Page 40 of Rebel Bride
I blinked, surprised at his words. That was another of my mantras—or at least since yesterday. Things were looking up. I had exercised, been gifted a pair of forty-dollar panties, and most importantly, had a cocktail in my hand. (I had also lost my ATM card, hurt my fiancé dreadfully, and could feel my myriad mistakes closing in on me like a dark winter’s night.)
I clinked his bottle with my glass and took a sip. “Oh, that’s nice.”
“It’s the little things.”
“It sure is.” I gazed out the window again because lately, Hatch had a habit of staring at me. It was strange—he never used to look at me at all. Often it felt like he was looking straight through me.
But since yesterday at the church, I occasionally found him studying me so intensely it set my body aflame. It was as if he had decided to give himself permission to do so.
Which meant that all these years I’d crossed his path, he had been working overtime not to look at me properly.
I turned back from the window. Still looking.
“What’s wrong? Bad case of hat head?”
He grunted.
Okay, be like that. I decided to steer the conversation to more productive avenues. “Tell me about Ava.”
“Not much to say.”
I scoffed. “You two obviously have history. What’s the deal? Romance gone bad? You get into it with this fiancé of hers?”
“I haven’t seen her since last summer. And the engagement is relatively new.”
But he knew about it. He had expected her to be out of town, and he clearly wasn’t enjoying this complication.
“She hurt you.”
“Just a summer fling.”
Oh, it was more. I just couldn’t get a read on what exactly had happened. Cheated? Swindled? Insulted his ancestors? Somehow this woman had done him wrong.
“She’s older than you. By a lot.” Hatch was twenty-five, a year younger than me.
He eyed me critically.
“Just saying.”
“She’s thirty-two.”
I shrugged. “Looks older. And now she’s engaged to someone else. And you wish she wasn’t.”
He looked at me sharply. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Millie appeared with our lobster rolls, putting the Ava conversation at an end.
“Can we go for a walk along the harbor?”
We had just left Bellagio’s. I tried to pay, at least for my cocktail, but Hatch had already handled it on the return from the bathroom. I promised to get him back the next time, to which he offered his typical grunted response.
I wasn’t ready to go back to the house yet. I liked the town, which was still lively with tourists taking a stroll either before or after dinner. Hatch touched my back, a light brush against my spine to guide me in the right direction. Every hormone in my body spiked.
Something was buzzing between us, an electricity that felt dangerous.
Desperate to not think about where danger like that might lead, I searched for something to say. “So, this isn’t one of the Great Lakes?”
“No, it’s a tiny one, Kalamazoo Lake. The river connects it to Lake Michigan.”
