We reached the back porch out of breath and soaked through to the skin.

“Let’s strip here,” Alex said, pulling off his jacket.

“Excuse me?” I asked, not sure that I’d heard him correctly. There was no way in the world that I was going to strip outside his parents’ house.

“Just the outside layers,” he replied, helping me unzip my coat as my teeth started to chatter.

We quickly took off our boots and went in the back door, which led to the kitchen. We were greeted with the smell of dinner cooking in the oven and the sound of a large group having five different conversations and speaking over one another. We’d been gone so long that Alex’s family had all arrived for dinner, and I was standing there with soaking-wet hair, looking like a drowned rat.

“Why in the world did you keep her out in the rain so long?” Liz scolded, her hands occupied with a pie. She pressed down the edges with her fingertips, not even bothering to watch what she was doing as she eyed our wet hair and clothes.

“I know why,” Bram muttered. Ani smacked his shoulder, then paused and kissed the place she’d swatted.

“I took her out to the old fort,” Alex said, sneaking a piece of sausage off one of the hors d’oeuvre platters.

“Oh, the one I was never allowed to go to?” his cousin Trevor asked. His arm was around a pretty blond woman whom I hadn’t met yet, and I assumed it was his girlfriend, Morgan.

“Evans kids only,” Bram and Alex said at the same time. Bram lifted his beer and saluted Alex with it.

“Then how come she gets to go?” whined Ani jokingly.

“Because they’re getting married,” Trevor joked back with a roll of his eyes.

There was a beat of silence.

“No fucking way,” Ani yelled, her eyes wide.

“Oh, shit,” Trevor mumbled. “Sorry, man.”

“I was going to tell you,” Alex said to Bram, grunting as Ani practically leaped across the room and slammed her body into his hard enough to make him step back. Her arms wrapped around his chest as she jumped up and down, jostling them both. “I was just waiting for you to get here so I could tell ya in person.”

Bram nodded easily, but there was something in his eyes that worried me. Something that passed between them that made me uneasy.

“I didn’t expect this,” Ani said, letting go of Alex so she could move toward me. “But I actually like you, so I’m not going to ask all the is this too soon? questions.” Her arms wrapped around me, and I had no choice but to hug her back.