Best Man's Conquest Read online

  Or a cake.

  Or even a wedding dress.

  It had been more of a we’ll show them when their parents had tried to interfere in their relationship. Proving that not only is love blind, it’s downright idiotic.

  The sad truth is, she and Dillon had barely known each other when they’d gotten married. Out of bed, anyway. Only after their vows had she realized her mistake.

  The day after.

  “I know you probably won’t believe this,” Deidre said, “but Dillon has changed.”

  “You’re right. I don’t believe it.” Men like Dillon never changed. Not deep down, where it counted.

  “May be it’s time you…” Deidre paused, her lip clamped between her teeth again.

  “It’s time I what?”

  She shrugged. “May be…get past it.”

  “Get past what?”

  “What I mean is, May be it’s time you…forgive him.”

  Forgive him?

  Was Deidre joking? Had the wedding jitters short-circuited her brain? Had she forgotten what Dillon had put her through?

  Did a woman ever get past having her heart stomped on and filleted into a million pieces? Did she forget losing an academic grant, being tossed out of college and having her reputation decimated?

  And how did you forgive someone who showed no remorse? Someone who sat back and watched with a smile on his face while her world fell apart? A man who had promised to love and honor her until death? “What Dillon did to me was unforgivable and you know it.”

  Deidre lowered herself into the chair beside Ivy’s, a look of genuine concern on her face. “I just hate to see you so unhappy.”

  Her words nearly knocked Ivy out of her chair. “What are you talking about? My book is selling millions, my private practice is flourishing. Why in the world would I be unhappy?”

  “You’re the psychologist. You tell me.”

  Ivy had everything she’d ever dreamed of. A good career and an impressive stock portfolio. Personal and financial independence.

  She was not unhappy. In fact, she was freaking ecstatic. “For your information, I am very happy with my life.”

  “When was the last time you were in a committed relationship? When was the last time you had sex? Hell, when was the last time you were on a date?”

  “I don’t need a man to complete me.” The words spilled from her mouth automatically. It was her mantra, the basis for her book. The only constant in her life.

  “May be not, but they sure can be fun to have around.”

  And so not worth the hassle. She had her career and her friends. That was enough. For now. “Setting me up like this has put me in a terrible position. Considering all the people who will be at the wedding Saturday, it’s bound to get out that I spent a week in Mexico with my ex. You know how brutal the media can be. What if they start spreading rumors that we’re getting back together? What do you think that will do to my reputation?”

  “I guess I never thought about it like that.” Deidre’s lower lip began to quiver and tears hovered just inside her eyelids. “I was only trying to help. If you want to leave, I understand.”

  Ivy sighed. As mad as she was at her cousin, deep down she knew her intentions were pure. Deidre didn’t have a vindictive bone in her body. If she said she was trying to help, it was the truth, and it was executed out of love and concern.

  Oh, hell.

  She reached over and squeezed Deidre’s fisted hands. “I’m not going anywhere. This is the most important week of your life, and I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  The tears spilled over onto Deidre’s cheeks and rolled down, leaving wet dots on the front of her shirt. “Thank you.”

  “Besides, Dillon and I talked, and we’ve reached somewhat of an agreement. I’ll avoid him and he’ll avoid me.” She gave Deidre’s hands a reassuring squeeze and forced a smile. “Really, how bad could it be?”

  It could be bad, Ivy realized fifteen minutes later after Deidre left to see about dinner. Really bad.

  She experienced the same eerie, familiar feeling as she had downstairs when Dillon had entered the room, and she looked up to find him a stone’s throw away, leaning on the edge of his own balcony on the opposite end of the house. His eyes were on her, steady and intense, as if he was biding his time, just waiting for her to notice him there.

  “Howdy!” he called, wiggling his fingers in a casual, friendly, good-ole-boy wave. He looked out across the ocean, his chest expanding beneath his T-shirt as he drew in a long, deep breath. “Hell of a view, isn’t it?”

