“Who said anything about being uncomfortable?” Jess said. “I guess I’m just surprised that he accepted.” She’d have thought the O’Brien Sunday dinner would be the last place he’d want to be at the moment. Not only would he have to face her, but he’d have to deal with the prying eyes of her entire family.
“Of course he accepted,” Gram said. “Why wouldn’t he?”
“I just thought he might find it awkward,” Jess said before she’d considered the ramifications of such a remark.
“Why would Will feel awkward around us?” Abby asked, seizing on the comment. “Like Gram said, he’s practically family. He’s been hanging around with Kevin and Connor since grade school. I can’t even count the number of holidays he’s spent over here.”
“I just meant…” Jess began, then realized she had no reasonable explanation. “Oh, never mind. I’ll go see if Mom needs help setting the table.”
Before she could leave, though, her grandmother pinned her with a look. “You wouldn’t be trying to avoid talking about Will kissing you at Brady’s recently, would you?”
Jess regarded her with shock. “How do you know about that?”
Gram chuckled. “Word about a thing like that gets around.”
“Indeed, it does,” Abby agreed. Her broad grin proved she’d known about it, too. “Who knew Dillon Brady could be such a gossip?”
“I heard about it from his wife,” Gram added.
“Well, I have nothing to say about it,” Jess said, all but running from the kitchen.
“I imagine Will might be more forthcoming,” Gram called after her. “He’s awfully fond of my chicken and dumplings. I suspect that’ll loosen his tongue.”
Jess bit back a groan and kept going. If she could have, she would have bolted from the house and not looked back, but the commotion that would cause wasn’t worth it. Nope, she just had to stay here and do her best to steer clear of Will so that none of the too-eager observers in her family would get any wild ideas that something had changed between the two of them. If it had. She honestly couldn’t be sure.
When she found the dining room table set and no sign of her mother, she wandered outside. No sooner was she seated in a rocker on the porch than Will himself appeared, carrying a large bouquet of flowers.
She blinked at the lavish arrangement. “Will, that’s a really bad idea. You shouldn’t have brought me flowers. It will stir up a hornet’s nest.”
He laughed. “Then it’s a good thing they’re not for you. I brought them for your grandmother to thank her for including me today.”
Jess sat back, not sure whether she felt more embarrassed or deflated. “Oh, of course. She’ll love them. But you probably ought to know that she’s more interested in information.”
“Oh?” he said, immediately looking troubled.
“She’s heard about the kiss. So has Abby. I imagine everyone else knows about it by now as well. The way I hear it, Dillon and Kate are bigger blabbermouths than the O’Briens.”
He sat down hard in the chair next to hers. “I see.”
“Gram seems to think we should get our stories straight.”
He stared at her blankly. “What stories?”
“The ones where we deny it meant anything or try to convince them that our lips locked by accident,” she said with a shrug. “Anything to keep them from jumping on this and starting some kind of matchmaking frenzy.”
“Why do I think it’s probably too late for that?” he asked bleakly.
“Because you know the O’Briens. We’re nothing if not eager to meddle.”
“So what’s our story?” he asked. “Any thoughts?”
“I’m all for trying out the accidental lip-lock theory,” she said.
Will had the audacity to laugh. “No one who saw us that night is going to buy that. The first kiss, maybe, but there were two.”
Jess shivered. “I remember.” The second had been even more potent than the first. “Maybe they don’t know that.”
“Maybe instead of worrying about them, we should be focusing on what the kisses really meant,” he suggested, looking directly into her eyes in a way that disconcerted her.
Jess shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I’m not ready to start analyzing what happened,” she said.
“You’d rather pretend that nothing did?”
“I’d like to try,” she admitted wistfully. “But I’m pretty sure that’s going to be impossible.”
Will tried to conceal a smile but didn’t quite pull it off.
Jess scowled at him. “Don’t let that go to your head. I’m just saying it’s not so easy to un-ring that bell.”
“I wouldn’t dream of trying,” he said quickly.
She gave him a plaintive look. “Why did you come here today?”
He held her gaze for a long time before he said, “For your grandmother’s chicken and dumplings, of course.”
“You know Kevin cooked, right? It might not be the same as Gram’s.”
He laughed. “It’ll be close enough, I imagine. And it’s bound to be better than anything in my freezer.”
Jess felt guilty at even hinting that he shouldn’t have come. “Sorry. I’m being selfish. I’m just not ready to deal with any of this, I guess. Whatever this is.”
Instead of trying to define it for her, he plucked a white rose from the arrangement of hydrangeas and roses and held it out to her. “I don’t think Nell will miss it.”
She frowned, ignoring the flower. Maybe it was a sweet gesture, but suddenly she wasn’t in the mood for sweet gestures. “Thanks, but even that’s likely to arouse questions, Will. Just take the flowers inside and get them into water.”
He studied her quietly. “Jess, do we need to talk? We could leave and go somewhere else, if you want to.”
“What could we possibly need to discuss?” she said, not entirely sure why she was so annoyed. Nothing about this encounter had gone the way she’d expected it to. Truthfully, she wasn’t even sure what her expectations had been.
Will looked justifiably confused. “I’m not sure exactly what we need to talk about. I just know that you seem angry all of a sudden.”
“I’m not angry,” she said. Hurt, maybe. Confused, for sure. But not angry. Had that blasted kiss meant nothing, after all? Will was all about honesty and being direct, but he hadn’t said a single word to indicate that the kiss had affected him at all. She’d opened herself up—well, a little, anyway—but all he’d done was make light of what had happened.
Though he didn’t look as if he believed her denial about being angry, he simply nodded and stood up. “Then I’ll see you inside.”
After he’d gone, Jess sighed. This was going to be a whole lot harder than she’d anticipated. It was as if the kiss had unleashed all sorts of unexpected emotions, and now she was supposed to stuff them back inside and pretend they didn’t exist, not just in front of her family, but in front of Will, too.
A part of her wanted to march inside and throw caution to the wind, but she knew better, at least in this setting. Because if she did what she wanted to do and kissed Will in front of her entire family just to see if the experience was still magical,