That earned me a playful punch to my arm.
“Stop talking about us getting married. You only say that when you mean it,” she snapped, and the fun we were having seemed to drain away.
“So what do I need to do to get you to say yes to dating me? Is it my car? I’ve told you, I will change the car. Is it to do with the fact that you’ve not been feeling well?”
She raised her shoulders and murmured, “Sort of.”
“Is it to do with a certain set of twins who are returning home in a couple of days?”
She gave a slight nod of her head. “If you’d have asked me to be your girlfriend just a few weeks ago, I’d have said yes, Noah. You are lovely, in every way. But now there’s a complication.”
A complication?
I could deal with complicated.
Or competition.
I didn’t know whether the greater challenge came from my brother or the twins, but I was ready for all the complications, challenges, and competitions Grace could throw at me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
GRACE MILLER
Has it been three weeks already?
Since my simple life as a high school student ended I’d became a mess of a person.
The type who arrives an hour early by accident because I didn’t register the correction text even though I must have looked at it. I was probably too tired to read the words.
That type of mess.
And I felt like death on top of it too. My head ached a lot of the time, and my body ached the rest of it.
It was all really the worst.
Ongoing headaches and fatigue made me wonder if I had something more serious than a head cold; possibly mono, or probably a brain tumor.
Still, I’d swallowed a couple of pills and knocked back an energy drink to get me through the next few hours.
Meeting Mom’s guy—it seemed too weird to call him her boyfriend.
This all led to me pacing outside the fanciest restaurant in town, in a shiny dress, with people looking at me for about an hour, wondering what I was doing. While I was dressed appropriately for the venue, I wasn’t exactly going in.
God, they probably thought I was hopelessly waiting for a boyfriend who had just stood me up. Knowing each of my four would-be suitors, though, none of them would be so harsh.
“Grace, dear, are you all right?” my mother said, approaching me in a similarly fancy dress. “You look a little green.”
“Oh, charming, Mom. I’m fine. Just a bit anxious. And chilly. I got here a bit early; I didn’t get your text about it being delayed by an hour. Not until now, when I noticed it while I was standing out here and rereading everything on the phone.”
The message kinda got lost in the sea of messages from four guys.
Ryan telling me he was back.
Sam told me he’d love to meet me ASAP.
Ryan said he wanted in on any meeting with Sam.
Sam insisting he and Ryan would like to meet the next day, as they were going to dinner with their dad.
Noah, telling me Sam and Ry were back.
Noah, bombarding me with messages about things we should meet up and do together, like as if he wanted to fill my calendar so that I wouldn’t have time to meet up with the twins.
It would have been funny if it wasn’t me that was at the heart of all this attention.
I can’t claim it was unwanted.
But I couldn’t string them all along. I’d have to choose soon.
There were no messages from Brandon. He was probably out doing some good deed or another. He’d definitely secured his place in heaven already.
Mom grimaced. “Oh dear, I should have told you who the reservation was for so you could go in and sit down. I’m so sorry.”
She pushed past me, taking me lightly by the hand to the front of the line.
“The eight p.m. reservation for Ryan Baker, please. Nancy Miller.”
“Right this way, madam.”
Wait, did she say Ryan Baker?
No, no, that couldn’t have been it. I had to have misheard that.
Mom could not be dating one of the twins.
“Mr. Baker is on his way, I presume,” the waiter asked as he guided us to the table.
“Yes, Ryan is on the way. I just wanted to get my daughter in here and out of the chill. Could we have some water while we wait?”
Well, damn. I sat down at the table set for five, but the number of place settings didn’t register in my brain at first. I was more disturbed by the name.
Baker was a common enough last name, so it could be a different Ryan, but shit, hearing my mom say his name turned my skin to goose flesh.
I hadn’t spoken to him or his brother since the night of graduation.
“You look even greener now, dear. Is something wrong? Do you need to go?”