Blair’s eyes narrowed, and if possible, she tensed up even more. “You already know the story, Libby.”
The woman came to a stop at his side and handed Blair a red plastic cup. “I had to sneak that out of the house. The red clashes with Knickers’ party colors, and I’m pretty sure whiskey doesn’t fit in with the food theme.”
“God bless you.” Blair snatched the cup and took a generous sip.
And this was another sign in his favor. Blair had never needed a crutch to get through adversity—hell, she thrived on it—but now she was acting like she needed alcohol to get through the evening. Sure, Libby had left to get her a drink before he arrived, but he knew it wasn’t his argumentative and judgmental relatives who were affecting her.
Blair only relied on alcohol when she was scared.
His relatives wouldn’t scare her. Not Blair. He suspected she’d tolerated his aunt the evening before in an attempt at compromise. Something else scared her, and God help him, he hoped she was scared of what she felt when she was close to him.
“I also gave Neil’s mother her lemonade. I know there’s a story there, which I’m dying to hear, but this one gets my attention first.” The black-haired beauty turned her dark chocolate eyes on him, looking him up and down like he was an amusing street corner act.
He would have known this newcomer was Blair’s other best friend even if she hadn’t been identified by name. Blair had always told him that men were drawn to Libby’s exotic beauty and vivacious personality, so he kept his attention on Blair, smiling at her as though she were the only woman in the world. After all, as far as he was concerned, it was true.
“Aunt Debra is a fundamentalist teetotaler, and I suspect last night was her first encounter with alcohol, even if she didn’t realize it,” he explained. “It will be interesting to see if she gets as loopy as she did last night.”
“I still don’t know why you’re here.” Megan stared at him and planted her hands on her hips. “Somebody better start talking.”
Blair gave him her iciest glare, but he grinned, undeterred. “I’m Neil’s cousin.”
“What?” Megan gasped, then tilted her head as she turned her attention to Libby. “Why don’t you look just as surprised as I do?”
Libby shrugged, looking like a kid with a big secret.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Blair groaned. “Now is not the time to get jealous of who knew what when. The important part is that Garrett has weaseled his way into our wedding and is now a groomsman.”
Libby tapped her foot, wearing a smug expression. “He’s also claimed the ring on her hand.”
“What?” Megan gasped loud enough to draw the attention of some of the newly arrived shower attendees.
“I don’t have time to deal with this.” Blair took another healthy sip of her whiskey, then lowered the cup and shuddered, as though trying to lodge the practical, no-nonsense part of herself back into place. “It’s a family ring. Garrett has claimed it belongs to him. His grandmother is supposed to sort it out.” She took a deep breath and glanced down into her cup. “I suppose I’d better go meet her and break up the scuffle over who wore it best.” She started to hand her cup to Libby, then hesitated and took another gulp before relinquishing it. “Hide this.”
“I’m going to exchange the waffle iron I got you for your wedding for a flask,” Libby teased.
Blair started to walk away, then turned around and pointed her finger at Libby. “You better not have gotten me a waffle iron.”
Libby burst out laughing as Blair swung back around and started across the patio. Garrett was about to take off in pursuit, but Libby blocked his path. “I don’t think so.”
“Look,” Garrett said, lowering his voice, “I know you want to grill me, and I promise to answer any questions either of you throw at me—later.” He glanced over at Megan and nodded. “But right now I need to get over there and try to defuse a pending nuclear war.”
Libby studied him for a moment, her eyes narrowing as she scrutinized him. “Fine. But I get to read your palm later.”
Megan snorted.
“What?” He shook his head, sure he’d heard her wrong. “Sure. Whatever.” Garrett would have agreed to anything so long as she willingly let him go. If they were still her best friends—and the way they hovered around her assured him they were—he knew they had influence over her. He was desperate enough to recognize he needed all the help he could get. “Done.”
Libby made a shooing motion toward him. “Go.”
He hurried after Blair, ignoring the adversarial conversation between the two sisters. He reached her just as she stopped in front of his grandmother.
“Nana,” he said, as she stuck out her hand to the elderly woman. “This is Blair Myers Hansen. Blair, this is Nana Ruby. The true instigator of all the trouble in this family.” He winked at the older woman. “She taught me everything I know.”
Blair shot him an irritated glare before returning her attention to his nana, who cracked a grin.
“So you’re the bride everyone is making such a fuss about.” She looked Blair over.
Blair bristled, and her eyes turned frosty. “I need this wedding to go off without a hitch, so let’s get this ring issue sorted out as quickly as possible. And if we need to replace the ring before the ceremony, I’d prefer to know sooner rather than later.”
Nana laughed, and Garrett was surprised to hear it was genuine. Blair gave her a look of uncertainty.
“You’re not what I expected,” Nana said once she’d settled down.
“And what did you expect?”
“Some hoity-toity, dainty woman who thinks the world revolves around her.”
“Is that how Neil painted me?”
Rather than answer, she gave Garrett an inscrutable glance. “I like you,” she said, turning back toward Blair. “Do you want the ring?”
Blair blinked in surprise. “I . . .” She swallowed. “It’s Neil’s.”
