Page 71 of A Fighting Chance

It was a clear and obvious,“You better not.”

“Sure,” she said. Maybe dancing with Isaac would help cool her foolish blood. “I’d love to.”

Isaac took her hand, and Joel watched them the entire way toward the dance floor. Considering that the universe liked to mess with her, Isaac walked them right past Joel, who reached out and grabbed her.

Not her wrist.

Not her hand.

He wrapped an arm around her waist.

“One second, Isaac,” she said.

Joel flashed Isaac a look before looking down at her. “Come upstairs with me.”

“I can’t.”

“I don’t mean to my room. I mean to the roof. You can see the opera house and the harbor from up there. We haven’t had much time to talk or hang out all night.”

“I can’t,” she repeated.

“Why not?” Joel pointed in Isaac’s direction. “Not because of him?”

“No, that’s not why.”

“Then why?”

“Because I don’t want to go to the roof,” she said. “If we go upstairs, I want to go to your room.”

Before she further incriminated herself, she walked off. The entire way, she felt Joel’s eyes on her as if she was the only planet in the universe and him, her center—her sun.

CHAPTER22

The DJ transitioned into a nineties segment, which began with Montell Jordan’s classic: “This is How We Do It.” The song wasn’t slow, by any means, but the man who’d asked Ayesha to dance had placed himself too close to her body, gyrating his pelvis less than six feet from hers.

Joel returned to the wall.

Gage joined him and handed him a glass of something so cold, had his blood not been as hot as it was, it would have numbed his fingers.

“I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to give me an honest answer,” Gage prefaced. “Lattimore, do you have feelings for Ayesha?”

Joel frowned. “What kind of feelings?”

“Lattimore.”

“Ayesha and I are just friends.”

“Well, you don’t look like—”

“But who the fuck is that, and why does he have his hands on her?” He downed the drink, which turned out to be ginger ale, in one gulp. “Do you know him?”

“One of Tayler’s cousins,” Gage said. “Name’s Isaac. He’s been fully vetted—not a threat.”

The term “threat” was relative. At the moment, Isaac looked like someone who should have had a red dot somewhere on his light gray suit. The light gray didn’t even look right with Ayesha’s outfit; the purple in her dress perfectly matched the groom and groomsmen’s ties and pocket squares. Naturally, that meant she looked better with him than anyone else in the building.

“Isaac’s a tax accountant.” Gage, arms folded, studied the mismatched couple. “Nothing we found suggests that he’s anything we need to worry about. Tayler was iffy about inviting him, but she changed her mind at the last minute.”

“What’d you say, taxes or terrorist?”