The Wedding Party (The Wedding Date, #3)(60)

She turned to him with a smile. When she smiled like that, she was so stunning he could hardly believe it.

“I really am. I’m not going to lie: it was scary to put myself out there like that—it was a lot easier the first time, when I managed to not think of them as real people. This time, I got so emotional. I even started crying at the end, which I felt weird about, but then, so did the woman I was working with. But when I saw the look on her face, and the way she thanked me afterward, I felt like what I said to her made a difference.” She laughed. “Is this how you and Alexa feel all the time? Now I get why you both love your jobs.”

He put his hand on hers.

“Not all the time, but those magic times when it does happen . . . it’s an incredible feeling. I know exactly what you mean.”

She squeezed his hand.

“I know you do. Thanks for helping me get there.”

He hadn’t been prepared for her to thank him. Or for how incredible that would make him feel.

“No thanks needed. This was all you.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

“Well, you helped me figure out how to be the best of me—let’s put it that way.”

Maddie did that for him, too, and had since the very beginning, when she’d told him what a pompous jerk he could be.

Granted, it had taken him a while to admit that, but still.

“I’m glad I could help,” he said.

As they walked into the restaurant, he wondered if Maddie realized this was the first time they’d been out like this. Up to this point, their entire relationship—or whatever someone might call it—had occurred in private. They’d hung out and talked and had sex and watched TV and eaten lots of food and had more sex, but all that had happened either at his place or hers. But he’d missed the feeling of walking into a restaurant, or a party, or just down the street, with the woman he was with by his side.

He looked down at the menu once they were at their table.

“Okay, I’ve been dying to go to this place, and I’m very thankful my little brother got us in here, but this is the issue I always have with restaurants like this: why do the menus all have to be so minimalist? Like ‘squid, lemon, herbs, beans’—that’s a list of ingredients, not a dish! How is it cooked? Deep fried? Roasted? Stewed together? No one knows!”

Maddie looked at the menu and laughed.

“Okay, but I don’t need to know much more than ‘burrata, bread, tomatoes’ to know that I want that. It’s like a deconstructed pizza!”

They ordered the squid, and the burrata, and a bunch of other things. Once they were halfway into a bottle of champagne, they found humor in everything around them. Or maybe he just got that way around Maddie these days.

“Don’t forget, Alexa assigned us the job to figure out the signature cocktail for the wedding,” Maddie said. “Who did you hire to be the bartender again?”

Theo laughed.

“One of the many bartenders my brother knows. I’ll ask her what she thinks, and hopefully we’ll get some taste tests out of this.”

They were halfway through their appetizers when Maddie looked across the room, jumped, and turned her whole body around to face the back of the restaurant.

“It’s Alexa!” Why she whispered in that loud hiss to him, he had no idea; the place was so noisy no one could hear anyone past their own table. “She’s over at the bar! What should we do? If I get up and go to the bathroom, it might draw her attention to me. But what if she’s waiting for a table? How can we get out of here without her seeing us?”

Theo turned from Maddie to look over at the bar at the entrance of the restaurant. What was Alexa doing here? She hadn’t said anything about going to San Francisco tonight. Well, maybe Drew had surprised her.

Wait. He saw a black woman at the bar, wearing a red floral dress like one Alexa would wear, but . . .

“That’s not Alexa,” he said to Maddie. “Not all short black women look alike, Madeleine.”

She glared at him and shook her head.

“I know that, asshole, but I also know how to recognize my best friend of more than twenty years.”

He kept eating the burrata and grilled bread appetizer.

“If you say so, but also, I promise you, Alexa does not have a tattoo on her forearm, and that woman does.” He narrowed his eyes. “Well, that’s either a tattoo or a big scar—I can’t quite tell from here, but either way, unless Alexa has some great makeup that she’s been using every day on her arm, that’s not her.”

Maddie turned back around and peered at the bar from behind the champagne bottle.

“Oh.” She sat up straight and took a gulp of champagne. “You’re right. That isn’t Alexa.”

He took another bite of the gooey cheese. It had suddenly stopped tasting as good.

She scooped up the rest of the burrata and put it on her plate.

“You have to admit, she looks a lot like Alexa. Same height, same hair, same skin color, and she has a dress just that color. Can you blame me for freaking out?”

He dropped his fork.

“Yeah, actually, I can. You were about three seconds from hiding under the table for the rest of dinner. What would you have done if that had actually been Alexa? Run to the bathroom and just stayed there all night? Would it be so bad if Alexa saw us here together?”