him when I stood in front of his fiancée with my middle still aching?
“Right, Preston?” she asked.
“Delilah, for fuck’s sake,” Preston snapped. “Leave us alone.” He grasped my wrist. “Belle, if you just—”
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. “Hey, Preston. What are you doing up here? You ran out of the ballroom and disappeared.”
“Your mom’s been flipping shit, man. She said she’d skin me alive if I got you drunk and stashed you under a bench again.”
“She didn’t say that,” a dry voice responded.
“Her eyes did.”
Shock rooted me to the spot. Slowly, I raised my head, taking in the could-feed-a-family-for-a-year shoes, moving up to fitted black and gray pants, the bespoke cut of their jackets, and finally, at them.
No. This can’t be happening.
Both boys jerked to a stop. Both dropped their jaws in matching surprise. Both said at the same time, “Belle?”
“Carter. Nathan,” I rasped.
Saying their names out loud didn’t make them real. They’d changed so much since I’d last seen them.
Carter was practically a different man. He was taller than me now and had permanently shed the softness and chubby cheeks of childhood. Darkish-blond waves were transformed into snow-white locks. Even as a child, people fawned over his aquamarine eyes, but their shift into this icy blue would’ve drawn equal attention for a different reason. Coldness like I’d never seen swirled in his gaze and chilled me to my core.
Carter’s lips curled—drawing up to the faint scar slashed across his right cheek. I could never forget him. Not for a single solitary moment.
Because of that scar.
I forced myself to break his gaze and glance at Nathan.
For us it has only been a few years, but they rapidly changed him as adolescence does. He was slimmer in some places and firmer in the others. His curly hair—a gift from his Afro-Caribbean father—hung low in his eyes. His shaved style a thing of the past. A multitude of tawny freckles sprinkled his nose, cheeks, forehead, and everywhere. They lay stark on skin paler than I remembered.
What hadn’t changed were those heart-shaped lips, curved to look like he was smiling at the world even when he wasn’t. Doleful brown, bordering on black, eyes snatched me and dragged me into their depths to drown alongside his many victims. Those fooled into believing the eyes of an innocent deer didn’t conceal the heart of a hunter.
Carter and Nathan turned away, dismissing me with a single flick of their eyes, and just like that, they were real.
How can they be here?
Why wouldn’t they be here? a voice countered. The summer at the cove was moved up a year early, no doubt because these two were freshly graduated from the academy. Someone has to snag them before college opened their minds too wide and reminded them this entire tradition was archaic.
That explained what they were doing at his party, but not why they were upstairs searching for Preston.
A heavy, nauseous feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.
“You’re friends with Preston.” It wasn’t a question.
“This was a trick.” I turned on Desai knowing betrayal was lashed across my face as assuredly as it laced my voice. “The three of you. You played me to get me to sleep with you?”
“Sleep with her?”
Delilah’s cry wasn’t half as loud as Preston’s.
“What? Belle, no!”
I had to hand it to him. Preston put on an excellent shocked and horrified face while his fucking fiancée hung off him like a tree ornament, glaring daggers at both of us.
“You said you weren’t going to the cove.”
He tossed his head. “That’s— That’s not what I said exactly.”
“I don’t want to get married yet and not to anyone in there. That’s what you said exactly!”
Preston stepped toward me. “Belle, if you let me explain—”
“Explain what? You’re going to pretend some more that you didn’t know who I was when those two are your best buddies? Did your plan to get me into bed start at our run-in at the gallery, or did you three think it up when you saw my name on the guest list?”
I couldn’t stop myself. The accusations poured from my lips on the rush of pain and humiliation.
“Do you even have a cousin?!”
Delilah pulled a face. “Cousin? What cousin?”
I went cold.
A lash tightened around my body, forcing the air from my lungs, the blood from my face, and squeezed out the sweet memories working to reform my feelings about statues.
Preston reached for me. “Belle, I swear there’s an explan—”
I socked him dead in the face, his cartilage crunching under my fist.