Page 10 of Enchanted to Meet You

“Yes. With the cups.”

“Impressive work so far.” His eyes dropped, deliberately slow, to the cups still sitting in my arms, untouched. “Really thorough.”

Heat crawled up my neck. “I was getting to it.”

“Sure you were.” He didn’t smile, but something in his face shifted like he was enjoying himself, which made it worse. Like he was laughing at me. “Didn’t peg you as an early bird.”

“Well…” There was no easy way to respond to that was there? But he was staring at me and I could see Justin cocking his head in my direction as if he was waiting for a response too, and oh gosh, my mouth was doing that uncooperative thing again where I couldn’t get any words out…

And as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Because right then, the front door opened and a voice, bright and already halfway down the hall, was calling out like she owned the place. And based on the way Justin dropped his controller and sat up straight, she basically did.

“Justin? I thought you said you’d text me when you got home.”

“Oh, great,” Rhys muttered, low enough that I wasn’t sure I was supposed to hear it.

I turned in time to watch the girl fill the doorway. She was unfairly pretty, the kind of pretty that looked effortless. Dark hair in perfect it-just-happened-to-fall-this-way waves, a jean jacket that probably cost more than everything I was wearing combined, and the posture of someone who had never once worried about being in the wrong place because she knew she belonged anywhere.

Her eyes did a slow lap of the room—Justin, upright now, controller forgotten in his lap; me, standing a few feet away clutching a stack of red cups like a shield; Rhys watching the whole thing unfold with an uncanny stillness.

“Kelcey—hey.” Justin was on his feet now. “I thought you were still at your thing.”

“It ended early.” Her eyes didn’t leave me. “Who’s this?”

My whole face went hot. I opened my mouth—cups, his mum asked me, I swear, ask her—and what actually came out was a strangled, “I was just—helping⁠—”

“Helping.” Kelcey repeated in clear disbelief. “Does she have a name?”

“Ainsley,” I said too quickly, like offering it up might buy me some goodwill.

“Okay. Ainsley.” She said my name the way you would discuss something stuck on the bottom of your shoe. “And you’re—what, exactly? Leah’s babysitter?”

My face flushed. “No?”

Her gaze slid to Justin. “So you just let people wander into the house now?”

“She’s not—I mean, she’s—“ Justin looked at me, then at Kelcey, then back at me, like I was a math problem he couldn’t figure out how to solve. “She’s, um...”

He didn’t finish that one either. I had never in my life wanted a floor to open up and swallow me whole more than I did in that exact second. It was even worse than Rhys calling me out last night by the baseball diamond, what with all the witnesses—and the boy I’d spent a year trying to get close to unable to produce a single sentence in my defense.

“Oh my gosh,” Rhys said, and pushed himself up off the armchair like the whole thing was mildly exhausting him. “Are we really doing this?”

He crossed the room before anyone could answer that, and his arm landed around my shoulders like it had been there a hundred times before, easy and unbothered, the exact opposite of how I felt standing under it.

In the tone of someone explaining something painfully obvious, he said, “She’s with me.”

four

For one horrible, suspended second, nobody moved. Kelcey’s face was twisted up in judgement. Justin looked both terrified and bewildered. And I stood there, frozen under the weight of Rhys’s arm, feeling the exact texture of every single thread of his shirt against the back of my neck, too stunned to do anything except let it happen.

“Since when?” Kelcey asked, her gaze raking over me and then over Rhys’s hand resting around my shoulder. She seemed just as suspicious and angry about this as she had about the idea of me being here for Justin, which confused me, but even if I could get my mouth to work enough to ask questions, it was obvious that right now was not the time.

“A while.” Rhys shrugged, like this was a conversation he found only mildly interesting. “We weren’t advertising it.”

Justin’s gaze snapped to his step-brother, so fast that I thought I heard his neck crack. “But, I thought she wanted m⁠—”

He stopped himself half a second too late, because the rest of that sentence had already landed in the room whether he finished it or not.

I thought she wanted me.