Page 11 of Keep

She turned her luminous smile on me and batted her eyelashes before slipping her hand into mine. “Just my luck to be asked by the most handsome man in the room.”

I didn’t recognize the song that was playing now but it didn’t matter. The beat was slow enough to justify sliding my arms around Cassie’s waist and bringing her in close enough to feel the sweet curves of her body.

“Have I told you how gorgeous you are?” I whispered in her ear and breathed in the vanilla scent of her favorite perfume.

Cassie tipped her head back, her blue eyes inspecting me. “You’re not too tough on the eyes either, Mr. Mulligan.”

If Cassie and I were alone things would be escalating real quick. However, we were in the middle of the dance floor at her sister’s wedding so I swayed to the music and pretended I was a gentleman.

The dance floor was already getting crowded. Some of the couples I recognized, some I didn’t. I saw Cord’s brother Creed dancing with his spirited, talkative wife, Truly. Then we were passed by a glamorous middle-aged couple who danced literal circles around the rest of us slobs, dipping and twirling like ballroom dancing pros. I’d met them once before. They lived somewhere overseas and exotic but I couldn’t remember where. Maybe it was Portugal. The man, Brayden, was a cousin of Cassie’s mother.

“Looking good, Millie,” Cassie called to Brayden’s wife as the two of them whirled past. They paused long enough for Millie to blow her a kiss.

Off on the sidelines I spotted the youngest Gentry sister talking to her parents. Cord frowned and shrugged while Saylor gave her daughter’s arm a motherly tap before allowing her husband to lead her out to the dance floor.

“Hey, what was the deal with Cadence’s boyfriend?” I asked.

“Oh, him.” Cassie wrinkled her cute nose. “She filled me in on the story at dinner. My sister can be fickle all right but Gareth, formerly known as Tim, was proving to be too high maintenance.”

“Let’s back up a step,” I said. “What’s with the name change?”

“That happened a few weeks ago. He’s changing it for his modeling career or something. Right before the ceremony he texted Cadence to say that he was suffering from an attack of low blood sugar. She told him there was a coffee stand in the lobby with plenty of snacks but he said the only thing he wanted was a gluten free hamburger. She told him to quit being such a prima donna and he texted back that she was a selfish bitch so she suggested that he should go get his gluten free hamburger and then stick it up his bony waxed ass.”

I snorted. “Good for Cadence.”

Cassie smiled. “I have a feeling she’ll recover.”

I gestured across the room. “I have a feeling she’s already recovered.”

Cadence was now chatting up the DJ, a bearded twenty something fellow with a variety of facial piercings, and I could tell from his eager expression that he was very interested in anything she had to say. But after eliciting some kind of promise from the guy, Cadence flashed a polite smile and didn’t linger. She immediately sought her grey-haired grandfather and coaxed him out of his chair. He was Saylor’s dad, the lone grandparent attending the wedding. Both Cord’s parents were dead and Saylor and her mother had been estranged for decades.

Probably due to Cadence’s intervention, the music abruptly changed to a pulsing party rhythm, one of those retro tunes from the eighties that gets everyone moving. The floor became instantly more crowded and we had to adapt to the new beat. I wasn’t exactly a dancing king and felt like kind of a joke for trying but I liked checking out my girlfriend’s sexy body as she moved to the music so I played along. Brecken hadn’t been in my line of sight for a while but I had faith that wherever he was in this crowd he was fine.

“Go Grandpa!” Cassie whooped as the man did his best to keep up with barefoot, nimble Cadence.

Saylor’s dad laughed and waved and I figured if the old man could be a sport then so could I so I stepped up my game, twirling Cassie impressively, dipping her low to steal a kiss before morphing into my best Patrick Swayze Dirty Dancing impression, which probably wasn’t very good at all but made her laugh and throw her arms around me.

“I see you’ve been keeping some of your talents under wraps,” she giggled.

“I didn’t know I had it in me,” I confessed.

She was still rocking to the beat in my arms when her father came over and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Your mother needs you,” he said and I knew Cord well enough to see that something was bothering him. His blue eyes, so similar to his daughter’s, were narrowed with tension. Cassie squeezed my hand before following her father through the crowd and out the door of the reception hall. I thought about chasing after them to see if there was anything I could help with but then I thought that if that were the case Cord wouldn’t have hesitated to ask.

No one around us seemed to have noticed anything unusual had just happened. Cami was on the floor now, dancing to Footloose with some of her friends. Cadence and her grandfather had been joined by some of the younger Gentry cousins and I saw Creed’s wife Truly shoo her son Jake off the sidelines and onto the dance floor with her. Jake lived in Portland and visited for holidays and weddings but since we’d never found a reason to say more than ten words to each other he was something of a mystery to me. The feeling was probably mutual. Jake politely nodded in my direction as I squeezed past him and his mother.

In the process of threading my way through the maze of tables I came across Creed and Chase Gentry, Cord’s brothers. The three of them were triplets and while it was easy to tell them apart by appearance the stark difference was really in their personalities. Though they were as close as any brothers ever were, Cassie told me once that her uncles were like the opposite ends of the scale while Cord was their balance. From what I could tell, Creed and Chase Gentry were in a state of perpetual disagreement. In fact they were arguing about something right now.

“What the hell?” Creed growled. “Give it back before you screw it up even more.” He made a grab for the phone his brother was peering at but Chase swiveled to avoid his reach.

“You have too many apps and games and shit on here,” Chase said. “That’s why you ran out of storage.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m deleting some stuff.”

“Don’t do that.”

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