Page 43 of Hers for the Weekend

She couldn’t figure out why everyone suddenly seemed to think that she, a dyed-in-the-wool Southern belle, from her perfectly pedicured toes up to her blond highlights, might want to leave a place so deeply ingrained in her identity. Carrigan’s was the polar opposite of her life, practically a mirror universe. It wasn’t for her.

Holly stared at her for a long moment, and Tara tried not to get distracted by her in her lacy bralette. “Even if Cole stays here for good?”

Tara sighed, her heart constricting.

It was ridiculous to think she couldn’t live without Cole. No one couldn’t live without their childhood best friend. Except Hannah, maybe, but she’d fallen in love with hers. Tara had been fine the year she’d gone to boarding school, and the months that Cole was in New Zealand and off the grid. Sure, she’d come back from school with some self-destructive habits. And she’d been an absolute fucking mess while Cole was gone, but that was because she was in the middle of a breakup.

Cole could live without her just fine, and she wasn’t going to need him more than he needed her. So, she would survive.

“I’m not throwing away my whole life plan because Cole fell in love.”

Holly made a noise in her throat but didn’t say anything else. Instead, she pulled on a hoodie, and Tara was finally able to look away and start putting on her own clothes.

“Okay!” she said. “Let’s go put on another show.”

“I don’t really get why you’re pretending,” Holly said. “Or, I guess, why we are. I don’t see your friends as the kind of people who would judge you for coming solo.”

Tara blew out a breath as she tried to tame the hair that had gotten frizzy when she pulled her sweater over it. “I know, I shouldn’t have panicked to begin with, but now that we’re here and they’re being so damn nice, and working so hard to make me feel welcome… I can’t tell them I lied to them. They would be so disappointed. Please, I can’t face that. They can never know.”

The only thing more humiliating than coming to her ex’s wedding single would be her friends finding out she’d faked a relationship. If she became a problem they felt they needed to fix, at best they would pity her, and at worst… they would decide she was too much work. She already wasn’t good enough for her friends; she didn’t need to also be a burden.

“Okay,” Holly said, shrugging like she didn’t agree, but this wasn’t her life. It was Tara’s. “They’ll never know.”

Chapter 14

Holly

There are so many people here.

Holly scanned the dining room the next morning, having emerged from the room only because Cole texted Tara to say they were going to miss breakfast.

They had gone down the night before to eat leftover cake and be sociable for a little while but had quickly run back to bed. Thankfully, Miriam had wanted Noelle to do “that thing I like” for her birthday, Levi and Hannah could barely keep their hands off each other (she suspected they’d had sex in every room of this hotel), and Cole and Sawyer were always sneaking away to make out, so no one was too upset when the party broke up early.

They hadn’t gotten any sleep. At all.

Holly had had a lot of sex since her divorce, even if she hadn’t had any relationships, and she’d never, in her life, had sex like this. It wasn’t that everything was easy, or they were an immediate perfect fit. Things were still sometimes awkward, they were still learning each other’s bodies. But even when they wound up in a giggling pile because something they tried had gone off the rails, Holly was still more turned on than she’d ever been. The chemistry between them was like a forest fire.

Yesterday morning, she’d thought it was hard to drag herself out of the room because of the promise of getting Tara naked. This morning, it was almost impossible because Tara was naked, and Holly wanted to trace every inch of her skin in the dawn light.

“Do you think,” she’d said, leaning against the bathroom doorway, watching Tara put on her blush, “that they would deliver breakfast to our room?”

Tara winked at her. “Normally, yes. This is a full-service inn. This morning, though? No. I think Miriam will have our heads on a platter if we don’t go down, and maybe Cole, too. Today is the first day of official wedding activities.”

“Isn’t the wedding still two days away? Tomorrow’s the rehearsal dinner, and then Christmas Eve is the ceremony?”

“Hannah’s an event planner,” Tara reminded her. “Give her an event to plan, she’s going to plan it within an inch of her life.”

Holly pouted. “Why do they need us? They have a million people more important to their lives than an ex and an ex’s new girlfriend. Who would even notice if we were gone?”

Even as she said it, she knew the answer. Cole would notice, because even if Tara didn’t know it, there actually wasn’t anyone more important than her in Cole’s life. And he would always notice when she was gone.

Tara, who believed herself as tertiary to the proceedings as Holly had made her out to be, didn’t argue that she was needed. Instead, she said, “It wouldn’t be polite.”

Groaning, Holly pulled on her own jeans and wondered how she could convince Tara that it would be more polite to go down on her for hours.

In the dining room, all Holly could process at first was that there were so many people in the room.

As she dug into a pile of perfect scrambled eggs to refuel and thought about how Mrs. Matthews was a national treasure and it must be hard on Levi that his mom was a better cook than he would ever be, she watched more people stream in without stopping.

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