fucking wedding. And the fitting weekend that we’re going to. Where you’re the maid of honor, and I’m the best man.”
She dropped to sit on the foot of the bed. She kept her gaze trained on the wall, not on me, so I let myself look at the line of her neck where her hair was tied up, the set of her chin, the silver hoop earring in her earlobe. She looked good. Older and wiser than the girl she’d been, her cheekbones sharper, but she was still brimming with restless energy and life, as if she was about to spill over. It was hard to look away.
“I can’t do the fitting weekend,” she said. “I already told them. I can only do one day.”
“It’s a weekend, so you’re doing the weekend.”
She gave me a glance of withering scorn. “I’m sure it’s easy for you to take a weekend in a posh Seattle hotel. It isn’t like you have anything else going on.”
An insult. I gave her a dead-eyed stare. “The hotel isn’t that posh, unless you book the penthouse suite.”
The scorn got even more withering. “Which, of course, you did.”
“What can I say? I like comfort.”
“Finn, I get that you have tons of money and time on your hands, so it isn’t a big deal to you that the wedding got out of hand. But it’s a big deal to me. I’m working.”
Her tone said that, unlike her, I most definitely didn’t work. It was starting to needle me. It was intended to.
“Look,” I said. “This is family. Your sister. My brother. They’ve been stupidly in love for a decade, so I’m going to assume that this is the only time that either of them will get married. You have no other siblings, so unless your mother remarries, this will be the only family wedding you ever have to go to. Call me crazy, but I think you should show up.”
“I planned to show up,” she argued back, her cheeks going red. “I agreed to a simple wedding, not a circus with other bridesmaids and dresses and fitting weekends. I got an email from one of the other bridesmaids about organizing the bachelorette party.” She swiped the strands that had come loose from her ponytail from her face. “I thought I’d take Vicki out to a dive bar for a few shots, and now there’s supposed to be a party? What the hell do I know about organizing a party?”
“Then I’ll help you,” I said.
“I don’t need your help.” She leaned toward me, and without thinking, I leaned toward her, too, as if she was a planet and I was in her gravitational field. “What I need is to keep my head down and make the most of this opportunity with the Road Kings. I need to be focused.”
“Yeah?” I raised my eyebrows. “Now whose career isn’t going so well?”
We locked gazes. I wanted to kiss her. I could nearly taste her already, could imagine what her mouth would feel like on mine. Juliet was a mystery to me, yet she was also terrain I already knew. Maybe because I had already imagined kissing her a thousand times, starting that night in my half-dark kitchen.
As if reading my mind yet again, she said, “You know, when we first met, I actually thought you were a nice guy.”
“I am nice,” I shot back. “Let me tell you how nice I am. If you do the fitting weekend and the wedding—the bachelorette, all of it—I’ll pay you twenty thousand dollars.”
She went pale, her eyebrows dark slashes of outrage. “You what?”
