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“Wow,” he said.

My pulse fluttered.

“You look…” He stopped.

I waited.

And waited.

Apparently, I'd rendered the town's most notorious flirt speechless. That should've been satisfying. Instead, I felt ridiculously nervous.

“There's no one here,” I reminded him. “You can save the performance.”

He blinked. Almost like he'd forgotten we were pretending. Then he cleared his throat and held out his arm. “Ready?”

“Yep.”

I slipped my hand into the crook of his elbow. And tried very hard not to notice how perfectly we fit together.

Julissa and Rob had decided that instead of separate bachelor and bachelorette parties, they wanted one combined celebration. Which sounded lovely. Until they'd announced it would be a scavenger hunt. A competitive scavenger hunt. Through Valentine Bay. With fifty-plus people, twenty challenges, and enough opportunities for public humiliation to qualify as a reality television show.

Damon and I hadn’t spent any time together today. When I got back from the spa, I found a note waiting for me saying he’d had a meeting this afternoon that he couldn’t reschedule. He got home just in time to get ready to go to the scavenger hunt.

I’d asked how things went with my mom, and he’d been frustratingly vague. He’d told me it went fine. When I asked what they talked about, he said, things. Getting any information from him was worse than pulling teeth.

My mom was even less forthcoming. She’d spent the entire afternoon napping, so she was unavailable to grill for details. It was extremely frustrating. I hated not knowing. I could deal with anything, the good, the bad, or the ugly, but not having any idea what happened was causing me to become paranoid and fill in blanks with my imagination. And I’d always had a very active imagination.

Damon held my hand as I stepped into the golf cart. The world seemed to narrow to the soft whir of battery-powered wheels and the subtle brush of Damon’s thigh against mine on the vinyl bench. The silence between us wasn’t awkward. It was charged, a live wire humming with all the words we weren’t saying.

I pretended to be on my phone, but every sense was tuned to him. I could smell his aftershave—citrusy, clean, with an edge of something wild—and feel his gaze when he glanced over at me every few seconds. My heart thundered in my chest, and the butterflies in my stomach had graduated to full-on dragon status.

I’d faced corporate raiders, hostile takeovers, and a viral video scandal, but none of those ever made me fight the urge to giggle like an idiot or wonder if my hair looked okay from the side.

He pulled the cart to a stop in front of the barn, where everyone was meeting. For a beat, neither of us moved. My head turned of its own accord. I met his eyes and was immediately caught in the full force of his attention. The air between us crackled, and the rest of the world slipped out of focus, leaving only the two of us.

Without warning, our bubble was popped when my mother materialized beside the cart. “There you are!”

I did my best to disguise the emotional whiplash her presence gave me and climbed out of the cart to give her a hug. When I released her, Damon was beside me, his hand resting on my lower back.

“How was your flight?” I asked, but what I really wanted to know was how the drive back from the airport was.

“Fine.” My mom gave me the same frustrating response as Damon before turning towards her partner-in-ambiguity. She patted his chest as she strained her neck and pressed a kiss to his cheek in greeting. “Hello, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart?

Cheek kisses?

Interesting.

He smiled. “Hope you got some rest this afternoon.”

“Oh, I did, thank you. Would you be a doll and get me some water? I'm absolutely parched.”

“Of course.”

He squeezed his hand on my lower back before heading toward the kitchen.

The second he was out of earshot, my mother turned to me. “What exactly are your intentions, young lady?”