Just Married!: Kiss the Bridesmaid / Best Man Says I Do. Cara Colter

have known not to even try to get the best of him, because he leaned close to her, inhaled the scent of her hair and then blew his breath into her ear.

      “Stop it,” he growled in a low tone, and then he gently nipped her ear, just to let her know if she wanted to play hardball he had plenty of experience.

      The tingle Sam had been experiencing in her fingers moved to her toes. And back up again.

      “Oh,” Annie said. “Babies! And you’d come in the winter?”

      “If I owned this place,” Sam said, “I doubt I’d ever leave it.” No, she could see herself here as if it would be the perfect next stage of her life, not the place of change that she had feared, at all.

      She could see all her friends gathering here, the Group of Six not disappearing, but expanding as they acquired mates and children, the circle growing in love and warmth. She could sense those unborn children, see them screeching and running on the beach, toasting marshmallows on bonfires at night, falling asleep in parents’ arms.

      This house cast a spell on Sam that made it so easy to see her brothers, settling down at last, coming here with their wives and children, raising another generation who loved Cape Cod year-round.

      This was the kind of place where friends and family gathered around the fire on deepest winter nights. Where they played rowdy card games and hysterical rounds of charades, enjoying sanctuary in the love and laughter of friends from the bitter winter storms.

      Why was it, it was so easy to imagine Ethan, an outsider to that circle, as being at the very center of it? Why is it she knew that he would slide into the circle without creating a ripple, as if he had belonged there always?

      Was it the place that created this sensation of belonging? A longing for things that weren’t yet, but that she could sense on the horizon?