“Finally.” Web held up his car keys and jingled them. “Let’s go.”
The Porsche logo on the key fob caught the light and on the next heartbeat, Will knew exactly what he needed to do to show Hadley he understood exactly how wrong he’d been about her. The chances of it working might be slim, but as a space cowboy once said, never tell him the odds.
Fuck the odds. He had to believe this would work.
Chapter Twenty
Toes pinched from the shoes she’d borrowed from Fiona and wearing a cocktail dress tailored via safety pins, Hadley kept her chin high and her steps steady as she walked by the coat closet—yes, the coat closet—at the hotel ballroom. Of course, up until that moment, she refused to notice the coat closet. She’d barely even glanced in that direction. Certainly, she hadn’t found an excuse to walk by it multiple times while working the floor at her very first fundraising event run by her fledgling company.
Nope.
She’d stayed clear.
And that whisper of “maybe he’ll show here, since he never appeared on your doorstep,” could just shut up already. Will was out of her life and good riddance to him. It wasn’t like she missed him or thought about him or dreamed about him every single night.
She didn’t.
Not.
At.
All.
He’d left. She’d blocked his number. Life went on.
Still, she searched the crowd in the ballroom, looking for the absolute worst man who she still loved because emotions were a bitch. If she could, she’d have hers surgically removed. Scientists really needed to get to work on that one. Maybe that could be her next charity funding recommendation.
Shoving all thoughts of Will into a deep, dark hole where they belonged, Hadley worked the room, talking with donors and influencers about the Holt Foundation Fund and the work it was doing to support Harbor City’s charities. Then the band started playing the first notes of a song that stopped her in her tracks. It was the song from Adalyn’s reception dance that they’d listened to repeatedly until she and Will had the steps down.
In half a breath, she could feel his arms around her again and could practically smell the musky scent of his cologne. Unable to stop herself, she whirled around to face the stage as her heart hammered in her chest, expecting to see Will standing up there. Her disappointed breath came out in a whoosh. It was just the band.
“May I have this dance?” Will asked, appearing all of a sudden on her other side.
Fighting a battle within herself, she took in the sight of him. The bastard didn’t just look good. He looked amazing. He wore a custom-made suit without a tie and the black cowboy hat she’d had every intention of burning before it had disappeared during the family festivities.
“Where did you get the hat?” Because that should really be the first thing you say to him. Way to go, Hads.
He tipped the brim and gave her a wink. “PawPaw sent it.”
“I should have known.” Was there anything her family didn’t lovingly involve themselves in? No, thank God.
Will held out his elbow to her. “Dance?”
There really wasn’t a way to get out of it without drawing attention, so she nodded in agreement, slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, and made her way onto the dance floor.
The second he placed his palm on the small of her back and took her other hand in his so they could two-step, she gave in to the tide of rightness that followed. For a second, she allowed her eyes to close and let that sense of everything falling into place fill her. Did that make her weak? Maybe, but that was the thing with love. Even when it was inconvenient or wrong or perfect, it was there. A person couldn’t stop that. So she gave herself that moment to remember what could have been and pretend it still could be before opening her eyes to the reality of the situation.
Will was looking down at her, the depth of feeling in his eyes the best and worst thing to see at that moment when it was taking everything she had not to fall prey to that old fake-it-until-you-make-it feeling.
“Hadley, I’m sorry,” he said as they moved along to the music, each step bringing their bodies closer together until they were aligned, fitting together like two puzzle pieces. “I was wrong. I know that.”
She managed not to flinch, years of covering her true feelings coming in handy, but that didn’t mean his words didn’t hurt. They were all she’d wanted to hear, but how could she trust them after everything that had happened?
“I should have known all along what an idiot I was, but it turns out that defense mechanisms are a helluva thing to realize you’re using,” he went on. “It took Web telling me that I was acting like our grandmother for me to really open my eyes to what I was doing. Please, say you’ll give us another chance.”
The music stopped, but they stayed there on the dance floor, his palm warm against the small of her back. On the ranch, it would have felt like the first moment of the rest of her life. Now it just seemed like a cruel tease of what could have been. She wanted to believe him, really she did, but she wasn’t sure she had it in her anymore to believe. She had her family. She had herself. Could she really think that she could have Will Holt, too? Damn it, she wanted to believe. She really did, and that was the one thing that scared her enough to push every knee-jerk fear of what happened when things stopped being perfect to the forefront, making her whole body ache. No one knew better than she did that perfection was only an illusion; the only thing that was real was love—and he’d made no mention of that.
“So