“Hold my beer,” I said, passing my half-finished bottle of Guinness to a slender young socialite immediately to my right.
Like a superhero, I swooped in, taking Maggie into my arms like a knight of old and kissing her passionately. It was a bit of a risk, but I could tell by how she responded that the feeling was mutual.
“Sorry, darlin’, I just saw you over here and couldn’t help myself.” I pressed a chaste kiss against the tip of her nose and turned to face Kenny. “I should really thank you?”
He sneered, and his nostrils flared.
“For what?”
“For cheating on Maggie with her stepsister. If you hadn’t, she and I would never have met and fallen in love. Fate has a funny way of making things happen, doesn’t it?”
Kenny stormed off, clearly too pissed off not to believe the veracity of our love.
The thing was, it was actually beginning to feel real.
I didn’t know that I was quite ready to propose for real, but I was definitely falling deeply and madly in love with the shy, beautiful girl in the head-turning dress.
I wanted to go so much further with her than a kiss, passionate as it may have been.
I could feel that Maggie agreed, especially by the way she had kissed me back and was currently trembling in my arms— not from cold or out of fear but in pure, loving desire.
This night wasn’t turning out exactly as I thought it would.
But Maggie was in my arms and letting me kiss her with abandon, so that was all that mattered to me.
In that sense, this night was turning out just as well, or even better, than I could have possibly hoped or dreamed.
Chapter Nine – Maggie
I wanted Gavin so badly that I could taste it. He had done such a good job of playing my Prince Charming that I was pretty much in awe of him.
I knew somewhere in the more cynical part of my mind that it wasn’t real— not in the way that it appeared to all the guests at the party, of course— but there was something there.
Something like undeniable, underlying chemistry made me want to tear my clothes off and jump on him.
That was an urge I hadn’t had in a long while.
“You didn’t have to kiss me,” I told him. “Just to make a point, I mean.”’
He gave me a sheepish smile.
“It wasn’t to make a point. Not entirely, anyway.”
“Oh, well, I’m glad we’re on the same page there. It’s awful, but I felt kind of good seeing that look on Kenny’s face. He can be such an asshole.”
“How long had he and your sister been shagging?” Gavin asked, making me giggle with his phrasing.
I never thought I’d be able to laugh at what happened, yet here I was, chuckling about the absurdity of it all, thanks to Gavin.
I sighed.
“I don’t know. But after facing reality, my best guess is that he’s been shagging my little sister behind my back since she turned eighteen. I guess less than a year.”
His eyes widened at that piece of news.
“Raquel is only eighteen?”
“I know. She looks older, right?”
“Aye, she does.”
“She was an early bloomer. And she’s never been short of male attention. Even after our parents divorced, I tried to protect her as much as I could. Keep her from doing anything too stupid. As far as I know, she never went all the way with any of her boyfriends, so that’s something, I guess. But maybe she was up to way more than she had let on. Perhaps she was just pretending to be good while really being very bad. It hit me hard when I came home to get my notebook and found Kenny pounding her in my bed.”
“Aye, I can see how that might be disconcerting,” Gavin agreed.
My lips twisted, and sadness filled my heart.
“I haven’t been the same since, honestly. I had to get a job as a personal assistant. I would much rather be following my passion of writing, which I was doing pretty well at, for a while, but it never really covered all the bills, and I haven’t been able to write the same since it happened.”
“I think I get that.”
“You do?”
“Sure, the money bit. I can’t say I get the boyfriend banging my baby sister bit. For starters, I only have brothers. Five of them, actually.”
“Oh, your poor mother!”
“I know, right? And it’s not like she had any help, what with our dad pretty much acting like a seventh child for her. I grew up with beans on toast being a Sunday feast, and acting isn’t always a lucrative gig. I’ve waited my fair share of tables and laid thousands of bricks on building sites. But, luckily, I invested what I earned and have a nest egg to dip into when jobs are scarce.”