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I smile back at Hunter. The coordinated effort to make me feel comfortable staying another night… or three… or whatever… makes my heart sing.

“Thanks, I think I will.”

I should put up a fight, for appearance’s sake if nothing else, but I don’t. Staying here is the practical thing to do, after all. There’s really no point in risking the drive when I don’t have anywhere that I have to be. The thought of leaving making my chest tight is just a reaction to the danger of the road, that’s all. Just the road. Nothing else. Certainly not the way Emmett’s shirt feels against my skin at night, or the way Hunter’s eyes crinkle when I cook something he likes, or the way Beau’s ears turn pink when I catch him looking at me. None of that. Just the road.

That afternoon, I’m in the kitchen with Beau and Hunter. I’m messing with my camera and the two of them are trying to figure out a recipe that Beau ate once and Hunter might have the skill to replicate, if only Beau could remember what went into it.

“So it was like cordon bleu, just with sausage and⁠—”

“So pigs in a blanket?”

“No, you ass. It had sauce on it.”

“Saucy pigs,” I interject.

Hunter laughs. Beau’s mouth quirks like he doesn’t want to smile, but almost can’t help it. I wink at him and he rolls his eyes.

“Don’t get me started on saucy pigs,” Beau mutters.

I laugh and snap a picture of the two of them. Beau sticks his tongue out at the camera while Hunter grins at me.

“Keep it up,” Beau says with a joking warning in his tone. “I’ll bomb all your photos.”

“And I’ll cherish each and every bomb,” I flirt back, laughing at the way his ears turn pink. I glance at Hunter and he’s grinning. There’s no sign of jealousy anywhere near his person, even though I’m openly flirting with his brother in front of him, and that lack draws me to him more than ever.

I feel like myself here, like I’m already everything I need to be, that being myself can’t be wrong. With Preston, flirting with another man in front of him would have been unthinkable. Not because he would have yelled or made a scene. Preston didn’t do scenes. He would have gone quiet. He would have driven home in silence and then, later, in bed, he would have said something like, “I just think it’s interesting that you felt the need to do that.” And I would have apologized. I would have apologized and meant it, because I would have genuinely believed that I’d done something wrong.

But here, in this kitchen, with these two men, I’m flirting and laughing and being flirted with and nobody is keeping score. Nobody is filing it away for later. Nobody is going to bring it up in a quiet voice at midnight. The freedom of that is so enormous I almost can’t hold it.

“Okay, okay, back to the dish,” Hunter says. “Were there olives?”

Beau snaps his fingers. “Yes! Olives! Do you know what I’m talking about now?”

Hunter slowly shakes his head. “Not a clue. But we’re getting a recipe list. Follow-up question: do you actually know what cordon bleu is?”

Beau tosses a dishrag at Hunter, who raises his hands in surrender. “Hey! I’m just asking!”

“He thinks your whole palate is prison food,” I comment wryly. I like that I’m comfortable enough to make that joke. I like these guys. More than that, I like who I am when I’m with them.

“Is that it? Is that what you think?” Beau jokingly squares up, lightly jabbing Hunter on the shoulder a few times.

“No! Josie, why’d you throw me under the bus like that? I thought we were friends?”

Their scuffling and my laughter are interrupted by a sound I never expected to hear out here. Someone is knocking at the door.

It startles me so much that my whole body locks up. My hands go still on the camera as my breath catches in my throat, the laughter dying in my mouth like someone flipped a switch. For one terrible, irrational second, the outside world comes crashing back in, and with it every person I’ve been hiding from.

The twins share a glance, then head out to the living room. I follow them, my heart hammering, my fingers cold around the camera strap.

For an instant, the thought that somebody found me flits through my brain and my anxiety spikes. Preston? Mom? Did someone track my phone? Did my mother call the police? I can see it so clearly, a search party, a news crew, my face on a missing persons poster with the caption “Last seen fleeing her own wedding.” My chest tightens and I can feel the panic building, that familiar pressure behind my ribs that makes me want to run.

No. Emmett is opening the door as we walk into the room, and there’s a woman standing there. Not my mother. Nobody that I recognize at all, but Emmett clearly does.

“Denise,” he says in his grumbly way.

The relief that it’s not someone from my old life is so intense that it takes me a second to actually look at her. When I do, something shifts in my chest.

His apparent grumpiness doesn’t seem to bother her at all. She bats her big blue eyes at him. “Hey there, Emmett. I brought your stuff.” She touches his arm, then gestures to the packages behind her, twisting her body and posing like a pin-up model in a parka. “I just need a big, strong man to carry them inside for me.”