But not hers. Garrett was certain his grandmother had picked up on her peculiar wording too, because she studied Blair for several moments. “I haven’t decided that yet.”
Blair groaned. “Why does this family have to be so difficult?”
As if to punctuate her statement, the argument between Nana Ruby’s two daughters rose in pitch. Nicole Vandemeer, the woman who had greeted Garrett and Nana at the door, was standing between the women trying to get them to reach a truce. Her eyes were wild with frustration.
Nana put two fingers in her mouth and released a loud whistle that filled the air and stopped everyone mid-word or mid-movement. “That’s enough nonsense, Debbie Sue and Barbara Mae,” Nana shouted. “I raised ya better than that. You’re guests here.” She waved to Nicole. “You get on with what you need to do, Mrs. Vandemeer.”
“It’s Debra,” his aunt grumbled.
Nicole smoothed back her hair and took a deep breath. “Oh, dear. Why doesn’t everyone help themselves to some refreshments, and then we’ll start the games.”
Nana hobbled over to the food table, muttering about needing a Coors, and everyone else followed, leaving Blair alone with him on the deck.
“Games?” Blair groaned under her breath. “Shit.”
Garrett chuckled. “How bad could it be?”
She gave him a baffled look, as if he’d just claimed to be a Martian. “What are you doing? Why are you here?”
“I told you, Nana Ruby made me come.”
“So why don’t you go inside with the men?”
“What men?” A shot of worry worked through his veins. Was Neil here after all?
She groaned. “Megan’s dad and her husband Josh. And for some reason, Noah, Josh’s brother, came along. He follows Libby around everywhere she goes, even though she has a—” Letting the sentence break off, she shook her head. “Never mind. I don’t know why I’m telling you anything.”
“If you’re marrying Neil, that means we’ll be seeing each other at family functions. That typically involves smal
l talk.” He hadn’t considered it before, but it was true. If he did lose her to Neil, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sit around making small talk with her on Thanksgiving.
“I don’t have time to small talk with you. I need to socialize.” Yet she didn’t move from her spot. Not that he was surprised. She had always hated this kind of thing.
“This doesn’t seem like you, Blair. A wedding shower? We used to make fun of this shit,” he teased.
She released a long sigh. “I tried to get out of it, but Knickers is relentless.”
He laughed. “Knickers?”
“Nicole. Megan’s mom. We nicknamed her Knickers back when we were kids.” She glared at him. “But she doesn’t know, so don’t you dare call her that.”
He grinned. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good.” She scanned the twenty people covering the patio. “We’re grown-ups now, and apparently this sort of thing goes with the territory.”
“And your wedding? It’s not at a courthouse like you always said you wanted. Nana said it’s going to be in a big fancy church.”
“You should have gotten an invitation with all the details,” Blair said. “Debra insisted on inviting everyone she knew to the wedding of her doctor son and his lawyer fiancée.”
He cringed. “I saw Neil’s name on the invite and tossed it into the trash before reading anything else. Including your name.” He worried about delving into dangerous water, but nothing risked, nothing gained. “You really didn’t realize it was me when you sent it out?”
“I didn’t address them. My now-absentee wedding planner did. Debra sent her a very long list, which I didn’t really inspect.”
“So a big, fancy wedding, huh?”
She stiffened slightly. “The partners expect it.”
To anyone else, it might have gone unnoticed, but to him that statement filled in a missing puzzle piece.
“Blair!” a young woman called out as she came through the back door carrying a small pink box topped with a large white ribbon. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”
Blair smiled, but Garrett could see it was forced. “Ashley. I think it was our five-year reunion.”
Ashley gave Garrett a thorough once-over and beamed. “It looks like you’ve done very well for yourself. You two make a striking couple. I wholeheartedly approve.”
“What?” Blair asked in confusion that quickly turned to alarm. “Oh, no. This is Garrett Lowry. The cousin of the groom. Neil isn’t here.”
“Oh, that’s unusual.” Ashley’s mouth twisted. “And unfortunate. Unless the groom is even better looking.” She winked.
Blair glanced down at her friends. “Libby and Megan are over there. You should go say hi.”
Garrett leaned into her ear and whispered, “She thinks we look good together.”
Blair turned her head to look up at him, her mouth closer to his than seemed appropriate. Conflict raged in her eyes before they hardened. “A relationship needs to be based on far more than looks.”
God, it was hard to be this close to her without touching her, but he was sure she’d bolt if he did, not to mention the whole issue of this being her wedding shower for her marriage to another man. “I agree. But I think there’s more to it than compatibility.”
“You mean sex?” she asked. It was obvious she was trying to sound disgusted, but her words came out breathless at the end.
Jesus, from the way her eyes dilated, he could tell she was thinking about them in bed. He had to steer the conversation in a different direction soon, or he’d embarrass himself. He shifted his weight slightly. “Well, yeah, amazing sex is a given, right?”
“Not necessarily.”
He was tempted to let her statement pass, but he just couldn’t. “I suppose that could be true for people who aren’t very sexual, but some people have a natural fire, don’t you think?” Then, before she could counter, he shifted the topic. “But I didn’t just mean sex, anyway. There are other important considerations in a relationship.”
