The Best Man (Alpha Men 2)

“Aw, come on, sweetheart, you clearly need to loosen up a bit. I can help you with that.”

After the debacle of her failed wedding, everybody had been treating her with kid gloves. She had to admit it was really kind of refreshing to meet someone who didn’t walk on eggshells around her. Someone who didn’t treat her like some fragile little porcelain doll that would break at the first sign of rough handling.

She tilted her head and openly assessed him.

“My wedding was called off at the eleventh hour last year,” she told him, watching closely for his reaction. He did nothing more than raise a cocky brow.

“Yeah? Good to know you’re a free agent, sweetheart. Married women are off-limits. I don’t do messy or complicated.”

“There are plenty of other available women here,” Lia pointed out.

“None of them are you,” he yelled, raising his voice even more when an annoying electronic beat started thumping and the crowd cheered. People swarmed around them, but nobody touched them. It was as if Sam Brand created his own invisible force field and people automatically knew to go around it. He was standing so close to Lia that she was afforded the same protection that invisible shield offered him, and it felt like—despite the throngs of people around them—they were in their own private little oasis.

He was staring fixedly at her, his unnerving and unflinching scrutiny making her feel vulnerable and exposed, but she found herself quite unable to look away. Her eyes dropped to his beautiful mouth and then back up to his magnetic blue eyes.

“How’s that nightcap looking, Dahlia?” he asked, that irrepressibly wicked grin flirting with the corners of his mouth.

“My name’s Lia.”

Two days later, just barely recovered from Friday night’s colossal hangover, Daff sat curled up on her sofa, her hands wrapped around her coffee mug as she took in the collection of personal debris she had been sifting through over the course of the last few weeks in her ongoing quest toward self-improvement.

The jazz albums, Japanese cookbooks, art history books, sketchbook and oil paints, a drum kit, a guitar, a surfboard, a collection of noir film DVDs, most of them unwatched, binoculars from that time she’d taken up bird-watching, her dad’s old golf clubs—she’d have to return them—and so many other gadgets and doodads that she had collected over the years. Obtained, not out of any genuine interest in learning a new hobby or craft, but to impress her current man of the moment.

The pile on the floor was embarrassingly large and served as mute testament to what had gone wrong with all those relationships. None of those guys had shown the slightest interest in getting to know her and, worse, Daff hadn’t showed any of them her true self, either. She hadn’t trusted them enough to reveal her weaknesses and insecurities. Her pathological need to impress them by adopting their interests and hobbies had doomed each and every relationship from the start. It had started with Jake, of course, and despite the way that had turned out, she had continued on the same self-destructive path for years.

She took a sip of her coffee and thought about what she and Spencer had shared. She had gone out of her way to give it no labels. Had done her best to ensure that it meant nothing . . .

And yet it had been her healthiest relationship with a man ever. They had talked, laughed, made love, and talked some more. He’d been genuinely interested in her likes and she in his. Spencer Carlisle was a man any woman would be lucky to have, and he’d wanted her. Not because of some bullshit, fake mutual interest she had cultivated, but because he had seen the real, cranky bitch Daff, with her many, many insecurities, and yet somehow still loved her. He did not want to change her, or improve her, or educate her, he just wanted them to belong to each other.

Why was that so hard for her to accept?

She set aside the mug and got up to pad to her bedroom. She went straight to her closet and retrieved the shoebox she had stowed on the top shelf. She took it back to the living room and sat down on the nearest armchair, holding the box in her lap. She took a deep breath, removed the lid, and smiled fondly at the slips of yellowing notepaper. There were more than she remembered. She lifted the top one and unfolded it. Spencer’s handwriting, bold and masculine even when he was a teenager, was scrawled across the lined paper.

Daff, your eyes

Are like stars in the skies

And for all your smiles

I would walk a thousand miles

She raised a hand to her mouth and stifled a half laugh and half sob. His poetry was kind of atrocious, but it must have taken phenomenal courage for the shy, reticent boy Spencer had been to write and then present this to the more popular Daff. She refolded the page along the well-worn crease and picked up another.