From Best Friend to Bride (17 page)

My Ryan
, she thought, before instantly correcting herself.

He’s never been yours.

He stared back at her, blinking as though trying to see her clearly through a veil of fog. He didn’t say anything for a moment that stretched out like eternity. Then he set down his fork and spoke her name, the sound of those two simple syllables rolling over his tongue making her knees go weak until they were about as useless to stand on as pillars of sand.

Katie grasped at the doorframe and steadied herself, and when she looked up again, he was crossing the room toward her.

He stopped about a foot away and seemed to second-guess his decision. She immediately cast her eyes down, unwilling to glance up again, but that didn’t stop what she’d already seen. Ryan Ford had always been a pleasure to look at; there wasn’t a woman in the world who would disagree. But the man who stood before Katie was...gorgeous.

He had Ryan’s deep hazel eyes—tiger eyes, her mother had always called them—and Ryan’s russet hair, wavy and unkempt and too long, as usual. And that was Ryan’s mouth she’d seen, the bottom lip fuller than the top—lips Katie had kissed only once and wished for since. And there was Ryan’s height, towering over her...making it darn near impossible to deny the truth.

A million different things rushed through her all at once. She wanted to punch him right in the face, and she wanted to wrap her arms around him. She wanted to scream at him and tell him to go back where he came from and she wanted him to hold her. She wanted to kick him in the shins, and she wanted to feel his mouth on hers. Katie couldn’t make sense of any of it, and she was afraid of what she might do if he stood there much longer.

She didn’t ask him why he’d done what he had done, why he’d never once contacted her after he’d driven out of town in that rusty old piece-of-junk truck—that stupid old thing Ryan had worked his ass off for just so he wouldn’t have to use his dad’s money—and never looked back. Why he’d refused to answer her that night when she’d asked him if he felt the same way she did. And...why he’d let her fall right out of his life, as though she’d never been important enough to hold on to.

The thoughts wouldn’t stop swirling around in her head, and Katie felt as if she was going to be sick. Ryan was still standing there staring at her, his face an unreadable mask, when she sucked in the breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding and pulled herself together. Before she had a chance to do anything stupid—before she had a chance to make her day even worse than the epic disaster it already was—Katie did what Ryan had done all those years ago.

She slipped past him and walked away.

Copyright © 2015 by Amy Woods

ISBN-13: 9781460381052

From Best Friend to Bride

Copyright © 2015 by Jules Bennett
 

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