Page 26 of Sunshine
“Damn. Life was simple then.” I burrow deeper into the warm blankets and stare up at the blank ceiling. “And we were so naive. Running away from here believing our prince was just out there waiting for us to find him.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe we needed to learn the hard way not to bet everything we had to give on the unlikely chance of a happily ever after here, there, or anywhere.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Despite my best intentions, my thoughts drift toward Dylan. I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours obsessing about what happened in his kitchen last night. Reliving the feel of his confident hands and soft tongue and hot blue eyes, deconstructing every minute to find its real meaning. We haven’t crossed a line—not yet—but I promised myself that tonight, I’d give my bestie all my attention anyway. Like it’ll make up for the kind-of sort-of flirting with her brother. But now I’ve slipped, and my self-control unravels like pulled yarn.
If Dylan were a prince, which one would he be? With the dark floppy hair, the brooding brow, and the broad shoulders? There’s only one answer.
A fantasy of Dylan as Prince Eugene Fitzherbert and me as Rapunzel plays across the back of my closed eyelids. I throw my arms around him, and he pulls me in tight, tucking his face into the crook of my neck, breathing me in like he can’t believe he got the girl. Like he can’t believe he got that lucky.
Nowthat’sa happily ever after.
“Okay!” Daisy nudges me with her bony elbow. “Sit up. I need your help.”
I don’t want to move from the warm cocoon I’ve created for myself, but Daisy is insistent, so I begrudgingly shuffle higher up the bed and re-stack the pillows behind my head.
“What’s up?”
“I posted an anonymous dating ad for Dylan in a local community group, and I got a ton of responses.”
“You didwhat?”
“Why are you surprised?” Daisy looks confused. “We spoke about this last week. I wrote a list. What did you think I was going to do with it?”
I make sure my tone isn’t so shrill when I reply. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t pimp him out to the highest Aster Springs bidder.”
Daisy snorts. “This isn’t about sex… Although my brother could stand to get laid.”
“Ew,” I reply, but her comment plays on my uncontrollable curiosity. “Do you know if…? Is he…? I mean, does he still…?”
“Does Dylan still sleep around?” Daisy finishes, referring to the fact that by the time he was nineteen, Dylan had already earned a certain reputation. It’s times like these, when I ask inappropriate questions and want to shake Daisy for the answers, that I wonder how she can have no idea I’m obsessed with her brother.
Because she trusts you, a little voice reminds me.
“I don’t know for sure,” Daisy says. “But all signs point to that boy being in a world of pain right now.”
I attempt a shrug to hide the relief that just liquefied my bones. Maybe it shouldn’t matter that Dylan’s not taking women to bed the way he used to—a fact that made him hotter when I was a doe-eyed virgin teenager and now makes me twitch with jealousy—but it does. “Oh. Okay.”
“But that’s not what this is about,” Daisy says. “Or at least, it’s not the main goal. Our first job is to remind Dylan that there’s more to life than running a business and raising a child. My brother needs to remember that he’s a person, too, and he should be having fun. Making plans. Falling in love.”
“I thought we decided that believing in happily-ever-afters is for suckers.”
Daisy clicks her tongue. “The problem with happily-ever-afters is that nine times out of ten, the guy turns out to be an asshole. That’s not the case with Dylan. Any woman would be lucky to have him.”
“Sure, but—”
“Why are you being weird about this?”
“Am I?” I swallow, then start plucking at the quilt cover. “I don’t mean to be.”
I can’t help myself. I think about last night and the sensation of Dylan’s tongue on my wrist. How Ileft my bodywhen the man of my fantasies did something so unexpected and sensual. The tension in my core pulls tighter. The same lips that have been on my body a million times in my dreams finally touched me in the real world…
And I have no idea what it means.
He’s always been out of reach and now suddenly, without warning, he’s reaching for me.
“Look, I know this is kind of unusual,” Daisy says. “I don’t particularly like thinking about my brotherlike that, but if we don’t, who will? I don’t want him to wake up one day and regret that he spent his best years alone and know there was something I could have done to prevent it. And I don’t want Izzy to lose the chance of having a mother figure growing up. Not an aunt or a nanny or a parent she only sees twice a year. A real mother.”
