The Worst Man (Wedding Season Series)

by Rebecca Norinne

  The Worst Man

  Rebecca Norinne

  Copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Norinne

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product(s) of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental or meant to lend credibility and authenticity to the story. The use of brand names and locations should not be read as an endorsement of this author’s work.

  Created with Vellum

  To the best man I know, my husband.

  Contents

  About This Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Meet the Men of Dublin Rugby

  Also by Rebecca

  More Flirt Club Weddings

  About The Author

  About This Book

  Imagine my surprise when I woke up next to my worst enemy wearing nothing but a wedding ring and a smile.

  Attending a work conference alongside Professor Hank Talbot is never a good time. Pretending we actually like each other is even less so.

  So when he tells our colleagues that my idea of fun is to organize my sock drawer, I’m ready to show him I’m not the shrew he thinks I am.

  From nightclubs to dive bars, we hit up all that Sin City has to offer— including Elvis’s wedding chapel. That’s right; Hank and I are the biggest Las Vegas cliche out there: we got drunk, and then we got hitched.

  But even worse than marrying a man I hate? His family just offered me $3 million to stay that way!

  One

  The only thing I hated more than traveling to Las Vegas in the middle of the hottest June on record for a work conference was having to make the trip with my sworn enemy, Professor Hank Talbot.

  I’d literally gotten down on my knees and begged our boss’s secretary not to book Hank and me on the same flight, yet here we were, sitting next to each other some thirty thousand feet in the air. And in coach, no less.

  “Do you mind?” I nudged his arm back into his own space.

  “Would you stop already? It’s not like I actually want to touch you.” Hank shuddered with disgust. “There’s not enough room in these damn seats, and you know it.”

  “Why didn’t you just upgrade to first class like a normal rich person? Then we wouldn’t have to see each other at all.”

  Lord knew if I’d had the cash to upgrade a last-minute flight on a whim, I certainly would have. And since Hank was filthy stinking rich, I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t. The Talbots were one of the first families to come over from England, back when America was still just a tiny rebel colony. They had spent the ensuing centuries amassing their wealth, which meant Hank didn’t actually have to work. The fact that he’d gone into teaching still baffled me.

  “How much longer until we land?” he asked, leaning across me to try and look out the window.

  I slammed the shade down. There was nothing to see out there anyhow, and I didn’t want him tempted to keep leaning into my space whenever he got curious. “An hour,” I said, mentally offering up a prayer of thanks to the big man above. Now if he could just speed up the space/time continuum so that the next sixty minutes passed by in a flash, that’d be fantastic.

  Hank flopped back against his seat, shaking mine in the process. “Ugh. I just want to get there already,” he groaned, his minty fresh breath filling the cabin.

  I was annoyed to note that even though we’d been locked together in this flying tin can for almost four hours, he still looked—and smelled—like he’d just stepped out of the shower. I didn’t want to examine too closely what it meant that I knew he always smelled like a combination of mint and lavender.

  “Why? You have a hot date lined up or something?” It pained me to admit it, but Hank’s perfectly fresh breath wasn’t the only thing he had going for him. With thick, wavy brown hair and crystalline blue eyes that were rimmed by full, dark lashes that I secretly coveted, the asshole was as handsome as they came—and he knew it. Having very publicly broken up with the latest in a string of twenty-something models foolish enough to fall victim to his charms, he’d made no secret of the fact that he was single and ready to mingle. His words; not mine.

  He flashed me a wolfish grin. “Why? Are you jealous?”

  I snorted inelegantly. “I assure you that I am not.”

  He stared at me for a beat. “I don’t believe you.”

  I flashed him my best you have got to be kidding me look. “Why do you insist on being such a cocky asshole all the time?”

  He smirked, and a perfectly placed dimple popped in his freshly-shaved cheek. “It’s not cocky if you have the goods to back it up.”

  “God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man,” I whispered under my breath. Not quietly enough, it seemed, for him not to have heard.

  “And there it is. You managed to go nearly four hours without making a snide comment about how much you hate men.”

  “I don’t hate men,” I countered. “I just hate you.”

  “Why?” His head was cocked to the side as he studied me far too intently for my liking.

  I broke eye contact, my gaze falling to the in-flight magazine clenched in my hands on my lap. “You know why,” I murmured.

  “To be honest, I really don’t.”

  My eyes bounced back up at the note of sincerity I detected in his voice. How could he not remember the night three and a half years ago he’d absolutely humiliated me in front of our entire department—including the new Chair.

  Showing up to the faculty Christmas party alone had been bad enough, but having Hank joke that my lack of a date was because I was more frigid than a cold New England winter had been utterly mortifying. The fact that I sometimes secretly worried that he wasn't wrong had been the cherry on the shit sundae.

  “Come on, Hank. Don’t make me say it.”

