Page 62 of Love Me Tomorrow

Oh, thank God.

“I also know you want to bang Owen’s brains out.”

Someone, somewhere, just dig me a grave and let me crawl my embarrassed butt right into it.

I press my palms to my heated cheeks. They’re on fire—or maybe it’s that I’m seconds away from hyperventilation. Could go either way, really. Wouldn’t thePut A Ring On Itproducers get a kick out of seeing me now?

“This is not how I envisioned this conversation going,” I finally manage.

“Can’t catch all these curveballs I’m throwing your way?”

Just because I know it’ll make her laugh, I grumble, “Hey, not all of us are natural-born athletes.”

“Must have been my birth dad’s DNA,” Amelie quips with a kiss to her Pilates-toned bicep, shocking me into startled silence. “What? You think it’s been all sexy boys and nude beaches since you went back to the States? I’ve been working on things, too. Wrapping my head around it all, including the fact that Mom won’t tell me who he is until I agree to come home. She wants to sit down face to face.Anyway, back to Owen. Spill.”

This is way too weird.

“Why aren’t you mad at me?” I zero in on her face, unable to look away. “You should be calling me out—”

“For a duel?” She cocks her head to the side. “I mean, I’m down for that if you are. Toy Nerf guns. Real booze. I’ll be a total gem and shoot you in the butt.”

Concerned for the well-being of my ass, I raise a brow. “Why the butt?”

“Yours is better,” she says, like that answers everything. “So, Owen. Have you kissed him yet?” She brings the phone closer, so I get a zoomed-in view of her freckled face, diamond nose piercing, and supermodel cheekbones. “Aw, are youblushing?”

Clearly, this is karma for saying nearly the same thing to Owen just yesterday.

“Can we not”—I wave a hand in the air, grasping for words—“go into the specifics of it all? Please?”

Looking put out, Amelie frowns. “Fine.” Then, beneath her breath, “Fun killer.”

Her comment hits a little too close to home, considering all the “wet blanket” commentary of late. Back snapping straight, I jab a finger into the screen, even though it’s not like she can feel it. “You’ve kissed him too! You aren’t weirded out by this—or angry, for that matter—and it’s honestly weirdingmeout. I don’t know what to say and I don’t know howmuchto say, and all I know is that I need to see where this goes with him, and if you have a problem with that, you need to tell me right now.”

A pause, in which the screen goes momentarily black and I hear Amelie tapping away on her side of the call.

“Savannah?”

I drag in a sharp breath. “Yes?”

“Check your phone.”

Reaching for it, from where it sits beside a bottle of water, I drag it close and see a message from my sister. Curiosity makes my fingers twitchy as I tap in my passcode and swipe to open the text. I feel my brows pull together in confusion. She sent a series of screenshots.

Amelie’s voice echoes from my computer. “Owen was fun, Sav, but I never had any illusions that what we had was the real deal. Mr. Right Now, not Mr. Right For Forever. We joked more than we kissed. We hung out with friends more than we were ever together alone. And when he met you, it was game over for him.”

Heart lodged in my throat, I slowly lift my gaze to look at her on the screen.

“He watched you in a way that Pops has never once looked at Mom,” she says, speaking softly, like she’s worried I might freak out in the face of her raw honesty, “the way I’ve never seen a man look at a woman before . . . and you watched him, too, Sav. Like you were too scared to approach but unable to stay away. That sort of chemistry can’t be duplicated. He knew it. I knew it.”

“But y’all . . .” I sink my teeth into my bottom lip. “Y’all still went out for a few months after that.”

Her warm brown eyes hold no apology in them when she admits, “I asked him to. Point-blank. Pops kept forcing me to attend all those BS events, and I wanted a tagalong who wasn’t trying to get in my pants.”

“I don’t understand. I can see why you might have asked him, but if he liked me, then why would he—”

“Agree?” Amelie smiles slow, smug. “Savannah, let me ask you this: why did you drop everything and fly to Europe after filming wrapped?”

My answer is instant: “Because you needed me.”

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