Watching him play with Lou is on another level.
I’m not too manly to admit their final duet is killing me.
Especially because I keep catching glimpses of long, wavy auburn hair at the other end of our section, near Lou’s friends.
I know that hair.
It belongs to the woman I met weeks ago at Sugar Maple Farms when I was bartending a wedding as a favor to Lou’s friends. The woman—Kayla—was funny and gorgeous and had a smile that could stop a man’s heart.
But her eyes weren’t smiling.
And she was engaged.
That meant off-limits… even if she was looking for a way out.
"I almost wish I’d catch him cheating," she told me that night, her fingers absentmindedly twisting the massive diamond on her ring—too gaudy for a woman so classy.
I could’ve told her from experience—that’s a terrible way to end things.
"Sounds like you’re looking for a reason to leave him," I said.
She shrugged, but the haunted look in her eyes said so much more.
An intense gaze behind her caught my eye, and I noticed a polished, too-handsome man—the kind of handsome that comes with a Swiss bank account and a whole lot of zeroes—sitting at a table twenty feet away, watching her like a man who had never been told no.
So even though I shouldn’t have said anything, even though she wasn’t mine to save, I opened my mouth.
"The way I see it, wishing you had a reason to leave him is all the reason you need."
"But we make so much sense on paper," she said.
And that, I understood.
Serena and I made sense once, too.
We were from the same town, the same social class (the bottom). I’d been practically helping her raise her daughter from the time she was a baby. By the time we were standing at the altar, Dakota was three, calling me Daddy.
I should’ve seen the cracks—the way she flirted with other guys, tested my limits.
I did see them.
I just didn’t believe I could stand up for myself, for a change.
"Making sense on paper is a relief for future readers, I guess," I told Kayla. "Not sure it’s workin’ too well for you, though."
And she laughed.
It was so unselfconscious, that laugh, and so generous. It could make a guy feel like a million bucks.
Did her fiancé know what he had? Was he as addicted to that laugh as he should be?
Or was he even capable of earning it?
One look at him told me no.
But I couldn’t dwell on that.
As much as I was drawn to Kayla, I wasn’t going to flirt. I would never pursue someone who was with someone else, engaged or not.
