Page 63 of Wedding Bet

I held his gaze. “I am. I’m right here with you.”

He nodded once. “I feel it, too.”

Something was blooming inside of me. After a year of emptiness, it was the strangest feeling—to actually feel like somethingnewcould grow inside me. New hopes, new dreams, and new possibilities.

“Come back with me to my room tonight,” I told Jamie. “I want to go back out there to the wedding with you, dance with you, feed you a fucking slice of cake oranything, and then I want you in my bed.”

My heart was thudding in my chest. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been truly, electrically nervous. Not dread, but pure, joyous excitement.

It felt like I waited a lifetime before Jamie replied. But I saw something shift in his eyes, like he knew I was laying it all on the line now. Like he knew he could trust me.

“I hope you know what you’re in for,” he told me, “because if you woo me with dancing and cake and sex and sleep I might even start to get a crush on you, Landry.”

My heart rocketed in my chest. Out of all the things Jamie had just said to me, and after all we’d done together this week, the word that stood out to me the most and sent me wild was an unexpected one.

Crush.

I wanted him to have a crush on me.

Like I was a damn teenager without a care in the world. My heart felt like it was cracking all over again, but this time in a good way.

More like it was coming out of a cocoon. Like it was transformed into something that could fly.

“I sure hope so,” I finally said.

Jamie’s lips were on mine a moment later. He kissed me without hesitation, his hands sliding along the front of my shirt. I ran my fingers through his soft hair, gripping the back of his head as he kissed me, his tongue a beacon of warmth in the cold air.

When we walked into the ballroom a minute later, I took Jamie’s hand in mine without thinking twice.

We made it just in time to watch Chase and Adam cut their cake, surrounded by dozens of cream-colored flowers. As we walked over, Jamie squeezed my hand when we saw Parker and his fiance standing at the edge of the crowd.

I watched Parker’s eyes flicker down, noticing my hand clasped with Jamie’s. His fiance had a sneer on his face, watching the cake getting cut.

“Our cake better not have lemon in it,” he told Parker. “I don’t want our wedding to be anything like this.”

“Huh?” Parker said, clearly barely listening to his fiance. “Sure, yeah. Whatever.”

Even through all of the turmoil of the day, I knew that this wedding was one of the most gorgeous ones I’d ever been to. It could have been photographed for a wedding magazine, for God’s sake.

And in a snap, I realized something I’d been totally blind to before.

Parker—and seemingly, his new boo—were the kind of people who would never be satisfied, with themselves or anyone else. At least not in this lifetime.

Breaking free of that vortex had been one of the best things for me, even if it had led to a world of pain.

I’d dodged a bullet.

“Holy shit, that cake looks so good,” Jamie told me as Adam fed Chase a bite and the photographers’ flashes went wild. “The pictures from this wedding are going to be epic.”

“I can’t wait.”

“And I can’t wait for a slice,” Jamie said. “You promised you were going to feed me one, and I’m going to take you up on that.”

“Damn right I am,” I said.

It was such a simple contrast, seeing the rude remarks Parker and his fiance made compared to the warmth Jamie brought to almost any situation. If I let myself, I could live in that world, too.

That warmth and positivity felt like a lifeline, after being closed off for so long.

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