‘Is my fiancé getting out of hand again?’ asked a deep, accented voice.
I looked up and met Lars’s amused face. He laid a hand on Jackson’s shoulder and my old friend, who had always been practically allergic to PDAs, brushed his cheek against his partner’s fingers.
My heart swelled at their happiness. I slipped out of Jackson’s arms so that Lars could take my place. Picking up my glass of fizz, I headed towards the doors that led into the garden. I paused before stepping onto the deck and saw Steve come up behind Mel and gently, as though acting with supreme caution, slide his arms around her waist.
I stepped out into the early evening sunshine with a feeling that maybe, just maybe, all of us might be about to get our happy ever after.
‘I can’t believe they’ve got you on chef duties,’ I said, slipping in beside Rhys at the now fully functioning barbecue. ‘How did that happen?’
He gave an easy-going, good-humoured shrug. ‘Not entirely sure. Steve was going inside to get the food and asked me to keep an eye on things... and here we are.’
Where we were certainly looked impressive, with plates of cooked sausages, drumsticks, and burgers piled up high.
‘Would you like me to take over?’ I offered.
‘Nah, don’t worry. I already smell of smoke and cooked pork,’ he joked.
‘Two of my favourite aromas,’ I said, which was meant to be a quip, but came out kind of sexier than I’d intended.
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
He patted the low garden wall beside him. ‘You can stay and keep me company though, if you like.’ I didn’t need asking twice and hopped up onto the sun-warmed bricks, feeling their heat beneaththe lace of my red sundress. It was a new purchase that had an elaborate cat’s cradle of shoestring straps that ran across my shoulders and back. Doing it up was a nightmare, but it was super flattering, and I was defiantly disobeying the rule that redheads shouldn’t wear scarlet.
When the cooking was finally done and Mel and Steve had wheeled out half a dozen desserts, Rhys switched off the barbecue.
‘It was good of you to do this for them,’ I said, getting down from the wall and feeling the third glass of Prosecco affect my balance.
Rhys’s arm was there in an instant, his hand going to my waist to steady me.
‘I didn’t do it for them,’ he said, his voice low as he bent down, resting his forehead against mine. ‘I did it for you.’
I swallowed and licked my lips nervously. His eyes followed the passage of my tongue and suddenly it wasn’t just the wine making me feel unsteady.
Someone had brought out some speakers and hooked them up to a phone. The garden was twinkling with fairy lights which Steve and his friends must have spent hours draping over every tree and bush. It looked like Christmas but felt like summer, and now that the sun had finally slipped below the horizon, there was an air of magic in the garden that was almost palpable.
‘Will you dance with me?’ Rhys asked as the romantic strains of a popular love song filtered out from the speakers. There were already a few couples on the lawn with a similar idea, but it wouldn’t have mattered if we were the only ones there. It certainly felt as if we were when Rhys clasped my hand in his and drew me gently onto the lawn. He was backlit by the moon, the stars, and about a thousand fairy lights as he stared down at me. It was one of those moments that you know you’re going to remember forever, regardless of what might happen from this point onwards. And as he pulled me against him and into his arms, that was good enough for now.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The temperature had been slowly dropping for hours, but I hadn’t felt it. Wrapped in Rhys’s arms, slow dancing in the moonlight, the cool night air had been incapable of chilling me. We moved in slow circles, swaying against each other, oblivious to the change in tempo when the music got livelier. We probably looked ridiculous slow dancing when everyone around us was doing the Macarena, but we didn’t care.
Even when the music had been silenced and the dancing had ended, Rhys still held me close. I was tucked into a me-shaped space at his side as we chatted with Mel’s neighbours. When Jackson regaled everyone with an amusing story about his wedding planner, Rhys’s hand had been palmed against my hip. When Steve thanked him for his help with the barbecue, Rhys’s thumb had traced lazy circles against my pulse point, sending it into overdrive.
Wherever Rhys touched me, my skin felt warmed. If I lived with him, I’d probably never have to pay a single heating bill for the rest of my life. That thought pulled me out of a dangerous fantasy I could easily have spiralled into. My brain was racing ahead into territory it had no business visiting. No one was talking aboutliving together – we weren’t even dating. And as for ‘forever’, well that felt about as distant as the Milky Way.
We said our goodbyes to my friends with a round of hugs, kisses, and handshakes.
‘Definitely a keeper,’ Mel whispered into my ear as she pulled me in and squeezed me tightly against her. It was something I really hoped we wouldn’t be able to do for very much longer.
I pulled away just far enough to let my eyes ask the question that had been on my mind all evening.
She grinned and silently mouthed my two new favourite words in the entire English language.
‘False negative.’
I was still beaming when Jackson enveloped me in a hug. His comment, unsurprisingly, was more earthy than Mel’s had been. ‘Don’t fuck this one up, Harker.’
We fell into step as we walked back to his car, Rhys’s arm looped casually around my shoulders. It felt so easy, so natural, as though we had walked like this, laughed and danced together, a thousand times before. It made no sense, but then nothing about us ever had. We felt right, meant to be, in a way I’d never experienced or comprehended before. Was this how Henry had felt when he’d first met Bee? If so, I could better understand the lingering sadness I saw in his eyes. The thought of losing someone who made you feel this way was almost too awful to contemplate.