Page 77 of Worth the Fall

“My dad’s house for dinner. You’re coming. No arguments. Get dressed, sweetheart. Thomas will be there.” He gave me a wink before taking the whole three steps it took to get to his front door. “One hour.” He held up one finger in the air before disappearing inside, leaving me standing there with a million questions and shaking knees.

I supposed that I could have told Matthew no, fought him on his demands, but part of me wanted to go, even if I was currently freaking out about it. Dinner at his dad’s house. With Thomas. And the rest of his family.

Shutting the door, I hustled back inside, searched for my phone, and pulled up Lana’s number. She answered before I even heard it ring.

“There’s my best friend,” she sang into the phone as I walked into my bedroom and hopped up onto my bed.

“Help me,” I whispered.

Her voice instantly shifted. “Are you okay? Did someone kidnap you? Drop a pin. Sven and I will be on our way. Sven, grab the go bag,” she shouted.

I pulled the phone away from my ear, put it on speaker, and dropped it on the pillow next to me.

“Why do you have a go bag, and what does that have to do with me being kidnapped?” I asked as a slew of new questions now ran through my mind. One of them being,Just how crazy is my best friend?

“So, you were kidnapped?” she asked seriously.

“No, Lana. Focus.”

“I am focused. On saving you. What do you see? Do you smell anything? What can you hear around you? Are you calling me from a trunk? Can you kick out a taillight?”

“Oh my gosh,” I groaned. “Lana! I was not kidnapped, you loon. I’m sitting safely in the bedroom of my condo.”

“Oh. Well, why didn’t you say that?” Her tone shifted again as she completely calmed down. “Never mind, Sven. False alarm,” she shouted, and I heard him yell something back, but couldn’t understand what he’d said. “Unless it isn’t. Hang up and video-chat me for proof.”

She ended the call, and I sat there, staring at the now-blank screen. I didn’t have time for this.

I took a picture of me sitting on my bed and sent it to her before calling her back, not on video, just to be spiteful.

“This picture could be a month old,” she said as she answered.

I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed out a quick huff. “Lana, listen to me. Matthew just invited me to dinner with his family.”

“Matthew? What? Are you just going to go through all the O’Grady brothers and leave none for anyone else?” She tsked me through the phone. “So selfish since the divorce.”

“Why are you like this?” I asked through my annoyance, which was slowly but surely growing by the second.

“Fine. I’ll be good. But why the heck is Matthew inviting you to some family dinner? I thought we loved Thomas and wanted to have all his babies?” Her voice took on a dreamy sound.

She’d been Team Thomas ever since I’d started working at the resort. Not to mention the fact that her favor for him had only grown tenfold since he’d punched Eli at the saloon. Which honestly, I understood completely because my favor for him had grown after that moment too.

“We don’tloveanyone,” I argued, but I wasn’t so sure what it was that I was feeling for Thomas. It was definitely more than like, but love? That felt like a leap.

“Denial is just a river in...” she started before stopping. “Whatever that saying is. You know what I mean. You do like Thomas. You’re just scared of him.”

“Why would I be scaredofhim?”

I wasn’t scared of Thomas. He wasn’t scary. He didn’t scare me. She was ridiculous, and I wasn’t sure why I’d even called her at all.

“I’ve been waiting for this conversation.” She sounded a little too excited.

We’d only had brief texts and quick chats the past week or so. She’d been booked like crazy at the hair salon, and I’d been working a lot too. When either one of us did have a free moment, the other one didn’t. Our timing had been shit lately.

“Anyway, as I was saying, you’re scared because you know that being with Thomas means something. It could never just be a casual fling or a one-night stand. He’s a single dad. He can’t do casual. And for some reason, in that gorgeous little head of yours, you probably think it’s too soon to move on.”

“Isn’t it?” I meant to say the words to myself, but I’d said them out loud on accident.

I heard her sigh. “There’s no timeline for these kinds of things, no matter what society wants you to believe. Are you supposed to stay single for a year to prove some kind of point? To what? To who?”