Page 79 of Wedding Bet

His blue eyes glimmered, gorgeous and hopeful. “I think I’m finally starting to.” One of his dimples appeared as he smiled, and I leaned in to press a kiss to that spot of soft skin.

I didn’t stop. I kissed him from his cheek to his jawline and down lower.

And in that moment, I knew I didn’t regret a single thing that had led me here.

21

JAMIE

I slammed my car into park, my back lurching against the driver’s seat a little as I stopped outside the store where Chase had been grabbing food.

I loved it when my brother visited California—but he always brought a little bit of chaos with him.

Beautiful, fun chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

“Get in, get in, we’re late,” I said, reaching over to pop open the door for him. He was rushing out the front doors, arms full of grocery bags and food containers.

I grabbed the stack of two pies and a box of pastries sitting on my passenger side seat, carefully placing them in the back of the car. Chase added his own stuff to the back before finally sitting down in the passenger seat, letting out a big breath of air.

“Okay, I’m in, let’s roll,” Chase said, leaning over to give me a quick side-hug before putting on his seat belt. “Landry is probably already at Mom’s. She’s probably already three stories deep into talking his ear off about the neighbor.”

I snorted, throwing the car into drive again and heading off. “She’s probably threetangentsdeep. Starting with a story about the neighbor, branching into a story about local birds, thenbranching into a story about how things used to be in 1992, or something.”

Chase laughed, settling in as we cruised down the street. “It’s been way too long since we had a proper dinner party at Mom’s, hasn’t it?”

“Years,” I said. “We’re too busy. I’m tired of being busy.”

“Tell me about it.”

I nervously tapped the steering wheel with my thumbs at a red light. For the last few days, I’d been in high gear planning out the dinner party. It was the first time Landry would be seeing Mom’s house, and I kept veering from excitement to nervousness and back again about twenty times a day.

It had been four weeks since the night at the beach. Chase and Adam had already gone on their honeymoon. Chase had decided to come out for a quick weekend trip to California to spend some quality time with me and Mom after the chaos that had been the wedding week.

I couldn’t believe it had all only been four weeks ago.

For me, it had been four weeks of cautious optimism, of opening myself to the possibility that someone—someone fuckingamazing—might actually want me for real.

But as each week passed, I’d only found myself getting more hopeful about Landry. I kept waiting for something bad to happen, but only good things seemed to be happening with him in my life.

Landry’s life was colossally different from mine, but he found a way to make everything seem normal. He’d driven down to visit me multiple times, and I’d caved, letting him pay for my gas to drive up to his house twice in LA. He’d already had to make two short business trips back to his house in Denver, but each time, he showered me with a steady stream of photos, little videos, and texts throughout the day, showing me the little moments of his life even when I couldn’t be there. A picture ofa pastry. A selfie of him in front of a museum. A selfie of him in front of tons of boring-looking paperwork. And each night, even when he couldn’t be in California, he made sure to have a video chat with me.

I loved the little snippets from Colorado, and I was shocked to find that I even missed the cold and the snow.

I’d fallen in love with it during the wedding.

“Did Landry seem nervous at the prospect of this dinner party at Mom’s?” Chase asked as we rounded the corner onto Mom’s street.

“Shockingly, no,” I said. “Landry wants her to like him, which is quite frankly adorable, but he said he liked meeting her at the wedding.”

“He certainly seemed good when he metyou,” Chase said, and when I glanced over at him, he was wiggling his eyebrows up and down at me.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Hot hotel hanky-panky,” he teased. “God, youwouldget lucky with a guy named Lucky. He’s like your Prince Charming.”

“Landry is not my Prince Charming,” I protested. “We had to talk through a lot of things at the ski resort to get where we ended up.”

Chase laughed. “Sounds like nothing but beautiful backdrops and cozy, fireside conversations to me.”

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