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Ashley’s were golden brown, Maude Alice’s a pale gray, so when Davis looked up from her phone, Cole thought she must have gotten her vibrant blue eyes from her dad. He hadn’t met Chuck at Flannelfest, but he’d heard all about what he’d done to the guys, to Madigan and Ashley. He also knew Davis wasn’t talking to him anymore, and he wondered how much that weighed on her. “Where’d you go tonight?” she asked. “I looked for you after dessert, but you were gone.”
“Oh, I just went out,” he said, aiming for nonchalance and probably missing. “Trying to get to know your town a bit better.”
Davis raised a brow, looking somehow exactly like Maude Alice and Ashley at once with the gesture. “Alone?”
“No. Not exactly,” he admitted. “I…was with Mira.”
“Mira Harlow?”
He nodded.
“How do you know Mira?”
“We, uh, met this morning. When I picked up the tarts.”
“And you took her out tonight?” She whistled. “Damn, bro. You move fast.”
He didn’t bother denying it. He had moved fast, sprinting from not knowing Mira at all to wishing he had all the time in the world to get to know her better like he was being chased by a bear. “That’s what they tell me.”
Setting her stare on him, squinting, considering, she said, “You two would actually make a great couple.”
He coughed into his fist, a tiny spark flickering beneath his sternum. Probably heartburn. “Do you have your toast written?” he asked her. “You have to go right before I do, right?”
Picking up her phone, she opened the notes app and flashed her screen at him. “Almost. I’ve never been a maid of honor before. It feels, I don’t know, stressful. The speech is so much harder than I thought it would be.”
“I know,” he agreed. “I’ve been working on mine for weeks. I’ve been completely blocked, until tonight. Until—”
“You found some inspiration?”
At least he’d earned a smile, even if she was giving him hell. “Something like that.” He sat up straighter. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s work on our speeches right now, together. When we’re done, we’ll read each other’s and say nothing but glowing things about them.”
This smile was even more genuine. “I’m down. But we need…” She stood from the table. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
When she walked to the kitchen, Cole realized she was in her pajamas, black fleece pants decorated with tiny red hearts, fuzzy pink slippers. Maybe this was something Davis did when she couldn’t sleep, sat in the dining hall by herself, in the dark. Or maybe it was something else,someoneelse, keeping her up, carving those purple half moons under her eyes.
Returning to the table with two steaming mugs of coffee in her hands, Davis set one in front of him and said, “Thanks for hanging with me, Cole.”
Taking the coffee, even though he knew it would keep him up for hours, he said, “My pleasure.” When he pulled his phone out of his coat pocket to start working on his toast, a grin spread across his face at the text waiting for him.
Mira: Thanks for a great fake date.
Typing—
Cole: Fake date, real feels.
—he hit send, opened his notes app, nodded at Davis, and said, “Let’s do this.”
* * *
“I can’t believeyou’re torturing us like this on your wedding day,” Sam grunted, reaching to the side, stretching his deeply tanned twenty-something body into triangle pose.
Reaching calmly toward his ankle, Madigan said, “Snowga is hardly torture. But we can stay in triangle for an extra minute if you’d like.”
When Mad had asked him earlier in the morning if he’d wanted to come to pre-wedding yoga with the guys from Little Timber, Cole thought they’d be stretching out in the lodge like sensible, rational humans. If he’d known they’d be half-naked assuming downward dog in four inches of snow, his answer might have been different.
Bracing against a sharp pain in his side when he’d tried to touch his foot, his indignation intensifying, Cole hissed, “Shit.”
“No swearing,” a new resident named Thom said. Rail thin with shaggy brown hair, Thom had a tight, jittery cackle that would give a hyena a run for its money. It made Cole strangely uncomfortable, until he realized why. Madigan had laughed like that when he’d been using. “Learned that one the hard way.”
