Page 78 of Always You (A Lilac Bay Novel)

He'd made eggs for my mom, too, I remembered suddenly, as I fumbled though the cabinet for the bottle of painkillers. The day he took me to her house. I rested my head against the edge of the open door, a wave of weariness washing over me.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice soft.

“Yeah,” I said, turning away and pasting a smile on my face. “Just hungry.”

To my relief, Andrew didn’t say a word about the events of the evening before, choosing instead to rehash all the details from the flash mob.

“Oh, I was supposed to ask you,” he said at one point. “Eddie and Zane want to have a little party at Rose’s later this week, to celebrate the anniversary of the reopening.”

“Wow, it’s really been a whole year,” I mused. Prior to Eddie and Zane deciding to run the place, Rose’s had sat empty for years following Frank Powell’s first heart attack. But now that it had been open again for so long, it almost felt like it had never been gone.

“I know,” he said. “I kind of can’t believe they made it this far. They want to celebrate with a little dinner, nothing too extravagant. You want to come?”

I had a sudden flash of Chase asking me to share dinner with him at Rose’s last night, and how terrible it had made me feel. And then I had ditched him on the dance floor, I realized. Probably not so eager to take me out now.

“Riley?” Andrew asked.

“Oh, sorry. Yeah, I definitely want to come.”

“Good. Give you something to take your mind off the contest while we wait for the next episode to air.”

For the rest of the meal, Andrew talked pretty steadily so that I didn’t have to say much at all. Another thing to be grateful for. And when we’d finished eating, he insisted that I go and shower while he did the dishes.

I paused in the doorway to the kitchen, watching him move around, comfortable in this space he’d spent so much time in. For one moment I let myself think about what the previous night would have been like if he hadn’t showed up. I shuddered slightly and then went to take a shower, thankful that a life without him wasn’t something I ever really needed to worry about.

Dinner with the Powell clan could take a little getting used to. There were a lot of them, and they were all very talkative and involved in each other’s life. We needed a table for eighteen just to fit us all—between Andrew’s cousins, their significant others, Posey’s nephews, and the aunts and uncles, we were a pretty large group. Even Paul was there, and he never came to family stuff. For the first ten minutes of dinner I didn’t say much of anything, plenty happy to let them dominate the conversation. It felt like the first time in weeks that no one had asked me a question about the show.

Which, unsurprisingly, didn’t last. The trivia episode had aired the night before, and we had found out that we made it another week. Which meant that no matter what, our flash mob was going to be broadcast.

“You should have seen Mimi out there,” Posey was telling her brother. Greg and his wife Sage lived on the mainland along with their three kids, and they hadn’t been able to make it out to the island for the flash mob. “She was the best one.”

“Yeah, that’s because we did a twenties theme,” Andrew said, smiling sweetly at his grandmother. “And she was the only one old enough to remember actually dancing in the twenties.”

To my delight, she reached out and smacked him on the side of the head.

“So what’s up next, Riley?” Sage asked me.

“I’m not totally sure,” I said. “They’re coming out on the last day of the Lilac Festival and they’re going to tape part of that. I’m sure we’ll have a challenge or something, but so far they haven’t told me anything.”

“Ooh, David has been trying out these vanilla-lilac macaroons for the festival,” Iris said. “They’resogood. Just really delicate and yummy. We have to have them at the cafe’s booth.”

“Why in the hell do you thinkyouget David’s desserts?” Edward asked. “Last I checked, he works at this restaurant.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who’s sleeping with him,” she shot back. David, quite smartly, I thought, concentrated on his dinner while the cousins argued over him.

“That was pretty sneaky of you,” Andrew whispered in my ear.

“What?”

“Mentioning the Lilac Festival. Now they’ll forget all about the show.”

I winked. I knew as well as anyone that mentioning the festival was a surefire way to get anyone on this island distracted for hours. It was the biggest event of the entire season, and people around here had strong feelings about it. Making sure the weeklong event went off without a hitch was one of my primary responsibilities of the summer, with or without a camera crew in tow.

“Actually, I did need to talk to you about that. Will you be on the stage-building team again this year?”

“No problem. Who else is volunteering?”

“Uh, I was kinda hoping you could find some guys.” He made an exasperated face and I smiled sweetly. “Pretty please?”