Page 63 of You Complicate Me

She’d wanted to be part of the family more than she’d actually wanted Michael. She’d turned herself into a perfect little Montgomery family fembot without even realizing it, just to fit in with the family she’d never had.

Oh boy. This was even worse than Grace had thought.

Grace swallowed hard. “Maybe you two just need to slow down. I mean, you love each other, right?”

She hesitated, but she nodded.

“And you’re in love with each other…right?” Grace prompted.

There was no nod this time, only a panicked, wild-eyed stare, and Grace’s heart plummeted to her shoes. “Oh, Sadie,” she said on a deep sigh.

The quiet tears gave way to gut-wrenching sobs. “I know I’m a horrible person,” she said in between gasps for air, “but I really did think I was in love with him until Nick told me what finding the one was supposed to feel like. I love Michael, but I don’t love him the way Nick loves you.”

Grace took the words like a punch to the gut. Nick loved her back? Lucille hadn’t been imagining it? He loved her? Like ‘til-death-do-you-part, let’s-adopt-a-dog-together, here-you-can-have-the-last-brownie kind of love? And he’d told his sister instead of telling her? She’d been stressing out, doing the mental math on when she’d be able to tell him how she felt, and he’d been keeping this from her? What the hell?

Then she remembered Nick had been trying to tell her something before she came to talk to Sadie. Something that made him look like he wanted to vomit.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. Could it really be true?

“The things he said about you…I’ve never felt that way for anyone,” Sadie choked out. “The closest I’ve come to feeling like that is with…”

That sentence fragment snapped Grace out of her Holy-Mother-of-Jesus-Nick-loves-me-back stupor real quick. “Gage,” Grace finished for her.

Sadie gave her a weak, watery smile. “No one has ever taken care of me before except for Nick.”

Grace rubbed her aching temples. This was sooooooo much information. And it was all so messy. Yikes. “Well, he’s a doctor, so of course he took care of you,” she said reasonably. She said it reasonably because that was a really reasonable explanation. Reasonable beat this-is-a-clusterfuck-of-epic-proportions every time, right?

Sadie’s answering expression told Grace that reasonable was not a factor here. Apparently they were going to go with the clusterfuck. Gah!

Work with me here, Sadie. Work with me!

“It’s more than that,” Sadie finally said. “I can feel Gage in a room even when I can’t see him. I know when he’s watching me, even though he turns away before I can catch him doing it. Have you ever felt like that before?”

“Yes,” Grace murmured, thinking immediately of Nick. If he was anywhere within a mile of her, her body seemed to realize it and react accordingly. Hell, her nipples were on high alert right now because she knew he was a few rooms away, waiting on her to get back from checking on his sister.

“Michael’s my best friend and I’ll always love him. But I wouldn’t feel this connection with Gage if what I had with Michael was forever, would I?” Sadie asked quietly.

Grace swallowed hard. She wouldn’t touch that question with a twenty-foot pole. But the implications were clear. Poor Michael. “What do you want to do, Sadie? What can I do to help?”

Wiping her tears with the back of her hand, Sadie straightened to her full height. “Look, nothing is going to happen with Gage. I’m too messed up right now to even think about that, and I wouldn’t do that to your family. But I do need help, Grace. And you’re not going to like it, but I’m going to ask anyway.”

Grace’s heart dropped into the pointy toes of her Manolos. “On a scale of one to ten, one being cauliflower, five being sitting front row at a Jon Mayer concert, and ten being—oh, I don’t know—clubbing baby seals, how much am I going to hate what you want me to do?”

Sadie’s watery chuckle echoed through the room, but the look in her eyes was anything but encouraging.

Grace’s chin hit her chest. “Ugh. Ten it is.”

Let’s go club some baby seals.

Chapter Thirty-four

About a hundred years later, Grace emerged from the bride’s ready room and made her way into the reception hall, looking worn out and…something Nick couldn’t quite place. Guilty, maybe?

Shit. That couldn’t possibly be good, now could it?

Everyone rushed her at once. Michael wanted to know if Sadie was okay. Gage—who smelled like a distillery and looked like something that had been scraped off the bottom of an old sneaker—wanted to know where Sadie was. Sarah wanted to know if the dress fit. David wanted to know if Grace had remembered to pack an extra Kindle charger, because his wasn’t working. Ruthie wanted to know if the reception was going to include an open bar.

Nick just wanted to know why Grace was ignoring everyone else and looking at him like she was very sorry, but that she was going to have to stab him through the heart with one of her stilettos.

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