Page 219 of In Somnis

Ridge.

The stomach-dropping awareness of both of them, and the fact that I am currently kissing neither of them, and the further fact that I have been kissing neither of them, plural, in various states of dreaming, waking, and general emotional chaos, and that Nevan does not know any of this, and that I have just…

This is Nevan.

Oh God.

I pull back.

My hand comes up between us on pure instinct, fingers spread wide, and I stare at them in the fairy lights like I’ve been trained to, counting quickly, waiting for them to look…

Five. Normal. All of them exactly the right shape.

“Lemon. You okay, baby?”

I look up at him.

He’s still crouched between my knees, one hand braced on the swing rope beside me, the other hovering in the space between us like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to close the distance again. His eyes are doing the thing I can’t look at directly right now, being open, warm, and patient in a way that makes the whole situation approximately forty percent worse.

Which is, objectively, a fair response to me doing a reality check immediately after he kissed me.

I press his shoulder for him to back up and stand, and then I walk, not away from him exactly but forward, because it’s the only direction my body has access to right now, and my brain is doing the emotional equivalent of a blender that someone turned on without the lid.

I have been kissed by—or kissed—or done things adjacent to kissing with—three separate men, which is three more than the six months before that, and I am apparently handling this by developing feelings for all of them simultaneously like some kind of catastrophic overachiever.

I am, without question, a terrible person.

I push back through the door into the inn and immediately into the noise, the bodies, and the Halloween playlist, and Jasper materializes out of nowhere as if he has a radar for when I’m about to do something stupid.

“Hey,” He grabs my arm. “What happened? Where’s Nev?”

“I don’t know.” I gently remove his hand and keep moving.

“Lenny, your face is doing the thing⁠—”

“I’m fine, Jasper.”

He doesn’t look convinced, but a guest cuts between us with a happy birthday banner, and I use the gap without guilt. I slip through the crowd toward the front door, moving faster than I technically need to, because I can hear Nevan behind me now—not close, but there, his voice doing the apologetic thing it does when guests stop him, and he can’t be rude about it. I need about forty-five seconds of air and open space to figure out what is happening in my chest before I can use words about it.

I push through the front door and stop on the porch, pulling in a breath of cold air. The cold helps, marginally. My face is still hot, and my chest is still doing the blender thing, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say to Nevan when he catches up with me, which he will, because that’s what Nevan does.

He shows up. He crouches in fairy lights with his hands on my face and kisses me as if he means it and then looks at me with those gray eyes all open, patient, and…

God. I kissed him back.

I kissed him back, and it was good, and I felt it. I also thought about two other people in the same breath, which makes it clear that I don’t deserve any of them, and standing out here in a yellow dress, having a crisis about it isn’t fixing anything. I should go back inside, find Nevan, and say something that resembles a coherent…

Derek’s car pulls into the lot, my poor, already overreacting heart does a full, traitorous flip, because Ridge is in the passenger seat.

This development is really not helpful.

But he came.

Derek goes to the back and hauls the wheelchair out of the trunk, wheels clicking softly over the uneven gravel as he brings it around to Ridge. He pulls the door open, and I can see from here that they’re arguing about something.

Ridge’s hand cuts through the air in frustrated movements. Derek’s jaw is tight as he argues back, but Ridge gestures toward the porch. I look around at the guests with drinks and the staff clustered by the garden gate, hearing the pockets of laughter drifting across the cold evening.

It’s an audience.