Page 23 of Double Dared
“I said I would,” I reminded him, though it was mostly for anyone overhearing the conversation.
“Come. Let’s get you a drink and loosen those muscles,” he said, putting a hand on the small of my back to lead me through the crowd to where he had been standing with Jason earlier. There was a table with various bottles set up there, and a large and colorful list of recipes for simple cocktails that could be made with the provided ingredients.
“Jason,” Taylor said. “Meet Harrison.”
Jason frowned a little at Taylor, then nodded and smiled at me. “Hey, you’re, uh, the guy Taylor met at the bar, right?”
“He knows it was a dare,” Taylor explained.
I shook Jason’s hand as relief relaxed his face. “Oh, good. I hate keeping secrets.”
I laughed. The pure Marx Brothers farce of this washilarious to me, even if nobody else was laughing. “We call it a happy accident.”
Jason’s eyes twinkled as though his suspicions were confirmed. “Of course.”
“What have you got here?” I asked, placing the bottle of wine I’d brought with me on the table and rubbing my hands as I looked through the bottles that were already open and being used generously.
Taylor walked me through the options for a drink, but as he began, he placed a hand on my arm, and I stopped listening altogether. It was such a casual, unbothered, unplanned gesture that would have been the reassurance of a beloved partner that I was in the right place, with the right person, and that everything was very good around us. It would have been all that, except that it was fake, and Taylor knew it.
He glanced at me and winked, making my heart thump a little softer.
He put a cocktail into my hand after a couple of minutes of mixing, and it blew me away, refreshing, a little spicy, and very alcoholic. “Trying to get me drunk this early?” I asked.
Taylor pressed his shoulder against mine. “Gonna take advantage of you,” he said in a low voice, acting all cool for Finn, whose back was turned to us but whose ears perked as soon as those words had landed.
I decided to raise the stakes. “You wish. If anyone’s taking any advantage of anyone else, it’ll be the other way around.”
Taylor’s eyes widened a little. “Oh yeah? How so?”
“Your cheeks are red,” I said, lowering my voice a little more. “And you popped a button already.”
One side of Taylor’s lips lifted into a devilishly handsome smile. He pulled his shirt together with his hand, barely concealing the planes of his chest that he had bared earlier. “Sorry, I’m a lady.”
“You really wanna do that with me?” I teased him.
His eyebrows rose in a challenge. “Maybe you can get me to be a little shady.”
“A naughty dynamite,” I assured him.
Taylor fanned his face. Somehow, he made himself blush a little harder.
Finn was slowly turning around, and I held back a laugh, keeping a very flirtatious look on my face instead until Finn’s gaze swept over me. As it did, I made sure I looked like I had just woken out of a dream. I took a step back from Taylor, who also straightened and cleared his throat. In a high-pitched voice, he said, “Finn. Have you met Harrison? Harrison’s a…friend.”
“I think we’ve seen each other,” Finn said, offering a fist to bump.
I obliged while Taylor followed up with the explanation that I was aware of the dare and all. I was more than a little out of place just then. Finn had heard enough to make him extremely suspicious and curious about what was going on. Then again, the way Taylor had flirted with me just then made me question everything.
Taylor excused himself because Kate, the girlwho’d made the stork I’d bought him, had just entered the house, and Taylor’s face lit up tenfold. He waved at her and pushed through the crowd to greet her.
I hadn’t realized that they’d stayed in touch. Of course they would. He’d made her laugh three times when passing her stall, and she’d made him forget all about our script.
“So, Harrison,” Finn said, making me pull back from a path I had no reason to follow. “Taylor keeps flaking on all our plans for you.”
I forced a laugh. “Is he?”
Finn shrugged. “He’s always out with you. We’re starting to get jealous.”
“What can I say? You made that match, right?” I gave him a challenging look and held his gaze. Perhaps too challenging. Perhaps I was confusing him with Kate and everyone else who was competing with me for Taylor’s attention, the idiot that I was.
