Epilogue 2 #2
She glances at me sidelong. “Now I think you’re serious about everything. Especially the things you shouldn’t be.”
I reach for her then—slow, so she can stop me if she wants. She doesn’t. I run a thumb along her jaw, tipping her chin up so we’re level.
Her breath catches.
That’s all the permission I need to lower my mouth to hers.
The first kiss is soft enough to be deniable for half a second, until she makes this tiny sound—surprised, offended by how much she likes it, whatever it is—and then it’s over for both of us.
I slide my hand to the back of her neck and kiss her the way I’ve imagined kissing her for an embarrassing amount of time.
Slow at first. Careful. Letting her decide if this is real.
She decides fast.
Her fingers fist in my jacket and she comes up into me, mouth opening, kissing me back with none of the hesitation I expected and all of the heat I’ve been living on scraps of for months.
Jesus. Her lipstick is wine-dark and a little smudged already, and I can taste champagne and something sweeter underneath, something that is just Jenna.
Cool control and hidden fire and every single maddening thing about her collapsing at once under my hands.
I crowd her back a step until her spine meets the stone pillar by the terrace door. Hold her there while I kiss her again and again because apparently the universe has finally decided I’ve suffered enough.
Thank fucking heavens.
She breaks away only far enough to breathe.
“Dominic.”
The way she says my name almost drops me to my knees.
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
Her eyes flash. “Don’t call me sweetheart like that unless you intend to do something about it.”
I go still for half a beat, then laugh under my breath, because holy shit. “That a challenge?”
“It’s a scheduling request.” Her hands slide down my shirt, flattening over my chest like she’s checking whether there’s actually a heartbeat under there.
“There’s a room upstairs,” she says.
For one glorious, deranged second, every prayer I’ve ever muttered into the dark is answered at once.
Then she looks straight at me and says, “Take me there and fuck me.”
My body reacts before my brain does. Every male fantasy I’ve ever had about Jenna Pemberton stands up and starts applauding.
But at the same time, it feels wrong.
Too easy.
Jenna is direct, yes. Brutal, often. Efficient enough to turn desire into a bullet point if she wanted. But this has a reckless edge to it. A looseness. Like the walls she uses as a barricade have shifted off-center and fallen unintentionally.
I pull back enough to see her face.
Her pupils are blown wide. Her cheeks are flushed high. And when I really look—when I stop being the luckiest bastard alive long enough to actually use my eyes—I see it.
She’s drunk.
Not falling-over, slurring-into-a-ficus drunk. Jenna would never. But softened. Warmed through. Over the line where choice gets fuzzy at the edges.
“Hey,” I say quietly.
She frowns immediately, already offended by my tone. “Don’t hey me.”
I huff out a breath that is equal parts desire and self-preservation. “Jenna.”
“What?” she says sharply.
I keep my hands on her, but differently. Less possession. More steadying. It feels like trying to convince my body not to be a complete animal.
“You’ve had too much champagne.”
Her eyes narrow to slits. “No, I haven’t.”
“Jenna.”
“I’m perfectly capable of assessing my own condition.”
“I’m sure you are.” I brush my thumb once along her jaw and hate how much I still want exactly what she just offered. “I’m also sure I’m not taking you upstairs like this.”
For one second, she just stares at me. Then every soft edge vanishes from her face so fast, it’s like a steel door dropping into place.
“Wow.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what? Be humiliated efficiently?” She pushes off the pillar, and I let her go, because holding on now would be the fastest route to losing a hand. “You can relax, Dominic. I’m not incapacitated. I made a suggestion, not a plea for intervention.”
“I know. And if you make it tomorrow, I’ll listen real fucking closely.”
That only makes it worse.
Color flashes high in her cheeks, this time from anger instead of champagne. “I’m not going to beg for credibility after kissing you on a terrace.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“No, you’re just implying I can’t be trusted to know my own mind.”
I scrub a hand over my face. “I’m saying I know mine. And mine says if I take you upstairs tonight, I’ll spend the next week wondering whether I got it wrong.”
The words sit between us, ugly and unavoidable.
Jenna’s laugh is short and flat. “Congratulations on your integrity.”
“That’s not—”
“No, it is.” She takes one clean step back, putting air between us like a legal boundary. “You don’t have to dress it up. You’ve decided I’m compromised, and now we all get to enjoy you being noble about it.”
