head down and meeting her halfway, Will kissed Hadley. She put everything in it that she felt, promising the world and meaning every bit of it.
By the time they walked back out into the ballroom, her dress was a bit askew, his cowboy hat sat cockeyed on his head, and both of them had that half-dazed, kissed-out-of-my-mind look on their faces.
The Harbor City elite staring at them as they emerged from the coat closet were buzzing with gossipy glee as well. Not giving a shit and grinning like a man in love, which she now knew he was, Will picked Hadley up and carried her out of the ballroom, past the huge mural of a sunset that took up an entire wall, and into the rest of their lives together.
Epilogue
One Year Later…
Will was wearing his black cowboy hat again, and Hadley was so beyond the point of denying that seeing him in it and his worn-in Wranglers was hot as hell. And the fact that they were back on the ranch to celebrate Adalyn’s decision to move to Harbor City and become an equal partner in Hadley’s charitable consulting firm, of course, meant only one thing: family game night.
She and Will had barely survived the first round of charades after dinner, which was what must have him so nervous. The bench at the outdoor picnic table they were sharing was practically vibrating from the speed of his knee bouncing up and down, and he hadn’t stopped shoveling Puppy Chow into his mouth since her mom had put it down in front of him with a wink.
She leaned in close to him, lowering her voice. “You okay?”
“Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “Everything’s fine.”
“Weird” didn’t begin to cover this. After a year of spending nearly every non-working moment with him, she’d pretty much pegged all his moods. This one, though, was totally new.
“If you want to concede, we can totally do that.” She gave his thigh a comforting squeeze, then glided her hands up about as high as possible, considering her entire family was out on the patio with them. “That would mean we could sneak off to the cabin sooner.”
“No,” he said, the single word coming out sharp as a firecracker. “Sorry. I just really love Scrabble.”
Okay then, nothing to see here at all. Just her boyfriend passing on hot cabin sex for a game involving wooden square tiles. Letting out a sigh, she turned back to the board, her shoulders slumped with disappointment. So much for that whole honeymoon, can’t-get-enough-of-each-other period.
PawPaw laid down the first word. Marry.
“Really? You couldn’t have gone for more points than that? You wasted an M on a square that didn’t even have double points?” Aunt Louise rolled her eyes. “I should have partnered with the dog.”
“Oh yeah?” PawPaw shot back, his question sounding oddly practiced. Of course, after decades of the siblings needling each other, how could it not? “What do you have that’s so amazing?”
Aunt Louise’s cheeks turned red. “You have no idea how painful this is for me.”
Then she laid down a single E beneath the M.
“A whole two points.” PawPaw let out a low whistle. “That’s really going to win us the game.”
“And this is why you two aren’t allowed to partner up during family game night,” Adalyn said as she stood at the end of the table messing with her phone. “Great-Grandma always said you have been bickering like this since you were kids.”
“We know how to work together when it matters,” PawPaw grumbled.
His knee still going a million miles an hour, Will laid down an O and a U going down from the end of the word “marry.”
For someone who loved Scrabble more than orgasms, it was a really disappointing point total. Judging by the way his jaw was clenched tight, he was none too happy about it.
“Don’t worry,” Hadley said, injecting an extra dose of chipper into her tone. “I’ve had those kind of tile choices before, too. We’ll catch up.”
Surveying her tiles, she was trying to work out how to use the W so it would land on a multiple-point square when Will snagged her tiles.
“I got this.”
What the hell? Slack-jawed, she stared at him as he laid down the tiles, usurping her turn as if she wasn’t sitting there.
“That’s not legal,” she said, looking to PawPaw and Aunt Louise for backup. “You can’t just play my tiles for me.” She glanced down at the board and realized that he hadn’t even connected his four-letter word to