Truth or Dare before nine o’clock.”
Jocelyn smiled as she watched Guy claw his way through a game of Egyptian Rat Screws with Lacey’s teenage daughter, Ashley. “I can’t believe she still loves to play that game and keeps teaching it to people. It’s like she’s spreading a sickness.”
“I refuse to play it with her,” Tessa said. “And let me tell you, when I lived out there in Flagstaff with Zoe and her great-aunt, they’d play four-hour Rat Screws marathons.”
“I have a feeling this card game is Guy’s favorite new pastime.”
Tessa looked around. “Then Will ought to learn the game. Where is he, anyway?”
“I have no idea,” Jocelyn said, but of course she knew exactly why Will wasn’t here. He was too angry with Guy to come to the impromptu party. But that wouldn’t last. He’d forgive and forget, too warmhearted to hang on to hate.
But she could, and would. Even if that meant she never had a chance to explore her feelings for Will or wallow in the sweetness of the confessions he’d made this morning.
He’d been her everything.
She stared at her father, the thief of her happiness.
Across the patio, Clay and Lacey stood arm in arm by the barbecue, laughing as they flipped burgers, punctuating almost every sentence with a kiss, a touch, a shared look of affection. No one had stolen their happiness, she thought glumly.
“You want to go try and find Will?” Tessa asked. “You’d think the aroma of cooking meat alone would get a bachelor out of his house and onto the lawn.”
Jocelyn attempted a careless shrug.
“Hey.” Tessa put her hand on Jocelyn’s arm. “Go find him. You’re staring at his house.”
She looked away. “I am not.”
Puffing out a breath, Tessa popped off the swing and nearly knocked Jocelyn on her butt.
“Excuse me,” Tessa said, walking over to the table. “Guy, have you seen Will?”
Jocelyn watched her father, expecting his usual blank stare, his big bear shrug. But, instead, emotion flashed in his eyes, so fast probably no one else saw it. Only a person who’d spent every minute of her childhood watching that face for a clue to when it would happen would see it.
They’d talked. Jocelyn knew it instantly. What had Will said to him? And was that why he was conspicuously absent?
“He was in his house last time I saw him,” Guy said.
“When was that?” Tessa asked.
Now he went blank and lifted a shoulder.
“In the last hour or so?” Tessa prodded.
“I saw him out jogging,” Ashley said, her next card poised over the playing table. “He was running up toward the high school when we got here. Okay, you ready? Slap!”
Ashley threw down a card and Guy was right there with her, the conversation forgotten as Tessa came back to the swing.
“It’s going to rain in the next half hour,” Tessa said. “Probably when we’re eating, so I better see about setting a table inside.”
Jocelyn stood. “I’ll help you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I don’t want to just sit here, Tess.”
Tessa gave her a look. “Go find him. Tell him whatever it is that has you sighing and staring upstairs at what I can only assume was once his bedroom.”
“I—”
“I’ll cover for you. Go, quick before it rains.” She held out her hand to help Jocelyn up, adding a knowing smile. “I saw you two arguing on the beach this morning,” she added softly. “He’s probably waiting for you to invite him to our little party.”
Jocelyn just laughed softly. “Secrets are so overrated around here.”
“They are with me.” She bent over to the cooler of drinks that Clay and Lacey had brought, snagging a beer. “Take him this as a peace offering.”
“We’re not at war.”
Tessa just lifted her brow and gestured for Jocelyn to go.
A few minutes later, Jocelyn had escaped out the front, unnoticed. Tucking the beer in the pocket of her white cargo pants, she traced her old familiar route toward the high school.
If she knew Will—and she did—she knew exactly where he was.
Twilight hung over the Mimosa High baseball field, and the clouds that had rolled in from the east made it even darker.
But Jocelyn didn’t need the field lights. She just followed the familiar ping of a baseball knocking against a metal bat. Rhythmic, steady, a whoosh of wind, a ding of noise, and the soft plop of a ball hitting the outfield.
Was he batting alone?
She walked behind the home dugout, pausing as she always did at the numbers painted on the back wall, each circled with a baseball and a year.