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“Sure, that’s definitely the vibe I’m getting from you right now. Fine.” Bitty was staring her down. She was good at it. As a trial lawyer, she had the skills to elicit information she desired, and it seemed she was intent on using them to find out what Lara had gotten involved in.
But Dette’s future was on the line, so Lara was going to have to squirm in the hot seat for now. Playing dumb was a good place to start. “What?”
Bitty’s eyes narrowed. “Oh nothing, I just find it fascinating that while you were ogling your best man at the window, you didn’t recognize him as the guy you boinked in Vegas last month…until Dette reminded you. And I’m really interested in why you changed your clothes and hair at four o’clock this afternoon making yourself look shockingly like your trouble-come-hither sister. So I ask again, what are you doing?”
“Keep your voice down,” Lara whispered between clenched teeth. Heart racing, she scanned for anyone who might have overheard and then grabbed her cousin and pulled her away from the crowd a few paces further. “I know Dette hasn’t always been fair to you, that she’s made some mistakes we’d all like to forget about, but do you really think I’d be doing this if it wasn’t important?”
“Lara, I don’t know what to think. You were on cloud nine waiting for your Cal to show up. Then, the first chance you get to speak to him, you act like someone you are not and pretend to be his crappy fling from Vegas. If Dette made this bed, she should be the one to sleep in it.”
“You think it was crappy between them?” Lara’s hand flew up to cover her eyes. As if the quality of their sex was the thing that mattered. Still, she needed to shake her protective cousin off her guard. “Bitty, there’s more to this one than Dette’s bad judgment.”
Bitty raised one disbelieving eyebrow at her and tapped her foot. “Is there?”
“Yes, you’re just going to have to trust me.”
“Here’s the problem with that, Lara. When it comes to Dette, you walk around with blinders on. She plays you, every chance she gets. Remember when she broke your mother’s vase and she said you did it—”
“No, I agreed to take the fall for that one, she wouldn’t have said it if—”
“She throws you under the bus, every time it drives by. How about the time she wrecked the car because she was drunk, and she made you say that you were driving?”
“She would have gotten a DUI—” Lara shook her head. With Dette, it was never as simple as Bitty made it out to be.
“Yes! Because she drove drunk and crashed a car. She’s not a victim, but you never see it that way. Dette is in trouble all the time, because Dette likes trouble. She likes it wrapped in designer clothes, she likes it at the most exclusive clubs, but no matter how she dresses it up, it’s still trouble. So, this time, why don’t you just let her have it?”
“This time, she’s getting married.”
Bitty’s head dropped forward in a slow nod. “Okay, but you are making a monumental mistake sacrificing your happiness for hers. She wouldn’t do it for you.”
A dark spot of memory flashed fleetingly through her mind.
She was a little girl, crying softly against Dette’s shoulder in their parents’ empty room. Dette whispered into her ear.
“Shh, I’ll get them back for you. Don’t cry. I’ve got a plan for so much trouble, they’ll have to come home.”
Lara met her stare. “That’s not true. You don’t understand.”
Bitty shook her head. “No. You’re the one who won’t understand.” She gave Lara’s arm a soft squeeze and walked back to the guests on the terrace.
A breeze blew through, making the lights strung over the terrace dance. It was a beautiful evening, but Lara had lost her interest in the whole party. She walked back over to the bar and set her ginger ale down. There were a million things to do to get ready for Saturday. Maybe if she went inside and worked on some of them, she’d be able to distract herself from the disaster of her day and save a little stress for everyone else in the week to come.
Lara looked over at Cal seated with two of her uncles and some of Adam’s relatives. He leaned back in his chair, his warm easy laughter echoing across the terrace. She lost all thought of leaving. How could laughter sound sexy? Everyone around him was laughing too. So he was as funny in person as he was in his emails. Lara was never going to forgive Dette for this.
As she watched, Cal leaned forward, grabbed his beer and looked up, catching her eye. Finishing the last swallow, he pushed back from the table and headed her way. Her stomach clenched and the skin tightened across her body. Desperate for something to take her attention off his approach, she grabbed her glass off the top of the bar and took a long sip.
“Interest you in some sex on the beach?”
Lara choked on her soda, nearly spraying a gulp out her nose. “Excuse me?”
Cal looked at her uneasily. “Your drink…in Vegas you said that’s all you ever wanted but, maybe, that was just a come on?”
Heat rose in her cheeks. Dette. “Probably.”
The silence between them hung in the air for a moment until Cal cleared his throat and glanced around at the guests surrounding the pool. “Funny, seems like whenever we’re actually together, we don’t really have anything to talk about, but emailing we hit it off. Maybe we should get our cell phones out and text message each other from across a table.”
A smile curved at one side of her mouth. So, he really hadn’t clicked with Dette in Vegas. And he really had clicked—over the keys anyway, with her.
She looked at Cal’s thick fingers wrapped around the neck of his empty beer bottle. “I don’t know. I have a hard time believing you can manage to dial a phone with those fingers, let alone text a conversation on one of those tiny phones.”
