Page 19 of Too Sweet

“I’m still mad that you kissed her.”

“It wasn’t my fault!”

I take a breath.

“Fair enough. I’m just…I don’t know what got into me.”

“So you’re not mad at me anymore?”

Taking a seat on the patio bench, I can feel my pulse slow down. “No.”

“Good. Don’t be mad at Summer, either.”

I scrub a hand over my face. “Summer.”

“Yeah, you might want to check on her,” he says.

I point a finger at him. “And you might want to check on Harmony. I suspect that’s the worst of the damage here.”

chapter

eight

Summer

“Harmony, wait!”

I find my sister sitting in the empty sitting room with the bar, curled up on a fringed chaise, shoving dinner mints into her mouth from a bowl on an antique end table. If she was wearing a corset and petticoats, she’d be the perfect picture of a scorned woman in a Jane Austen novel.

“There you are,” I say, breathless.

“There you are,” she imitates through a mouthful of chocolate.

“You’re so good at comebacks when you’re mad,” I say. I can’t help it, because this is so farcical and dumb.

“Shut up, Summer.”

I have to remind myself that she’s hurt by what she thought she saw.

“Can I sit down?” I ask.

“Evidently, you don’t care what I think about anything, so do what you want,” she says.

Ouch.

I sit on the edge of the chaise and try to will away the drunken urge to assault her with a lecture.

“Listen. It was a mistake.”

She snorts and unwraps another dinner mint.

“I kissed Carter earlier, and then things got awkward. When I came out of the bathroom, in the dark, I thought it was Carter. Cooper was obviously confused but I took that as Carter’s shyness. So I kissed him again, I thought.”

My sister remains silent.

“I wanted to crawl into a hole when I realized who I’d kissed.”

Harmony scoffs. “He sure didn’t though, did he? He was beet red.”

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