Page 66 of Rivals to Lovers
“Oh, a hundred percent.”
“Pretty sure that’s why she likes you,” Mackenzie said with an air of finality.
He knew he was blushing at the sideways compliment. “Thanks?” But that Mo liked him—that she had told her roommates that she did—was confirmation enough that Wes wasn’t completely on the wrong path. “I don’t want to wait to tell her, because I think waiting would ruin her weekend, but I don’t know where she is.”
Mackenzie smiled and turned to her roommate. “Oh, this boy wants to romantic-gesture our friend, Sloan.”
“But should we let him?” Sloan looked thoughtful. She reached over and pulled the hedgehog into her lap. Finally, after a long second, she gave Wes a serious look. “Did she ever tell you about our ratports?”
He had thought Sloan’s looks before were serious, but they were nothing compared to the death stare directed at him. The small animal on her lap only added to the Bond villain air of the moment. “What?” Wes was sure his mouth gaped open, but he didn’t know how else to arrange his face. “Your—”
“Ratports. Every week, the three of us talk about rats we’ve seen. Around the city.”
“So many rats,” Mackenzie agreed. “And we started to talk about it because, well, if we talked about it and made it part of our lives, it would at least make us laugh. Or acknowledge how gross but normal it is. Life is gross and weird and normal and funny. Rats are a part of that.”
“Okay.” Wes could not see where this was going.
“And we just want to make sure you’re not one,” Mackenzie concluded.
Wes choked.
“That’s not to say that rats don’t have their charm!” Sloan said. “I don’t hold the bubonic plague against them. That was really fleas. They get a bad rap. But, honestly, our frienddeserves a better class of rodent. At least a hedgehog.” Perkins, as if knowing he was being mentioned, curled tighter.
“I’m not a rat,” Wes said. “Or at least, if I am, I promise to be better.”
A glance passed between Mackenzie and Sloan, then Sloan replied, “Okay, but if you hurt her—”
“You’ll have to kill me?” he helpfully supplied.
Mackenzie smiled sweetly. “Slowly and painfully.”
Unpacking the adverbs this time, Wes noted. He didn’t tell them that the upcoming airplane ride would feel both slow and painful, not even mentioning the apologies he had to concoct, but it was a price he was willing to pay to begin to set things right again with Mo. He only hoped he could get there in time to see her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Mo
Kyle and Anna couldn’t stop beaming at one another, and even the photographer seemed to be having trouble finding ways to coax new expressions out of them because they couldn’t stop the widest smiles Mo had ever seen. She’d snuck away once the group shots were finished and found this deserted hayloft, up a ladder and overlooking the fenced lawn where Anna’s dogs usually played.
Mo wasn’t exactly hiding, but she didn’t want to be found. Haylofts were perfect for that. She had about fifteen minutes to come up with something brilliant. As much as she had been helping with the wedding preparation, she had ignored this one important task. She sat with a notepad in her lap and pencil between her teeth, but in her hands, she held the phone that had been maddeningly silent all weekend.
It wasn’t that Mo had expected Wes to text her back, but him not texting her back felt like death by a thousand cuts. She was supposed to be writing a heartfelt speech to the brideand groom, and she had put the writing of this speech off until the minute after the last minute. Anna and Kyle were finishing their post-ceremony shots with the photographer. The wedding ceremony had gone off without a hitch—including the part that was most likely to be hitchy: They had used two of their dogs as the ring bearer and flower girl despite Mo’s anxiety dreams. The dogs—Melon and Burt—did amazingly well. Melon had carried a small bouquet in her mouth. Kyle’s brother had flown a drone overhead that released flower petals as she scampered. The pros of an outdoor wedding, Mo guessed. Burt had been the perfect gentleman—gentledog?—and walked with no issues with the ring, which was the actual ring. She knew dogs rescued people from snowdrifts and fires, but those dogs weren’t bred mainly for their fluff and goofiness.
From her spot, she could see the huge white tent and dozens of carefully laid tables ready for a feast soon. Too soon for Mo to come up with something good. Being a writer meant people expected you to write well all the time, when in her opinion, a toast should come to you in three minutes: brief and heartfelt and true. Like toast, she guessed. She could not think of a more honest food.
Kyle was growing on Mo. At the rehearsal dinner last night, he had brought everyone outside to see a metal bench he had made for Anna in the welding shop. Their initials were mixed in the metalwork of the bench’s back. The seat looked like intricate bent-metal ivy, but if you looked closely, he had hidden their anniversary date inside. “So we can always sit together in the garden,” he had said. Attached to the bench was a packet of daisy seeds. Okay, he loved Mo’s sister, and yes, she had sobbed with the adorableness of everything.
Hay jabbed into her sides as she shifted to get more comfortable, and Anna’s only horse, Cash, neighed softly under her. Mo glanced through the ladder slats to stare at her soft brown head. She could go pet the horse as a distraction, but she didn’t need any more of those.
“What do horses think of love, Cash?”
Cash tossed her head, maybe to remove a fly or maybe to do a hard agree with how Mo felt.
Maureen hated how people referred to their wedding as the biggest day of their life. It was a day, and it was a big one, but she remembered how they’d celebrated when her sister started her business and when she’d signed the papers to buy this property. Mo remembered when Anna had graduated from college and even back when she’d won the seventh-grade geography bee. There were so many things she loved about her sister, and she had no idea how to shove them all into a speech that made sense and yet still connected to this admittedly big-ass day.
But divorce! Her brain bugged her, even as she was trying to celebrate this day for Anna. Half the married world would get divorced. She’d blasted the news to the world about Wes’s parents’ divorce, and she felt the aftershocks of it distantly. At the epicenter, back in New York, were Wes and Ulla. Divorce was ultimately good, though. She believed that. Hell, if Clive and Eliza could have divorced, maybe both would have had a happy ending. She needed to stop thinking of fictional people as real.
She’d kept a count: eight asks of “Do you have a boyfriend?” If only she could write a toast as good as the comebacks she didn’t share to that question. Sometime between helping Anna put on her veil and watching her sister’s handshake as she put the ring on Kyle’s finger, Maureen realized she would have been married to Aaron by now if she’d said yes. Aaron hadn’t been perfect. Aaron never turned his socks the right way out when he threw them in the wash, plus the small issue of not respecting her life’s passion. Knowing how things had turned out with her adaptation ofP&L, Aaron was right. Maybe Mo did work too hard on something that wouldn’t ever bring her success. Maybe it was too much to ask for a partner who believed in you and challenged you and loved you for who you were, just like it was too much to believe that hard work and time were enough to help you write something that could touch someone.
