1) Schmooze Him, Don’t Lose Him: Start your charm offensive early, and don’t give your best man too much wiggle room.

      ‘I didn’t say I can’t dance—I said I won’t dance.’

      Sabrina Millard resisted the urge to roll her eyeballs at the man sitting opposite her in the crowded Soho pub, while silently cursing her BFF, Libby, and Libby’s fiancé, Jamie.

      Wow, Libs, thanks so much for saddling me with the best man from hell to handle.

      As a maid of honour with enough experience to write a book about the pitfalls of the role, Sabrina knew handling the best man vied for the top spot in ‘Wedding Crap the Maid of Honour Has to Deal With’ right alongside:

      1. Wearing an exceptionally unflattering dress (puffball sleeves optional)—so as not to upstage the bride.

      2. Making sure the bride doesn’t have a nervous breakdown or develop an eating disorder before her big day.

      3. Getting hit on by tipsy groomsmen—who assume that if you are single and a member of the bridal party, you’ll put up with getting shagged senseless against a wall by any eligible bachelor within a ten-mile radius.

      Luckily, as the company manager at The Phoenix, a non-profit theatre on London’s South Bank, Sabrina happened to be exceptionally talented at planning events while coping with colossal egos, making her confident she could even whip Jamie’s half-brother Connor McCoy—the Creature from the Testosterone Lagoon—into shape.

      But even with her excellent man-handling strategies, Sabrina was struggling to suppress a scowl after only fifteen minutes in McCoy’s company. That he kept challenging every single thing she said with that surly, I-couldn’t-give-a-shit look in his pale blue eyes was not helping with her scowl control.

      ‘Yes, well, I’m afraid as the best man you’re going to have to dance,’ she said, subtly alerting him to the fact he wasn’t the most knowledgeable person on the subject of wedding etiquette.

      If Libby hadn’t already clued her in about the commitment-phobic dating habits of her beloved’s older brother, Sabrina could have guessed from the way his smouldering gaze had checked out every woman in the place in the ten minutes since he’d arrived. Every woman that was, except her.

      Not that she cared about his lack of interest per se. All right, so Connor McCoy was undeniably hot, she’d give him that. The combination of cool azure eyes, dark brows, jet-black hair long enough to curl around his ears and sharp angular cheekbones made him arresting—not to mention the cloud of testosterone that hovered in the air around him and had been a siren call to every other woman in The Pillars of Hercules pub on Greek Street. But luckily, she’d never been susceptible to alpha-jerk types who spent a small fortune on their gym membership—if the overdeveloped biceps stretching the sleeves of his black T-shirt were anything to go by.

      Not that she’d noticed those hard, round orbs of muscle much—that flexed and bulged every time he raised his beer bottle to his lips. But when a girl hadn’t had a meaningful relationship with anything other than her vibrator since last July, well, upper body strength like that was kind of hard to ignore entirely.

      She drew her gaze away from his distracting biceps and concentrated on getting her point across—firmly and succinctly—again.

      ‘Libby wants us to join the floor together after her and Jamie finish their first dance. So really, whether you want to dance or not is a moot point.’

      He shrugged. ‘I’ll talk to Jamie, tell him to scratch that part.’

      ‘No, you will not,’ she replied, somewhat less subtly. ‘This is Libby’s big day, and the first dance is an