Ryan’s chest squeezed tight at her beauty.
Smith handed him a beer. “Some pretty big bets were going down today in the production offices for the playoff games. You ready to make us all some money?”
Ryan took a slug from the bottle, his eyes never leaving Vicki. “I’ll do my best.”
But instead of taking the hint that he wasn’t up for shooting the breeze tonight, Smith kept right on talking. “I enjoyed the shaking down we did today for your school sports fund. Kind of nice to be on the other side of the demanding, for once. Ever feel like everyone just wants something from you?”
Depending on his mood, Smith could be disturbingly blunt...or as opaque as it got. Clearly, he was in one of his deep—and talkative—moods.
“Well,” Ryan drawled, “considering my brother just told me to pitch a no-hitter so he wins his money back on a bet, yeah, I guess I do know how that feels.”
“You’re lucky to have her, you know.”
Ryan finally shot Smith a look to see what he was playing at. “Vicki?”
“You’ve been friends since you were kids, so you know she’s not hanging around because of what you could do for her, or for the fame that comes with being your fiancée.”
“She’s not my—”
“Right.” The one word was loaded. “Funny how the way the two of you look at and touch each other makes it hard for any of us to remember that it’s all just a lie.”
Ryan’s teeth clenched at the way his brother had just pointed out the obvious. He couldn’t keep from wanting Vicki. Loving her. Not even when she’d all but asked him to do just that this morning when she’d called their night together “weird” and then said her silent no to ever being intimate like that again.
Frustration had him lashing out at a brother who didn’t deserve it. “Not everyone is as good an actor as you are.”
Smith gave him a hard look. “Then maybe you should quit trying so hard to pretend.”
Finally, his brother left him alone again and Ryan’s gaze immediately went back to Vicki.
All day he’d been turning their situation over and over in his head. Yes, he knew she thought making love had been a mistake. A weird mistake. But he hadn’t forgotten the way she’d responded to his touch...and that there hadn’t been one single weird thing about the way she’d arched and cried out against him and begged for more.
The thing was, even before he’d known just how amazing it was to make love to her, Ryan had wanted more.
Everything.
He wanted everything.
Not just to give Vicki his heart, but to know that she wanted to give hers to him, too.
Ryan hadn’t had to fight for much in his life. School, sports, friends, women—they’d all come easily. Even his friendship with Vicki had always been natural, comfortable—easy—right from the start.
But he wasn’t satisfied with friendship anymore.
Not when he wanted what his parents had shared.
Not when he wanted what his brothers and sisters were finding for themselves, one after the other.
And not when he held Chase’s baby daughter, Emma, in his arms and wondered what his and Vicki’s children would look like.
All her life, Vicki had kept reaching, kept believing, kept trying to turn her most passionate dreams into reality.
Now, it was finally his turn to reach. To believe. And to try.
Ryan Sullivan had finally found something that mattered enough to fight for.
Love.
* * *
“I’m so glad you could come to Summer’s party,” Mary Sullivan said when Vicki joined her on the patio.
“You know how much I love spending time with your family. And Emma is positively gorgeous.” Zach and Heather’s dogs had clearly adopted the baby as they flanked her pink and purple vibrating baby seat. A moment later, Jake helped Sophie up from the nearby couch, her belly looking even bigger than it had just a day ago. “And I’m so glad things worked out so well for Sophie and Jake.”
Summer’s grandmother, who had flown out from Minneapolis for Summer’s birthday party, smiled and said, “Congratulations on your engagement.”
Vicki worked to smile back and say, “Thank you,” without faltering. Thank God Mary already knew the truth, or she would have felt even worse about the situation than she already did.
The other woman turned to Mary. “You must be so thrilled to know that another one of your children has found the one.”
Mary put her arm around Vicki and didn’t miss a beat in the game of pretend they were playing. “I couldn’t be happier for Vicki and Ryan. He had such a crush on her when they were in school together. It was amazing for me to see him be so serious about a girl when he’d always been so relaxed about it all before.”
Wow, Vicki thought, now I know where Smith gets his acting chops.
Mary turned to her and added, “The night he went over to ask you to the prom and found out you had already agreed to go with someone else...well, it just about broke my heart to see him like that.”
Forgetting they were supposed to be pretending, Vicki blurted, “He was going to ask me to the Sophomore Prom?”
Summer’s grandmother cut in to ask, “He never told you?”
Vicki shook her head, wondering if Mary could have made that up. “No. He never told me.”
At her unspoken question, Ryan’s mother patted her arm and nodded. “It’s true, Vicki. He really did go to ask you to the prom. I know how worried he was about doing something that might ruin your friendship. Asking you to that dance was going to be his big risk. Unfortunately, he never got to take it.” Mary’s eyes held hers. “Until now.”
Summer’s grandmother was saying something about romantic love stories and long-lost high school sweethearts, but Vicki could barely keep track of it. Fortunately, Mary seemed to understand that she needed to be left alone with her thoughts.
Vicki had been so careful to keep herself from getting hurt every step of the way with Ryan this past week. But as she watched Ryan pick up Emma and give her kisses all over her face that had the baby nuzzling even closer to him, Vicki suddenly wondered if what she’d thought was so smart had actually been blindingly stupid, instead.
* * *
As they drove through the city back to Ryan’s house, Vicki was as nervous as she’d ever been. Ryan was strangely silent, which was okay, since she couldn’t have made small talk for the life of her.
Oh God, she couldn’t believe what she was thinking of doing—that she was actually toying with the idea of confessing her feelings to him after all these years. Because even after her body had given away far more than she’d ever planned while in his arms the previous evening, it was still possible to write that off as “just sex.”