“Like what?” she asked without sarcasm.
He forced himself to rein in his hope. “The two people should know each other’s hopes and dreams. The little things that make each other happy. They should share inside jokes and secrets. And love.” He tacked it onto the end, making it sound like an afterthought.
“Love,” she scoffed.
“Of course love.” He kept his tone light. “Love is the foundation on which the entire relationship is built. A relationship is nothing without love.”
Sadness flooded her eyes, and she looked close to crying for a moment. Then her body stiffened. “I think we need ice.” And with that, she bolted for the back door.
He considered letting her go. He’d clearly struck a nerve, and he didn’t want to agitate her too much at a party that was being held in her honor. But time was running out, and now that he’d peeled back a section of her protective layer, he needed to keep digging if he hoped to get through to her.
He went through the back door and found her in front of the sink holding onto the counter, panic in her eyes.
“What do you know about love, Garrett Lowry?” she said, looking at the side yard through the window. “You found our love so disposable you were willing to toss it aside to sleep with someone the very next night.”
He gave up all pretense of playing it cool and spanned the room in four footsteps to stand at her side. “I didn’t sleep with her, Blair. I swear to God. I was an idiot the night I walked out and an even bigger idiot when I got so drunk with my buddy that I couldn’t drive. I let Jody take me home.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He held out his hands. “Why would I lie now? Why not just own up to it? I won’t deny I slept with quite a few women afterward, so why would I lie about that?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked.
Time to go for broke. “I’ve spent five years regretting both of those nights. If I could give up everything I’ve achieved in the last five years to go back and live that first night over again, I’d do it.”
She shot him a look of indecision.
“I was too stupid to see that you were lashing out because something had happened. I’d gotten a bad grade on my paper—the one I’d worked on relentlessly for two weeks—and I was mad and upset. All the way to your apartment I kept thinking about how much I wanted to see you. I knew you’d help me put everything in perspective. Then I walked in, and you got pissed because I hadn’t picked up laundry detergent for you, and the next thing I knew we were both yelling, and before I could even process what was going on, I’d packed my things and left.”
“I didn’t know,” she whispered as she turned to face him.
They were inches apart, and without thinking, he reached for her face and cupped her cheek. “And I didn’t know about your dad. Oh, God, Blair. You have no idea how devastated I was when I heard.”
She closed her eyes and leaned into his palm.
He wrapped his other hand around her back and slowly pulled her to his chest. “Nothing happened with Jody. I swear to you. She brought me home. I stumbled inside my apartment, and before I knew what happened, she kissed me and then stripped off her clothes before I pushed her away.”
“How can I believe you?”
“If I wanted to break up with you, why would I have run after you? Why would I have stood outside your door half the night, begging you to let me explain?” His thumb stroked her jaw, and he couldn’t believe she was in his arms again. Could it be this easy? “I was crushed, Blair. I didn’t have a clue how much I really loved you until I lost you. I had this gaping hole in my heart. I knew you’d never give me another chance, so I tried to find other ways to fill it. But no one ever came close to you.”
Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked at him with such longing it stole his breath.
“I love you, Blair. I never stopped loving you.”
She lifted her hand behind his neck and kissed him, her lips soft on his, hesitant. His ton
gue slid along her lower lip, and her mouth parted. Her grip on his neck tightened, and her tongue joined his as she dropped her guard and lost herself to the moment.
The fire that swept through his body caught him by surprise, and he pulled her closer, his hand sliding from the small of her back down to her ass and pulling her against his pelvis.
She groaned, and he felt her free hand grabbing his own ass, pulling him closer.
The sound of a doorbell barely registered in his head, but the voice he heard several seconds later sent ice water through his blood.
Neil was at the front door.
Chapter Fourteen
What the hell had she done?
She heard Neil at the front door. “Hey, Josh. I didn’t know you were here,” he said. “I thought I’d crash the party.”
Shit.
Blair froze in Garrett’s arms and tried to jerk away from him, but he held her tight.
Josh answered, “Bart invited me over to hang out in the basement and watch a game. He was feeling outnumbered. Noah’s here too.”
Panic flooded her, and she pulled against Garrett’s vise-like grip. “Let me go!” She couldn’t let Neil find her like this. Oh, God. What had she done?
He dropped his hold, and worry filled Garrett’s eyes as she took several steps backward.
“You have to break off this wedding, Blair,” he insisted in a whisper. “Tell him when he comes in. We can tell him together.”
Lifting a hand to her temple, she shook her head. “This is all happening too fast. I have to think.” She couldn’t just throw away a two-year relationship over a hot kiss—and from a man who’d slept with half the women in law school after their breakup. This was ridiculous. She was getting married in three days.
But her panic increased, stealing her breath. How could she face Neil after what she’d just done?
“They’re out back,” Josh said, and moments later, Neil stood in the doorway with Megan’s husband.
“Oh, hey, Blair,” Josh said in surprise. “I didn’t know you were in here. Look who just turned up.”
Neil surveyed the both of them. He smiled, but his eyes were cold as his gaze swung from her to Garrett and back.
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