  His gaze flicked over my face for a few seconds that felt more like an eternity. His voice came out harsh when he asked, “If I don’t know what I did, how can I be expected to fix it?”

  “I don’t know that you can fix it.” Too much time had passed between then and now. Too many barbed jibes and harsh insults exchanged between us.

  He thought I was a humorless prude with a chip on my shoulder the size of Maine, while I thought he was an entitled, egotistical waste of flesh. It was amazing we could even pretend to be civil with one another at this point in our acquaintance. Frankly, the only reason I even made the effort was because I was afraid that if I didn’t, his family had enough influence at Thackeray to send me packing. I was this close to getting tenure, and until I did, I wasn’t taking any unnecessary chances. Tenure was everything in academia, and I wouldn’t let my feelings toward this spoiled man-child ruin my chance for professional security. I’d worked too hard and sacrificed too much to get here.

  “No, I wouldn’t suppose so,” he mused quietly. “I think you enjoy being angry at me all the time. It goes so well with the angry feminist thing you’ve got going on.” That bomb dropped, he leaned his perfectly coiffed head back against the seat rest and closed his eyes.

  Oh hell no!

  I spun to face him—as much as the nylon belt wrapped around my middle
and the metal arm digging into my side would allow—and glared a figurative hole through his handsome forehead.

  “You goddamn, self-righteous asshole,” I hissed. “You’ve spent the last three years outright mocking me and undermining my work, and you somehow think this—” I waved my hand frantically between us “—is my fault?”

  He pried open one bright blue eye. “Are you about done?”

  My jaw fell open in shock. “Is that all you have to say?”

  He closed his eyes again and shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I say. You’ve already cast me as the villain in this story.”

  I flopped back against my seat and an errant spring stabbed me in the back. It somehow felt fitting.

  Crossing my arms over my chest, I shot him one last death glare. “You’re not smart enough to be the villain,” I hissed, closing my eyes for the remainder of the flight in an attempt to ignore the infuriating man at my side. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as I hoped. I blamed it on the mint.

  Two

  “So, Miranda. Hank tells us you have a rather interesting hobby.” Natasha Blankenchamp wrapped her lips around her straw and hollowed out her cheeks, sucking down her twenty-four dollar gin and tonic.

  Like Hank, Natasha had graduated from Thackeray, but unlike him, she’d headed west for grad school instead of staying in New England. Now she taught Early American History at a fancy pants private academy in Seattle.

  I didn’t have anything against her, per se, but I got the impression she didn’t much care for me. Every word out of her mouth seemed laced with disdain, and more than once I’d wondered if she somehow saw me as competition. Why, I wasn’t completely sure. But it was ridiculous considering we were as different as two women could be.

  Whereas she was approximately six feet tall and looked like the real-life version of Jessica Rabbit, I was barely five-foot-two, wore glasses best described as “nerdy” to compensate for a weird astigmatism I’d developed as a kid, and regularly dressed in jeans and no-nonsense button down shirts. If I was getting dressed up—which she certainly was at the moment—I wore my dishwater blonde hair down instead of up in a messy bun, and I maybe threw on the tweed jacket I’d picked up in Scotland a number of years ago. Basically, she was sexy and beautiful and I was … not.

  “Hobby?” I asked, looking around the circle in hopes of being clued in.

  In addition to Hank, Natasha, and me, there was Samuel Gallagher, a professor of antiquities at Trinity College who I’d dated briefly back in the day, Rory Wellstone, my college roommate and the current Dean of Admissions for a small liberal arts college in New York, and Charles Tate, an aging university administrator who’d retired two years ago but still attended these conferences because “they make me feel young and in touch.” A few years back, we’d been assigned to the same group project during this conference, and we’d sort of just stuck with the pairing.

  “Yeah,” Hank said, his lips tipped up in a condescending smirk. “The sock folding.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.” I cast a quick glance down at the drink in my hand—only my second of the night. Maybe it was stronger than I thought because his comment made absolutely zero sense. Then again, Hank was the one speaking, so it stood to reason that the discussion bordered on the ridiculous. The man rarely spoke a sensible word.

  But then it hit me. “Are you talking about Marie Kondo?”

  A couple of months ago, Kondo had become a cultural sensation for the second time in her career when Netflix aired a show about her rather stark methods of personal organization. I’d gotten sucked into watching the show while grading papers for my freshman seminar, and while I couldn’t bring myself to employ many of her tactics, one weekend I’d gone through my dresser and thrown out all of my mismatched socks.

  But how would Hank have ever known that?

  “Who’s Marie Kondo?” he asked, his thick brows dipped into a deep vee that signaled his confusion.

  Inwardly, I tossed him a smirk of my own. I always enjoyed it when I could turn his snide comments back on himself, and making him look like an idiot when he’d intended for me to look like a prude was fine by me.

