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I grin around the edge of my glass. “Even if he was loaded?”
“Even then,” she confirms before turning up a curious brow. “Are you telling me you would?”
“At this point in my life, I’d do some questionable things for even one night of pretending I’m someone else.”
“Molly…” Piper chastises me. She never likes it when I talk badly about myself.
“I’m serious. Imagine how unstoppable I’d be if I were more confident, like you.” I nudge her playfully. “If you were up there right now, you’d have this whole place bidding for a single hour with you.”
“I don’t want to hear that shit,” she mutters, nudging me back. “You don’t need confidence with a heart like yours.”
God, how pathetic does that sound?
“Yeah, well, my heart isn’t scoring me any dates, now is it?”
“That’s because they haven’t seen your amazing tits.”
I wrap an arm around her waist, giving her a quick squeeze as another woman steps on stage. But my smile slips when, across the room, I catch sight of a tall, brooding man chatting with Eleanor and three other ladies.
When I realize why he looks so scarily familiar, my blood runs cold, then hot, as if my body can’t decide between dread or anticipation.
He must be here with Sam—there’s no other explanation, and I shouldn’t care one way or another.
But I can’t take my eyes off Rowan casually sipping his cocktail as he entertains the ladies’ excited rambles. His face is shockingly warm when one of them makes him chuckle, and I wouldn’t have thought the strait-laced man I met was capable of looking so… adorable.
He licks his sinful lips before brushing his thumb across them, and a vivid image of me swirling my tongue over his skin and sucking that thumb inside my mouth assaults me.
As if sensing my thoughts, his eyes flick upward. I hold a breath, waiting for that all-consuming spark to hit, but… it’s gone. There’s no trace of the Rowan I met days ago in that stare, no semblance of the heat or passion we’d shared, and before he can see how that affects me, I spin to face the dessert table.
What the hell?
Is he happy to see me again, pissed that I left him in the library, or completely indifferent because he’s here to find a date with one of the beautiful, high-class women on stage?
I envy how easily he masks his emotions when I know every one of mine was just stamped across my face.
“What’s wrong?” Piper asks.
“Don’t look, but do you see that guy standing beside the balloon arch with Eleanor?”
“Well, you told me not to look, so…”
“I meant, don’t make it obvious that you’re staring,” I hiss.
“The tall drink of water in the navy suit?”
I gulp. “Yeah, that’s him. The out-of-towner I told you about.”
“That’s Thomas’s grandson?” she says with venom coating the man’s name. “Shame. He had so much potential.”
Piper hates the Radleys. Actually, her mom hates them, so therefore, she does, too. Although Thomas refusing to sell Piper the vacant building next door to her bakery helped fuel her contempt.
“Okay, please don’t be mad, but… We sort of made out.”
She gasps dramatically.
“I know, I know! It just happened. I was helping him look for something in the archives?—”
“Mistake number one.” She rolls her eyes. “You know that room is filled with decades’ worth of pheromones. You may as well have walked into a sex dungeon!”
