Page 60 of Playing for Keeps

I was going to have that talk with Vinny.

To clear the air and tell him the truth.

Tell him that I loved him.

And hope that he still loved me too.

13

Vinny

My heart raced as I gazed out at the crowd, watching as the guests danced and swayed to the music. Time slowed, the fast beat that thumped out of the speakers around the room sounding like a funeral drum. I squeezed my eyes closed, forcing my breathing to slow, trying to calm the wild rhythm of my heart. When I opened them again, a gasp shattered the tightness in my chest.

She was there, dressed in purple silk, her slender body dancing in her spot. She looked like a dream, and I blinked hard again, trying to make sure she wasn’t just a figment of my imagination.

“Just go after her, Vin.”

Mitch’s voice was in my ear, in my head, and I couldn’t get it out. Not since before the ceremony, when he saw straight through me and called me out.

“I can’t,” I told him, shaking my head frantically as I tugged at the cuffs of my sleeves.

He chuckled, his hands landing on my shoulders and squeezing, almost like a hug I so desperately needed. “Your sister used to say the same thing, and look how that turned out?”

My lip pulled between my teeth, the skin raw as I bit into it once again. The man had tamed my sister’s fickle heart after somehow making it through all the walls that she built around it. “What’s your secret?”

Mitch’s eyes flashed to the back of the church. I knew, logically, my sister and Frankie were there. But I only saw one thing.

Jen.

“Persistence,” he said, this string of happiness wound around the word. “For some things, you just can’t give up.”

I hadn’t given up.

I’d done everything in my power to bring Jen back to me. To get her back to the city, back into my world. To show her the truth that I’d found.

And there she was, dancing with her brother’s friends, Matt and Ramon.

I was done waiting. I’d waited over a year. I’d waited through the longest wedding ceremony known to man. I’d waited through the dinner and the toasts, Frankie and Corey’s first dance and the cutting of the cake. I’d been caught up in her the entire time, in her blue-eyed stare, in the gravity that swirled around her, pulling me in.

Her beauty had only increased in the year since she tore out my heart. But something had changed. The happiness that had always shone through her like sunlight was hidden behind darkened clouds.

Just go after her, Vin.

As if he were beside me instead of seated at the far side of the room, Mitch’s voice sounded once again in my head. I felt the push of his hand on my shoulder, his insistence that I put my fear of rejection and abandonment aside and go to her.

Talk with her.

Tell her how I felt.

My foot stepped forward without conscious thought. As the music’s beat transformed into a slow cadence, I found myself at her side.

Matt and Ramon both stepped away at the same time, turning to their girls, Ellen and Emily, and sweeping them up in their arms.

Jen was alone. Eyes roaming, shoulders slumping under the weight of loneliness. She hadn’t brought her boyfriend. She’d shown up at the rehearsal dinner and the wedding alone. It was something Mitch had pointed out, and the thought pounded in my head.

Those dark blue eyes found me as Jen turned, and she gasped, pulling her hand to her chest, clutching at the diamond necklace that hung from her neck.

“Vinny.” My name was a breathless gasp across her lips. My eyes dripped down from hers, toward the necklace she clutched like a talisman. But it wasn’t the tear-drop diamond Corey and Frankie got her that caught my attention. It was the white gold chain wrapped around her wrist and the familiar blue-green stone hanging from it.