Page 248 of By His Play

I didn’t appreciate what he’d done for me at all.

“W-what’s going on?”

“My eldest son owed me a favor,” she explains, before leading me toward the ladies’ changing rooms.

The moment the door opens, laughter hits my ears.

My initial reaction is to cringe, but then familiarity trickles through me and I relax.

“Oh shit,” Tate exclaims the second she sees me, and before I know what’s happening, I find myself as the filling in a Tate and Lori sandwich.

“Aw, I have the world’s best daughters-in-law,” Elizabeth muses.

No one points out that Tate is her only official one. Lori is close; she and Kian are engaged.

But me…right now, I couldn’t be further from joining their family.

“What’s going on?” I ask once I’ve been released, despite the fact I can guess.

“We made King close up shop for the afternoon,” Tate says with a smirk.

Lori holds her arms out wide and spins around with a smile on her face.

“This place is all ours for four hours.”

“Seriously? He allowed that to happen?”

“It’s amazing the power that my best friend has over that man,” Lori teases. “There is nothing he wouldn’t do for her.”

“The fewer details about how she’s managed to achieve that, the better,” Elizabeth laughs.

“Now, now,” Tate teases. “We know you possess the skills as well.”

Elizabeth blushes. “Back in the day, maybe.”

“Are we going to stand around in here talking all afternoon, or are we hitting the spa?” Lori asks.

She and Tate are already in fluffy white robes, and Elizabeth is busy getting ready.

“I don’t have?—”

“You’re cute,” Tate says before thrusting a tote bag at me.

“Thank you,” I whisper, my emotions beginning to get the better of me again.

Thankfully, when I pull the swimsuit from the bag, I find that it’s a little more appropriate than the one Kieran selected for me.

That very first morning when his eyes ran down the length of my body was probably the start of everything going wrong.

I’d never seen that kind of heat directed at me before.

It threw me for a loop. Although, I can’t use his reaction as an excuse for why I didn’t tell him the truth while we were in that jacuzzi.

I should have done it.

How differently would all of this have gone if I’d told him the truth?

As much as I like to think it would have changed things, something tells me we would have always ended up here.

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