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“Turnabout is fair play, my wife.”
“I took off everything except my undies.”
“The black silky ones?” he asks.
My head darts up from the cradle as I glare at Spencer, who’s still face down. “Excuse me, Mr. Nash, but how in the hell do you know that if you didn’t peek?”
“I didn’t peek in here! I swear. At breakfast, when you got out of the booth next to me, your shirt was riding up a little, and, well…I peeked then.”
My cheeks burn again, but you know what? I kind of like the fact that he peeked.
It makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, this drunken mistake could take us from good friends to something else entirely.
The massage therapists return to the room before I get the chance to respond to that, but it’s in my mind the entire time the therapist works my back.
After the couple’s massage that feels like it upped the ante between us a bit, the two of us head for couple’s pedicures, where we find Lincoln and Jolene as they’re about halfway through their own pedicures.
“It’s the groom and his new bride,” Lincoln teases us, and at least the teasing is getting slightly less awkward.
Slightly.
It’s still pretty awkward.
“Oh Linc, knock it off,” his wife scolds him, and she pats the seat beside her. “Let’s chat, Grace.”
I offer a small smile, but I know this woman. She’s a former sports reporter who now runs a popular podcast with her head coach husband, and she’s not afraid to ask the hard questions.
It makes me just a little fearful about what’s coming next, but I take the seat beside her anyway. Spencer sits on the other side of Lincoln, and part of me wishes he would’ve sat beside me. This is supposed to be a couple’s pedicure, after all.
But I suppose my husband and I aren’t really a couple. Yet.
“Tell me about yourself,” she begins, and she grabs the remote and makes some adjustments to the back massager on her chair.
I do the same as I stick my feet into the warm water. “Well, I’m twenty-four, and I’m the hospitality manager at my family’s vineyard.”
“What’s it like having a family vineyard?” she asks. “It sounds so magical.”
I launch into the history and my dream of running the place.
“That sounds really special,” Jolene says quietly. “Heck, it sort of sounds like a dream I’d like, too. Life is just so crazy right now with Josephine and Jonah. I can’t imagine having a calm, quiet place to relax at the end of each day when life is full of chaos right now.”
“It’s a different kind of dream having kids, though,” I point out.
“It is. It’s the best, most wonderful, most frustrating job in the world.”
I laugh.
“Do you want kids someday?” she asks.
I nod. “I always pictured at least two who are close in age. I always wondered what it would be like to have a sister who was my best friend instead of one who hates me.”
“You think she hates you?”
“Well, if she didn’t before, she probably will now that I married her ex,” I point out.
She laughs. “So this wedding was all just a business deal?”
“I don’t know. It all just feels so natural and right with him, and sometimes I think maybe…” I trail off, not sure I should be confessing this to her with him a mere ten feet away.