  Oh, yes it is, she agreed silently, her eyes wandering over his solid frame. And she could feel it coming on, that little shimmy thing her heart did whenever he was near.

  Here it comes…

  No, no, no!

  She lowered her eyes back to her book. Don’t look at him. Don’t encourage him in any way. May be he would take the hint and leave her alone.

  He didn’t.

  “Whatcha’ doin’?”

  “Reading,” she answered, not looking up from the page. May be if she kept her answers short and succinct he would get a clue. He would realize she wanted him to leave her alone. Like he promised he would.

  He didn’t.

  She could still feel his eyes on her, feel him watching. Goose bumps shivered across her skin, and she felt fidgety and uncomfortable.

  Ignore him and he’ll lose interest, she assured herself. Keep reading and he’ll get bored and go away. But she could feel her anxiety level climbing again. Her foot had begun to tap, the way it always did when she was nervous, and she was grinding her teeth.

  She forced herself to relax.

  “Good book?” He used a tone that suggested he was making friendly conversation. May be to break the ice, so the situation would be a bit less awkward.

  He was wasting his time. The only conversation she was interested in having with him was the nonexistent kind. She didn’t want to break the ice, and she had no desire to make things less awkward.

  She just wanted him to go away.

  There was also the distinct possibility that, despite his promise to leave her alone, he was doing this to annoy her.

  Either way, she was beginning to feel like a specimen under a microscope.

  She took several deep, cleansing breaths, tried to concentrate on her book and not on the man staring at her.

  After a few very long, tense moments he said, “Must be a good book.”

  “It is.” Up until a few minutes ago, anyway. Now, as she tried to focus on the small print, the words ran together in a nonsensical jumble. Was a few minutes of peace really too much to ask for?

  Several more minutes passed quietly by, but she knew without looking up that he was still watching her. The question was, why?

  When she couldn’t stand it any longer she looked up and met his gaze. “Was there something you wanted?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, his eyes never straying from her face. “Just enjoying the scenery.”

  Something in his eyes, in the intense way he stared, suggested that the scenery he was referring to was her. He was beginning to annoy the hell out of her, and she had the sinking feeling that was exactly his intention.

  “Do you think you could possibly enjoy it from somewhere else?” she asked as politely as possible, despite her rapidly mounting irritation.

  “What’s wrong, Ivy?” He leaned forward on his elbows, deeper into her personal space. “Do I make you uncomfortable?”

  That was the last thing she wanted him to think. He no longer had any power over her. She was strong and independent. She answered to no one but herself. “No, but I would like to read a few more chapters before dinner. If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. You go on ahead and read.”

  “Thank you.” She turned her attention back to her book. He was quiet for several minutes, but in her peripheral vision she could see that he hadn’t moved from his spot. He was still watching her.

  He was
definitely doing it to annoy her. There was no other logical explanation.

  “I saw your mom a few weeks ago,” he finally said.

  She sighed and gathered her patience. So much for sitting outside, reading and enjoying the view.

  She very calmly marked her page, shut the book and looked up at him. Ten years ago she would have thought he looked damned good standing there, the sun reflecting bluish-black off his dark hair, eyes slightly squinted against the glare and crinkled in the corners. The distinguished kind of crinkles that men got. The same things that on a woman were just plain old ugly wrinkles.

  Dillon had that special something, a physical appeal that was impossible to ignore. Or resist. In the short term, anyway.

  As she’d quickly discovered, looks aren’t everything. What he needed was the personality to go along with it. One that wasn’t quite so…annoying.

  “You still fold your page over to mark your spot,” he said. “No matter how many bookmarks you bought, you always misplaced them.”

  For a minute she was speechless. How had he remembered such a mundane, trivial detail about her? She honestly didn’t think he’d been paying attention.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I was in downtown Dallas for a meeting, and I saw your mom through the window of her shop. She looks as though she’s doing well.”

