And Then Forever Read Free Page B

enough to boost a tip, and when to pull back before someone got the wrong idea. Waitressing, she had learned early on, was a lot like dancing, with the fancy foot moves and the relationships that lasted no longer than a song.
    And it was a dance Darcy liked. The kind with no commitment, no broken promises, no men in her life to screw up the very good thing she had going. She had everything figured out, or at least as close to that as she could get, and she wasn’t going to change that just because one man had arrived on Fortune’s Island.
    The Simple Plan song gave way to one by Avril Lavigne, and she shifted her attention away from Kincaid, away from a past that was going to stay where it was, stuck to the wall, dusty and forgotten.

K incaid Foster had been in a lot of bars in his life. Most of them too fancy to leave so much as a ring of condensation lingering on a tabletop. The kind of bars with hushed conversations and top-shelf vodka and waitstaff that moved in and out of the space like ghosts.
    That was not The Love Shack. And that was exactly why he was here. And exactly why pretty much every member of the Foster family would be outraged and horrified. They had been every time he’d gone to The Love Shack when he was young—and that was only counting the times he’d been caught. His presence at such a “seedy establishment” was an embarrassment to the family, of course. And when they’d found out that he had, for a while, dated Darcy Williams, who was as far from the kind of socialite his parents wanted him to pursue as the earth was from the next solar system, there had been much criticism and nashing of teeth and rules forbidding him from seeing her again. A part of him wondered if maybe that was part of what had attracted him to Darcy—the forbidden love that his parents hated, like some real life version of Romeo and Juliet, only without the crazy suicidal ending.
    Maybe it had started that way, those clichéd starcrossed lovers trying to escape society’s rules, but it had turned into something else. Something more than just dating. It had been crazy and wild, and something he thought would last forever, until the day reality set him straight. All this time, he’d thought he was over her. Until tonight.
    Kincaid had noticed Darcy the second he walked in. It wasn’t so much seeing her, as sensing her. It had always been like that whenever he was around Darcy. She had this larger-than-life personality, the kind that took over a room. The first time he’d noticed her had been in this very bar, when he was nineteen, and ditching a family dinner, sneaking into the one place on Fortune’s Island that had been forbidden. And there was Darcy, dancing on top of a table to an old Aerosmith song, in short shorts and a cutoff T-shirt that exposed a flat belly and the twinkle of a ring centered in her bellybutton. He’d been mesmerized, wanting to be a part of whatever world gave her that kind of…
    Freedom.
    It was the one thing Kincaid had never really known. He’d had tastes of freedom, especially that summer, but in the end, he’d returned to the very same prison he’d lived in all his life. The one built out of steel expectations.
    He had a temporary reprieve from all that now, but he knew it was a limited parole. Eventually, Kincaid was going to have to return to New York City, which had become the hub of his father’s law practice a few years ago, to face his father’s wrath and what Edgar called “the consequences of his decisions.” But for now, there were other worries on Kincaid’s plate, things that ranked far above what his father wanted of him.
    Just being near Darcy reminded Kincaid of all he had given up the day the ferry motored away from Fortune’s Island. She drew him in, captivated him, as easily as she had the first time he’d met her.
    He pretended not to watch her now, but still his gaze strayed to Darcy every few seconds. The beer in his hands grew warm, barely touched. He