“I baked,” Julie announced to everyone else with a happy nod.
“That’s great, honey!” Grace replied. Then she turned her head toward Riley and spoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Good call on the cupcakes.”
Julie pointed a finger. “Just for that, you have to try the first bite of my cake.”
Julie was notoriously bad in the kitchen, probably because her efforts only ever pertained to special occasions, so she never got any regular practice.
Mitchell, thankfully, had become increasingly handy in the kitchen since he and Julie had gotten together and it became clear that her skills were not destined for improvement. And since Mitchell Forbes excelled at everything he tried, dinner tonight would be passable, if not delicious. The man was gorgeous, smart, and successful, and he could cook. Basically perfect. Emma would not have been at all surprised to learn that Mitchell was packing pure gold parts in his pants.
The group dissolved into small pockets of conversation: Julie, insisting Riley put the cupcakes out in the hallway, Sam talking to Grace about the new labels for his rye whisky, Mitchell pawning off hockey tickets he didn’t want onto Jake.
Not for the first time, Emma felt an overwhelming surge of warmth and gratitude for this group of warm, bubbling friends, even if, at times, she still felt a little alone in the group, like she hadn’t quite found her place.
She moved toward Julie and Mitchell’s plentiful wine collection and topped off her glass with something white and lovely.
Cassidy came up behind her.
She knew it was him by his smell. Which was creepy, when you thought about it, but sadly true.
Over the years she’d done a good job of forgetting his face and the sound of his voice.
She even liked to think she’d forgotten his touch, although sometimes her naughtier dreams told her otherwise.
But she had never been able to forget the way Alex Cassidy smelled.
Clean and spicy, and utterly masculine in the way that made even the most independent, girl-power woman want to press a cheek to his chest and just stay.
“Think this is a setup?” Cassidy asked her, his voice low.
She stepped aside so he could pour himself a glass of wine. Red. Back in college, and the years just after, he’d only ever drunk beer. But adult Cassidy…he drank red wine. Always. He even swirled and sniffed it before taking a sip, which should have seemed pretentious as hell to her, but instead made her think of a man who knew what he wanted and wouldn’t waste his time on anything less.
College Cassidy had been driven. Ambitious. Relentless.
Adult Cassidy was all of those things. But he was also confident.
Confident that what he wanted was always within reach.
He lifted his eyebrows as he glanced at her, and she realized she hadn’t answered his question.
“No, I don’t think it’s a setup,” she said, as they stood shoulder to shoulder, watching their friends. “Julie claims we’re both invited simply because it’s the first time in months that we’ve both been single.”
“Is that so?” he said, taking another slow sip of his drink. “So I was with Danielle for two, maybe three months.”
“Before that, I dated Doug—”
“And I was with Alexa, maybe six months ago.”
“Alex and Alexa? That’s cute,” she replied.
“I dumped her because I thought the personalized towels would be too awkward when we got married.”
“So true,” Emma agreed. “Although it must have made it handy during sex. That way, when you screamed your own name, she’d think, wrongly, that you were interested in her pleasure—”
She broke off her sarcastic jab when she caught him watching her with an almost-smirk.
“What?” she asked.
His smile grew a little bigger, and he leaned in. “You think about us in bed.”
Her mouth dropped, and he laughed outright. “You do. You think about the two of us together. How we were.”
“I can assure you—”