  “She is.” It had taken a while, but her mom had finally gotten her life together.

  “I would have stopped in for a trim, but I was running late.”

  Only a complete fool would go to his former mother-in-law for a haircut. And while Dillon may have been a big pain in the behind, he was not a fool. Complete or otherwise.

  “I figured I would stop in after my meeting instead. But then I got to thinkin’, she may not have the highest opinion of me.”

  “Gosh, you think?” Her mom had never liked Dillon. Not even when they’d been dating. She’d always said he was too much like Ivy’s real dad. Arrogant and unreliable.

  After Ivy’s dad took off, she and her mom had been forced to stay with Deidre and her parents until they got back on their feet.

  He hadn’t bothered to stick around, and her mom had been sure Dillon wouldn’t, either. She’d warned Ivy repeatedly that she was asking for trouble, just begging to get her heart broken.

  Ivy had wanted so badly to prove her wrong. But her mom had been right, of course, and to this day she’d never let Ivy live it down.

  What would her mother think if she could see her now, stuck in the same house with Dillon for a week? She would probably be worried that Ivy would be foolish enough to fall for him again. The way she had repeatedly fallen for Ivy’s dad, trapped in what she liked to call an on-again, off-again trip through the house of horrors that had spanned nearly a decade.

  Ivy was smarter than that. If there was one thing she’d learned from her mother, it was how not to repeat her mistakes.

  She would worry about her mom Saturday when she flew in for the wedding. Right now she had other, more pressing problems, like the man still staring at her.

  It was clear Dillon didn’t intend to leave her alone. Rather than spend an hour or so before dinner enjoying the sun, she would instead have to remain indoors, where he couldn’t bug her.

  Ivy rose to her feet and grabbed her book. “I guess I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “I thought you wanted to read.”

  “It’s been a long day. I think I’ll take a quick nap.” It was a lie, but there was no way she would admit that he’d irritated her to the point of driving her away.

  She hoped this was just his misguided way of trying to make amends. She hoped she was wrong and he wasn’t actually doing this to annoy her.

  “See ya’ll later,” he called, and as she was shutting the door, she could swear she heard laughter.

  Three

  Bitterness can be handled in many ways. The worst is to pretend it isn’t there. Recognize it, identify it, embrace it. Then get over it.

  —excerpt from The Modern Woman’s Guide to Divorce (And the Joy of Staying Single)

  Dillon was a big, fat liar.

  Ivy sipped her champagne and glanced up at him through the pale pink, lingering light of sunset across the patio table. Eyes as blue and crisp as the ocean stared back, tangling her up in their gaze like a fish in a net.

  A shivery zing of awareness started in her scalp and rippled with lightning speed down to her toes. And though she mentally squirmed and flopped, she couldn’t seem to break loose.

  Instead, she stared him down with a cool, disinterested look. Hoping he couldn’t see the frantic flutter of her heartbeat at the base of her throat. The goose bumps dotting every conceivable inch of her flesh.

  He was supposed to be avoiding her. He had agreed to leave her alone, hadn’t he? Yet, as she feared earlier on the balcony, it was crystal clear that he had no intention of keeping his promise. In fact, he was doing everything he could to make her as uncomfortable as humanly possible.

  And he did it damned well.

  Throughout dinner, every time she looked up from her plate of mostly untouched food, his eyes were on her. He wasn’t even attempting to be subtle, the big jerk.

  At this rate she would be leaving the country a total basket case.

  Blake kept shooting Ivy apologetic smiles, and Deidre had started stress eating. She had finished her own meal and was stealing bites from Blake’s plate when she thought no one was watching. Blake’s brothers, Calvin and Dale, observed with blatant curiosity.

  Deidre’s bridesmaids were another story. The motor-mouth twins—or as Deidre liked to call them, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum—were too busy flapping their jaws to notice Ivy. Or anyone else for that matter.