I bite down on the first defensive thing that rises up. “I’m deciding I’m not sleeping with you when you’ve been drinking, Jenna. I’m deciding that when we do this—finally—we do it with clear heads. I’ve wanted you for far too long to wake up next to you and learn you regret being with me.”
Her expression goes still in a way that’s worse than yelling.
“I already regret it,” she says.
The words land clean. No wobble. No drama. Just a blade slid neatly between my ribs.
I don’t move.
She laughs once, humorless. “Does that help? Since you’re so concerned about how I’ll feel in the morning.”
“Jenna—”
“No, actually, let’s be accurate.” She folds her arms across herself, putting herself back behind glass.
“You’ve been after me for years. Years, Dominic.
And the one time I stop fighting you, the one time I decide maybe this is a good idea, maybe I’m ready, you tell me no.
” Her eyes lock on mine, bright and furious. “That’s fucked up.”
Every instinct I have wants to close the distance and argue her out of this. Tell her what I mean. Tell her what I’m protecting. Tell her that saying no to her right now feels like peeling my own skin off.
So naturally, I do none of that.
I keep my face level. My voice even.
“I’m not doing this with you angry and half-drunk on a terrace at someone else’s wedding.”
Her mouth opens in disbelief. “Unbelievable.”
“I’ll take you home.”
Something in her posture hardens further, if that’s even possible. “I don’t need you to take me anywhere.”
“Jenna.”
“I said no.” She steps around me, all sharp edges and offended dignity. “Enjoy your moral high ground.”
Then she’s gone—back through the terrace doors, into the warm spill of light and music and everyone else’s happy.
I stand there like an idiot, staring at the door she just disappeared through, my pulse still hammering from kissing her, from not taking her upstairs, from the fact that apparently integrity feels a lot like getting hit by a car.
“Great work,” I mutter to the lake.
The lake, unhelpfully, remains a lake.
I drag both hands down my face and laugh once, because this is exactly the kind of cosmic joke I’d expect from a universe that has spent years dangling Jenna Pemberton in front of me like a reward for character growth.
I finally get the girl onto a terrace, against a pillar, asking me to take her upstairs—and I choose ethics.
A stronger man would feel proud.
I feel homicidal.
The music inside swells—some Motown thing with a bass line you can feel through the stone. Voices rise, glass clinks, somebody laughs too loudly. Life goes on while I stand out here wondering whether I just saved my future or torched it.
I push off the balustrade and head back inside.
The pavilion is all candlelight and expensive flowers and happy people who aren’t currently trying to parse the difference between doing the right thing and being a complete fucking moron. I scan automatically for Jenna.
She’s not near the dance floor.
Not at the bar.
Not with the women.
I catch one of the servers passing with a tray of champagne and steal a glass purely for something to do with my hands. Then I spot Audrey near the dessert table, talking to Logan with the intense seriousness of two people who somehow make discussing buttercream look like a strategy summit.
“Hey,” I say.
Audrey looks up first. Her gaze flicks over my face and goes sharp immediately, because Audrey misses nothing when it comes to data anomalies and my face is apparently one. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
Logan snorts into his beer. “That’s obviously false.”
I take a drink. “Has Jenna left?”
Audrey’s brows rise. “I think so.”
“Helpful.”
“She said she was tired,” Audrey says. “Which, translated from Jenna, usually means either she is genuinely tired or she would like to murder someone privately.”
Logan tips his head. “From the look on your face, probably the second one. Did something happen?”
I don’t answer. I just glance toward the main doors. “Did she drive?”
“No,” Audrey says. “Bennett has drivers for everyone. Why?”
I could lie. I’m generally excellent at lying when it counts. But I don’t. Logan is my closest friend, and he’d see right through me anyway. So I look at them and admit the truth.
“I think I fucked everything up.”
JENNA
I wake up to a headache, a mouth that tastes like regret and Moet, and the immediate, full-body recollection of kissing Dominic Cruz on a terrace and asking him to fuck me upstairs.
“Oh God.”
For approximately three seconds, I lie perfectly still and attempt to convince myself it was a dream.
A vivid, champagne-induced hallucination produced by an overworked brain, an underused libido, and the ambient romantic pressure of watching four couples slow-dance to a string quartet while lake light turned everything gold.
Then I remember his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine and the sound he made—low, wrecked, like something he’d been holding for years—and my whole body goes hot with the dual recognition that it absolutely happened and that it was the best kiss of my entire life.