Wedding Party Collection: Always The Bachelor. Barbara Hannay

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 poured, 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 СКАЧАТЬ