Page 18 of Give In

It is enough to make me feel like I’ve touched a live wire.

When dinner ends and the tables begin to clear, I excuse myself with the intention of finding her before she can disappear. She is faster though. By the time I’ve extracted myself from a conversation with the wedding coordinator about tomorrow’s timeline, Clover is gone.

I stand at the edge of the emptying terrace and look out at the dark water and think about a woman with amber eyes who is somewhere in this building right now probably convincing herself that last night was a pleasant accident and nothing more.

She is wrong.

“Heath.” Graham’s voice comes from behind me.

I turn. He and Bram are at a table nearby, the remnants of the dinner crowd thinned out around them. They are wearing matching expressions of the sort that have historically preceded advice I didn’t ask for and needed anyway.

I walk over.

“What’s going on with you and the bride’s sister?” Graham asks.

I don’t ask him how he figured it out. Graham has always been able to read a room the way other people read text. It is occasionally useful and frequently irritating.

“I take it she’s who gave you that love bite?” Bram says.

“She is. We didn’t know we were here for the same wedding. We met on the plane.”

Graham lets out a low sound. “What are the fucking odds?”

“I’d rather not figure out the statistics on that.” I pull out a chair and sit.

I know my brother well enough to know that he’s not done talking to me about this. I might as well be comfortable.

“So what are you going to do?”

“My plan had been to catch her before she ran off so we could talk. But she’s already disappeared.”

“Don’t you own this place?” Bram asks.

“I do.”

“Seems like it could be pretty damn easy to find her.”

“Is it really that simple though?” I ask. “What the hell am I going to say?” I scrape a hand down my face. “And what the hell do I say to Leo?”

“If she wasn’t the bride’s sister, what would you say about her?” Graham asks.

“That she was not a one-night stand for me. She was so much more.”

Graham is quiet for a moment. He reaches for his glass, turns it once in his hand. “Sometimes you know when you know,” he says.

It’s not nothing, coming from him. My brother spent the better part of fifteen years being absolutely certain he would never be the kind of man who would fall head over ass in love. But then Lizzie happened and rearranged everything he had constructed in his well-ordered life. He says it like someone who has earned the knowledge.

“And sometimes even when you know, you’re a dumbass about it,” Bram says, elbowing him.

“You really want to go there, old man?” Graham asks. “We can call Emma over here and she can tell us all about your dumbassery.”

“That’s not even a word,” Bram says.

“Any advice?” I ask.

“Go with your gut and your heart,” Graham says. “Our brains are dumb as shit.”

I stand. “If Leo asks where I am⁠—”