“Considering they’re constantly on the radio and TV and playing in every single bar—” Mia pointed to the speaker on the ceiling, where they could hear Ford singing yet another one of his huge hits. “—that’s going to be pretty hard to do. But I love you for offering.”

“Well,” Brooke said, “we might be stuck listening to them from time to time when we can’t avoid it, but we won’t enjoy any of them. Excuse me for a second.” She walked over to the bartender and said something to him. A few seconds later, Ford’s song stopped and the acoustic version of Nico’s One Moment began to play instead.

Mia appreciated her friends’ solidarity, even though she knew how hard it would be for any of them to avoid Ford’s presence, not just on the radio, but in the media, too, which had always had a love affair with him.

“Did he ever contact you again?” Colbie asked.

“Nope.” Not only had he not come running after her in Miami, but he hadn’t called, emailed, or written her so much as a text begging her to forgive him. “And I certainly never tried to contact him.”

“So he waits five years and then makes sure you’ll show up at the house by dangling a huge potential sale in your face while not disclosing who he really is.” Colbie’s snarl curled her lips even tighter. “What a jerk. I double hate him now.”

This was why Mia had texted her best friends tonight. They always knew how to make her smile, even when she was feeling at her very lowest. But her smile didn’t last long, because there was one more thing she needed to confess.

“I let him kiss me. This morning. In the house I was showing him.”

Her friends both looked at her like she’d lost her mind before Brooke all but yelled, “You let him kiss you today?”

A dozen heads swiveled around to see what the fuss was all about, and Mia could feel her face turning even redder. “The kiss was supposed to prove how completely over him I was. You might double hate him now,” she said to her friends, “but I’m the two-time idiot.”

“The way he set you up this morning has made it way more than double hate now,” Colbie declared.

But instead of agreeing, Brooke said, “He’s obviously still hooked on you.”

Mia shook her head in denial. “Nothing is obvious with Ford. On the surface, he’s every girl’s sexy rock-god dream, but underneath—” She scowled into her drink, then took a long sip before finishing her sentence. “He never let me find out what was underneath. Every time we got close, he’d pull back. For a moment today, I actually thought maybe things had changed, but he wouldn’t even tell me why he hates being called Rutherford so much. And if he won’t tell me something little like that, I seriously doubt he’s going to spill anything else in his dark soul.”

Brooke held up her phone. “We could do a Google search on him to find out.”

Every one of the thousand times Mia had wanted to look up Ford’s past on the Internet, all she’d had to do was remind herself how pathetic it was to long for tidbits of his life from journalists and Twitter feeds.

“No.” She took Brooke’s phone from her hand and dropped it back into her soon-to-be sister-in-law’s purse. “Imagine how it would have felt for you to have to dig into Rafe’s past on Google. My brother cares so much about you that he dug deep and told you everything about his past and how much it had messed him up, even though it was really hard for him to do that.”

Brooke put her hand on Mia’s arm. “You’re right. And I’m sorry if I sounded like I was defending Ford when I said he’s still hooked on you. It’s just that—” Brooke shook her head. “No, never mind.”

“I’ve always hoped I could take the truth from my best friends as well as I can dish it out to them,” Mia said softly. “What were you going to say?”

Her friend sighed, as though she knew there was no getting away with a never mind this time. “We all know what Ford Vincent looks like, and I can imagine what poetry falling from his lips would sound like, especially if the sex really was as great as you said. Honestly, I don’t know how easy it would be for anyone to get over someone like him.”

Mia’s stomach twisted tight at Brooke’s words. She could always lie to herself. But to her friends? It was another one of the big reasons she’d never mentioned her week with Ford. Because she wouldn’t have been able to lie about what it had done to her.

“He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. And no matter how many times I look back and remind myself that I was young and foolish and still in a place where I believed that fantasies were possible, and that it was perfectly normal for me to lose myself entirely in him and his oversized life...” She sighed. “What I felt for him was still real, despite all of that other nonsense.”

“You know,” Colbie said slowly, “maybe there’s another reason why he was able to get past your defenses this morning. From everything you’ve just told us, it sounds like you never got a chance to give him a piece of your mind, not five years ago and not today either, because he made sure to take you by surprise. I, for one, would sure like to hear you rip him to shreds.”

Though Mia had already said what was supposed to be her final goodbye to Ford, she couldn’t help but feel that Colbie was on to something.

Brooke gave Mia a pointed look. “The only problem is, do you think you could give him a tongue-lashing without yours ending up in his mouth again?”

It was the same question Mia was already asking herself. Because she hadn’t yet figured out the honest answer to it, she said, “What has my brother done to you, Brooke? I never thought you’d talk about tongues lashing in any way.”

Her friend was flushing but grinning a wicked little grin as she said, “Don’t you mean, what have I done to him?”

Halfway through her friend’s sentence, Mia’s hands were over her ears. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that. Although it’s totally my fault since I keep forgetting how weird it is to think about my brother’s sex life. Especially when it’s with one of my best friends.” She made a show of scrunching her eyes up and shaking her head hard a couple of times as if to toss the vision away. Far, far away from her brain.

“Does that mean that it’s not weird for you to think about my sex life with Noah, since he’s not related to you?” Colbie teased.