Dean wouldn’t have come here at all tonight if April hadn’t stopped answering his e-mails a few days ago. Now he was watching the people who’d conceived him get it on right before his eyes. What a perfect ending to a shit hole day. Courtney had been a clingy pain in the ass, and he’d been glad when the women had dragged her back to Nashville to shop. The guys had hung around for a while. For too long. Dean had needed to get to Blue, but by the time he reached Nita Garrison’s house, the windows were dark. He’d climbed the balcony anyway, but the doors were locked, and Blue’s bed lay empty on the other side of the glass panes. He felt a searing flash of pain before sanity returned. She wouldn’t leave until after Nita’s party on Saturday. Tomorrow he’d set things right, or as right as they could be.

Nothing had been the same since their Fourth of July hiking trip. Something had gone wrong in that goofy little sex game they’d played. At first, it had all been sexy fun, watching Blue’s comic attempts at pretending to be a terrorized female. But at the end, when they’d clung together, a well of tenderness had grown inside him, and something had shifted. Something he wasn’t ready to look at too closely.

Riley caught her second wind and joined the dancing again. Dean stood outside the pool of light. Separate from them. Just the way he wanted it.

Jack moved toward Riley, and she started showing off for him, rolling out her entire repertoire of eager, awkward moves. April grinned and danced away. Her skirt swirled. She cocked her head. Spun. And that was when she saw Dean.

With losing a beat, she held out her hand.

He stood immobile. She danced closer, moving her arm, luring him into their circle.

He felt frozen, dizzy, a prisoner of his DNA. The music, the dance drew him to a place he didn’t want to be. Those double helix strands of genetic matter imbedded inside him were a hereditary package he’d channeled into sports, but now those ladderlike structures wanted to draw him back to the source. To the dance.

His father jived.

His mother beckoned.

He turned away from them both and strode off to the farmhouse.

Jack laughed when April suddenly stopped dancing. “Look, Riley. We’re too much for her.”