  Natasha threw back her head and laughed, a sexy, throaty sound that had three sets of male eyes swinging her way. “Oh, Hank. You’re so funny. Who’s Marie Kondo, he asks.”

  Rory turned to me with a no-nonsense expression that hadn’t changed much since we met our freshman year of college. “Should I know who Marie Kondo is?”

  Rory certainly marched to the beat of her own drum, not caring one way or the other for cultural fads, but since she was responsible for making sure the best and the brightest freshman attended her university, she had to keep abreast of them. Frankly, I was surprised she hadn’t heard of KonMari already.

  “I feel like I met her once,” Charles was saying. “Maybe back in 2011. Smart woman. Very clever.” He clearly had no idea who we were talking about, having mistaken the Japanese woman for someone else.

  “Marie Kondo is a professional organizer,” I explained, putting a stop to the merry go round of trying to figure out who she was and how people might know her. “She’s the one who said to throw out anything that doesn’t bring you joy.”

  Rory stared at me like she couldn’t possibly comprehend why anyone would be advocating for something so ridiculous—she was a bit of a pack rat—while Charles’s ears turned pink with embarrassment as he realized his gaff. Samuel chuckled, his eyes cast down into the amber liquid he was swirling in his glass.

  Meanwhile, Hank scowled at me from across the circle. “You threw away your socks because they didn’t bring you joy?” His eyes bounced down to my feet. I was wearing a pair of sensible-yet-stylish ballet flats. I’d learned the hard way years ago not to wear heels to these things.

  I sighed audibly. Leave it to Hank to make it sound like I was some addlepated nincompoop. The man seemed to live for humiliating me at work functions. “Don’t be ridiculous. I tossed them out because they either had holes in them or hadn’t had a mate in months.”

  “Sounds like someone else I know.” He smiled wolfishly before his eyes dropped down again and he scanned me from head to toe.

  Natasha brayed, smacking his arm lightly and letting her palm settle on his bicep. “You’re just too funny, Hank.”

  “See, Whitcomb. Someone thinks I’m funny.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow, daring me to respond.

  I wanted to. Really, I did. But I was ill equipped to go toe-to-toe with him in this arena. If we were trading barbs about literature or politics, I could best him four out of five times. But when it came to insults about our love lives, I tended to sound inarticulate, or worse—immature. The best I could do was make fun of the fact that he had a lot of sex. Meanwhile, I was having none—which he had no problem pointing out.

  My neck grew hot, my stomach churned, and a bead of sweat dripped down my back. I couldn’t beat him at this game, but that didn’t mean I had to play it.

  As a waiter sailed passed, I set my half-full glass on his tray. “If you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long day, and I need to prepare for my talk tomorrow.”

  “You’re heading up already?” Samuel glanced down at the elegant watch on his wrist.

  Yes, it was still early, but the sooner I made my exit, the less shit I’d have to endure from Hank and his one-woman cheering squad. “I want to go over my slides again to make sure everything is perfect.”

  Hank shook his head and then downed the last of his cocktail. “You know they already are.”

  Wait. Had he just given me a compliment? It was hard to tell sometimes with him.

  Charles smiled fondly. “Miranda is generally considered one of our most prepared speakers. I always look forward to reading through the packets you pass out to accompany your lecture.”

  “Our very own Hermione Granger,” Hank mused snidely, trying to compare me to the know-it-all from Harry Potter. Little did he know that I actually took the quip as a compliment. Hermione was the real hero
of that story.

  I rolled my eyes. “If you think that’s an insult, try again.”

  Natasha tapped her lips thoughtfully. “I can kind of see it. The hair and the glasses are the same.”

  Hank’s head quickly swiveled to Natasha. “I wasn’t talking about the way she looks,” he said, his voice hard.

  She shrank back and raised her hands in a sign of surrender. “Oh. Um, I didn’t realize. I thought you were—”

  “What?” Hank leveled her with a probing stare that had her taking a further step back.

  She laughed nervously, and her gaze swung around the group, eventually landing on Samuel. Briefly, her eyes traversed over his hard, lean body, starting with his light, sandy brown hair and then moving south to take in his pale green eyes, full wide mouth, and strong, cut jaw.

  A sly smile split her crimson lips. “I’m going to grab another drink. Would you care to join me?”

  Samuel’s eyes found mine, seemingly seeking out my permission. We had a complicated history, to say the least. In most every respect, we would have made the perfect couple—except for the small fact that we were completely incompatible in bed. Still, we’d been young and in love once, so situations like this could be awkward.

  Well, not for me so much as for him. I sometimes got the impression that Samuel might still be in love with me, and if I asked, would be willing to forego some of his more … ahem … interesting sexual needs in order for us to get back together.

  But since that was never going to happen, I smiled brightly as if to give him my blessing. While I certainly didn’t enjoy being tied up and spanked to the point of tears, who was I to say that Natasha wouldn’t?