Page 32 of Maid of Dishonor
He’dbetterbe awesome. Or I’ll murder him and bury his body where no one will ever find it.
She shrugs. The light breeze tugs at her hair, blowing some of it up into my face, but even though it tickles, I don’t push it away.
“We’ll see,” she says, but I can hear in her voice that she doesn’t believe me.
Holy crap. She really doesn’t believe me. She really thinks she’s going to die alone.
What is that all about?
I’m about to ask her when she speaks instead, and it’s probably a good thing, because I don’t know how to have conversations with Sam about her future wedding to some guy I don’t know.
“My feet hurt,” she says, stretching her legs out and looking at her sandals.
I force my eyes past her bare legs, letting them land instead on her shoes—which do admittedly look nice, but uncomfortable. I smile a little at her toenails, which are painted a bright, cheerful pink.
I stand up and move in front of her, my back to her. “Come on; up.”
Even though I can’t see her, I canhearher raised eyebrow as she speaks. “What?”
“Get on,” I say, tapping my back.
“Ooh, piggyback ride,” she says, and I grin at the excitement in her voice.
I catch her by the legs as she jumps, just as her arms wrap around my neck. With one boost she’s relatively well situated and stable. I grip her legs a little tighter, trying not to notice her skin beneath my hands. My rubber band rests on my wrist, taunting me now that my hands are occupied and I can’t give it a couple good snaps.
I know in my heart that it wouldn’t work anyway.
I hoist her up again, moving my hands further up her legs, hoping to run into her shorts—to alleviate the distracting hands-on-warm-skin problem—but all I get is more skin. Along with a baseball player, Sam’s a runner, and it shows; as I look down, I see that her legs are toned and tanned.
“These shorts arereallyshort,” I say as I begin to walk.
She clears her throat. “I too have just become aware of that fact. Do you want me to just walk?”
The honest answer is somewhere between yes and no, but I’m not going to act like a jerk. So I just laugh, shaking my head. “It’s fine.”
She breathes what sounds like a sigh of relief. I feel it on the side of my neck, and I fight the urge to twitch.
“Thanks,” she says, and her body relaxes slightly. She leans into me, and when I feel soft curves press against my back, I pick up my pace. The walk back to the car should only be thirty seconds, but suddenly that feels like a long time.
Before we kissed, I did a dang good job of not paying attention to any emotional or physical attraction I might have felt for Sam. But all my efforts are being shot to the ground now, because there’s no way my body can miss what my brain is trying not to notice. I mean, she’s wrapped around me like a kudzu vine.
And once again, I have to talk down the nervous churning inside—the one that tells me to run and hide, far away from anything that evensort ofresembles…you know. Non-platonic feelings for Sam.
When we get back to the car, I set her down gratefully. But though she smiles at me, it doesn’t escape my notice that she’s even more quiet now than she was before.
* * *
As per our agreement,Sam comes with me when we go visit Maya. We go there straight from the wedding venue, stopping only to drive through someplace and get Sam a cherry limeade slushie. She’s addicted, especially in the summer. Plus they turn her tongue and lips bright red, which I always find entertaining.
“Okay,” she says, taking a long sip and then glancing over at me as she pulls up in front of Maya’s house. She insisted she could find it this time, and I agreed—partly because I really do think she can find it since we were just here recently, but also partly because as irrational as her fears might be, she still hates having people drive her places.
“Let’s give this a try,” she says.
I give her a nod. “But if this chat doesn’t go the way we hope, we’ll go ahead and book the sixties room as the universe’s first sign to Maya that this wedding is a bad idea.”
“Right,” Sam says.
We walk up the driveway together, but we stop next to the car parked there; it’s not Maya’s.
