Page 18 of Stunner (Whiskey Dolls 3)

“Not at all. I love the honesty, actually. And it just so happens, your opinion matches that of everyone else’s, mine included.”

She pretended wiping a sweaty brow with a dramatic, “Phew. Good to know I read the room correctly. That could have gone bad really fast.”

I liked this woman almost immediately. She reminded me so much of the other girls at Whiskey Dolls, the women I was closest with. She was unapologetically her, and there was something refreshing about it. With Jackson and his family, it had taken much longer to see the real people beneath the façades they wore like armor, and even then, I’d still been snowed.

Then there was Hardin’s brother. As it turned out, he wasn’t who I thought he was either. Sure, that just so happened to be in a good way, but still.

“No worries. We’re all good here.” I extended my arm across the counter. “It’s nice to put a name and voice to the picture on a fridge.”

She shook my offered hand heartily. “Nice to meet you too. And just for the record, what you do with my big brother is your business. You want to have a non-drunk sleepover in which he makes you breakfast again, go for it. You couldn’t get much better than Owen.”

I suddenly felt the insane urge to duck my head, like I was guilty of something more than secretly lusting after her brother, but I could have sworn there was an underlying meaning to what she’d just said. I felt my cheeks heat and was sure they’d bloomed tomato red. “Oh, um, that’s...” She stood silent, one eyebrow arched in a look, as though she was daring me, to do what, I didn’t have the first damn clue, but my gut was telling me the woman knew something I hadn’t been made privy to.

“Oh! Hardin, darlin’. I’m so glad you’re here.” My shoulders slumped in relief at my mother’s interruption. I was off the hook,at least for the time being. “I was just about to call you. That peppermint essential oil you’ve been waiting for finally came in this morning.”

“Great. I was hoping I’d get lucky.”

My mother joined me behind the counter. “Poor thing,” she said to me. “She gets these terrible tension headaches, so I turned her on to peppermint oil.”

“Worked like a charm,” Hardin said with an appreciative grin in my mother’s direction. “You’re a genius, Jolene.”

Mom waved her off while still preening under the praise as she hooked her arm through mine, locking elbows. “I see you’ve met my lovely daughter, Asher. And Asher, this is my number one customer. I hope you two have been getting along.”

“Getting along great, actually. Although, we kind of knew each other already,” Hardin answered. “Well, unofficially anyway. I guess it was more knewofeach other.”

My mother’s gaze darted between the two of us, curiosity dancing in her eyes. “Oh?”

I cleared my throat, nearly reaching up to tug at my collar. For the love of God, it was like I was an awkward, nerdy, brace-faced teenager, way too into comics and graphic novels all over again. “Yeah, she’s Owen Shields’s sister.”

The best way I knew to describe the look on my mother’s face just then was pleased as punch. “Well if this isn’t just one of the best coincidences I’ve seen in a good long while.” She propped her hands on her hips over her long, brightly colored maxi skirt. “I wasjusttalking about what a looker that brother of yours is.”

I squeezed my eyes closed tightly and silently wished for the ground beneath my feet to open up and swallow me whole.

It took some finagling, but I managed to get out of my mom’s shop with only a bit more embarrassment.

I’d handled about as much peopling as I could for one day—my mother had a tendency to suck up all the energy when youspent any significant amount of time with her—so I swung by the market to grab something I could heat up in the microwave for dinner and headed back to my condo, resigned to spending the rest of my evening with a Stouffer’s French bread pizza and Netflix. What Iwasn’tgoing to do was spend the rest of my night thinking about a certain tattooed veterinarian who’d been taking up far too much of my headspace lately.

However, my plan to put Owen firmly out of my mind was squashed the moment I stepped off the elevator onto my floor and spotted the vase of long-stemmed roses, their petals a deep, velvet red, sitting in front of my door.

Curiosity had me picking up the pace to my door and placing my shopping bags on the floor so I could free my hands to pluck the card from the plastic holder nestled in the middle of the elaborate arrangement.

It read:You deserve better.

Simple. Succinct. And enough to make me smile as I thought back to Owen teasing about how Jackson could have at least cushioned the blow of splitting with flowers.

“Clever man,” I muttered, smiling like a loon as I tucked the card into the pocket of my jeans and hefted up my wares, flowers and all.

I’d been determined to forget all about Owen, but as the microwave whirred, my dinner inside, and I cued up an action movie full of explosions and fight scenes on my TV, he remained front and center in my brain.

9

ASHER

The music pumping through the sound system swelled as “Kill of the Night” by Gin Wigmore reached its crescendo. I watched myself in the mirrors that stretched across the studio wall as I guided my body through the choreography while Charlotte, another Whiskey Doll, stood at the front of the room, counting off the steps.

“That was awesome!” Charlotte called after we hit our final marks at the same time the song ended. “You guys killed it.”

It felt great to be back at rehearsal after a long week. I hadn’t realized just how much my body missed the strenuous activity until now. In my defense, when I’d scheduled the time off months back, I was supposed to have been spending that week sunning myself on white sand beaches, swimming in turquoise waters, and drinking alcoholic beverages out of coconuts with little paper umbrellas, not binging mindless, trashy TV and eating my weight in microwave pizzas and Chips Ahoys.

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