  They weren’t actually twins, although they may as well have been. They had the same burnt-out blond hair and surgically enhanced, anorexic, size-one bodies. They even shared an identical flair for mindless, irrelevant conversation. Ivy was guessing that their collective IQ’s ranked somewhere in the low double-digits.

  “A toast to Deidre and Blake,” Dillon said, raising his glass, his eyes still locked on Ivy. She couldn’t help but notice that he’d dropped the good ole boy twang. Tonight he sounded decidedly more upper-crust Dallas. “May you have a long, happy life together.”

  Like we didn’t, his eyes seemed to say. Was he suggesting that was her fault?

  Yeah, right.

  Around the table crystal stemware clinked and everyone sipped. Ivy downed the contents of her glass in one long swallow. She’d never been much of a drinker, but the champagne felt good going down. It tickled her nose and warmed her nervous stomach.

  One corner of Dillon’s mouth tipped up and his eyes sparked with mischief. He was mocking her.

  She sat a little straighter, pulled her shoulders back, all the more determined to see this through. She refused to let him win.

  May be the trick to making it through this week was to drink alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol. Hadn’t that been Dillon’s method of coping with stress? Hadn’t he spent the better part of his time in college intoxicated?

  Although she did notice that he drank only mineral water with dinner and had barely touched his champagne. Was it possible he’d given up drinking?

  As if reading her thoughts, Dillon reached for the bottle of champagne the housekeeper had left chilling beside the table. He rose from his chair and circled to her side, moving with a subtle, yet undeniable male grace that was hypnotizing. Even the Tweedles, deep in some inane conversation about the difference between clothes sizes in the U.S. as opposed to Europe—in Europe Dee had to buy a size three, gasp!—stopped to watch him with unguarded interest.

  Ivy sat stock still, resisting the urge to turn in her chair as he stepped behind her. His aura seemed to suck the oxygen from the air around her, making her feel light-headed and woozy.

  He leaned forward, resting a hand on the back of her chair—his fingers this close to her skin but not quite touching her—and filled her empty glass. As he p
oured, his arm brushed her shoulder.

  His bare arm. Against her bare shoulder.

  Time ground to a screeching halt, and the entire scene passed before her eyes in slow motion. A twisted, messy knot of emotions she couldn’t even begin to untangle settled in her gut, and a weird, this-can’t-possibly-be-happening feeling crept over her.

  Why didn’t she do something to stop him? Bat his hand away or jab an elbow into his gut? Why was she just sitting there frozen? It was not as if she was enjoying this.

  Yet she couldn’t deny that there was something about him, about the feel of his skin that was eerily familiar.

  Not just familiar, but almost…natural. Which was just plain freaky, because there was nothing natural about her and Dillon being anywhere near each other.

  Silence had fallen over the table and everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at her and Dillon.

  Which Ivy realized was exactly what he wanted.

  Under the table, her foot was tapping like mad. If she didn’t calm down, she was going to wear away the sole of her sandal.

  She forced herself to relax, to pretend she didn’t care when in reality she was wound so tight she could crack walnuts on her rear end.

  What felt like an eternity later he finally backed away, making it a point to run the length of his arm across her shoulder while the hand that rested behind her chair brushed ever so softly against the back of her neck. If this was what she had to look forward to every time she emptied her glass, May be the heavy drinking wasn’t such a hot idea after all. She was much better off keeping him at the opposite end of the table, where he could only touch her with his eyes.

  “Anyone else?” he asked, offering a refill to the rest of the table.

  Dee raised her glass. “I’d love some.”

  As he poured, Ivy couldn’t help noticing that he didn’t rest his hand on her chair, nor did he brush against her with his arm. Everyone else seemed to notice, too.

  It confirmed that he had only been trying to antagonize her. Hadn’t he caused her enough grief? Couldn’t he act like an adult and leave her alone?