The Secret Seduction. Cathy Thacker Gillen
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stopped glaring at you since the two of you walked in together.”
Fletcher forked up some of his own shredded pork and tangy barbecue sauce, irked because they were treating his coming in with the stubborn minx as if it were some sort of date, and it darn well wasn’t. “I didn’t ask her to the party,” Fletcher said, exasperated. “So don’t go making anything out of us coming in together.” That was just the way it had happened, thanks to Lily’s refusal to give up on her pitch right until the minute they walked in here side by side.
“Yeah, we know.” The twenty-eight-year-old Dylan winked.
Cal continued with a salacious grin. “At least she was on time.”
Fletcher shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Cal might have been the first of them to get married, but his wife Ashley’s current OB/GYN fellowship in Honolulu had him living the everyday life of a single man again. And though Cal kept insisting it wasn’t a marital separation, it looked to everyone else in the family as if it were. Particularly since it had been going on for two years now.
Not that Cal had ever looked at another woman. Ashley was—and always would be—the love of Cal’s life. For all the good it did him, Fletcher noted cynically.
“I couldn’t help being late.” Fletcher finally answered the charge against him. “A sick cow needed my attention.”
“No problem. Lily Madsen was only too happy to volunteer to go and find you and drag you over here.” Cal continued teasing, even as the beeper on his belt went off, signaling a message regarding one of his orthopedic patients.
Fletcher guzzled his icy cold beer as Cal stepped away to use his cell to phone the hospital. “Can I help it if I’m not much for parties these days?” Fletcher asked.
“Who are you kidding?” Joe razzed, looking fit as a fiddle, even in the Carolina Storm hockey team’s off-season as he chowed down on liberal amounts of coleslaw, beans and shredded pork. “You’ve never been much for parties. Always too busy tending to some sick or wounded animal.”
Fletcher wasn’t going to apologize for his devotion to his work. He plucked a golden brown hush puppy off his plate. “That’s my job.”
Thad Lantz, Janey’s fiancé, joined the group. “Not twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” Thad said with the same frank authority he used as coach of the Carolina Storm hockey team. “You’ve got a partner. She takes calls from time to time. Or so I’ve heard.”
“And your point is?” Fletcher asked Thad.
“It’s best to play as hard as you work.”
And all he needed, Fletcher thought sardonically, was a playmate who didn’t want hearts and flowers and marriage—or anything else he was ill equipped to give.
Even as he thought it a single woman came to mind. Beautiful, blond and all of twenty-five…
“I think we’re getting off subject here,” Dylan said, guiding the conversation back to where it began. He looked at Fletcher curiously. “We want to know what you did or said to Lily Madsen to get her so ticked off at you.”
Fletcher turned and looked at Lily. She was deep in conversation with his mother and sister, and the other bridesmaids. And she looked absolutely gorgeous. Like the cherubic angel he remembered her being as a kid, and yet…all grown up. Definitely grown up. Her five-foot-five frame was slender but curvy in all the right places, her legs stunning enough to make even the most jaded guy stop and take a second and third look. Her baby-blond curls had been cut to chin-length, but these days she wore them in a tousled, unconsciously sexy, finger-combed style that drove him wild. Her soft pink bow-shaped lips had a sensual slant and the rest of her features—the straight slender nose, high cheekbones, wide-set Carolina blue eyes—were elegance defined.
She was incredibly feminine, and it didn’t matter whether she was wearing the khaki pants and pastel T-shirts he sometimes spotted her in, or the kind of floaty, flirty tea-length floral sundress and high-heeled sandals she had on now. She always exuded a sort of purity and innocence that was amazing for someone her age, especially in this day and age. Which was why, Fletcher thought as Lily turned and sent a brief, dagger-filled look his way, he had to stay away from her. Which probably wouldn’t be hard, given all the reasons he had just given her to absolutely loathe and detest him.
Reluctantly, he broke off their staring match and turned back to Thad and his brothers. Aware they were still waiting for an explanation, he said, “She wants me to fix her up with Carson McRue when he hits town tomorrow to start filming Hollywood P.I.”
“And you refused?” Mac guessed dryly.
Hell, yes, he had refused, Fletcher thought as he took another swig of his beer. “Lily is much too innocent to be hooked up with a narcissist like McRue,” Fletcher said in the most disaffected tone he could manage.
“Let me guess. You gave her a hard time about wanting to go out with him at all,” Cal said.
“No,” Fletcher replied, beginning to feel exasperated again as Lily shot him another withering look over her shoulder, which was followed by a whole slew of withering looks from his mother and the other bridesmaids. “I simply told her the way it was,” Fletcher continued matter-of-factly, defending his actions. “And I wouldn’t have done that if she had just taken my hint and not asked for my assistance in garnering an introduction.”
The male members of the wedding party turned to look at the female participants. Especially Lily, who still looked awfully ticked off, like her temper was sky-high. “What’d you say to her?” Dylan asked curiously.
That was just it. Fletcher could hardly recall—he had been so focused on Lily and that sexy lilac perfume she was wearing.
Fletcher swallowed around the sudden dryness in his throat as he pushed away memories of just how kissable her pink and pouty lips had been, how silken her peaches and cream skin. “I just wasn’t very helpful.”
Joe smirked. “Not being helpful usually doesn’t earn you razor-sharp looks like that.” Since getting hooked up with his wife, Emma, earlier in the summer, the pro athlete in the family suddenly considered himself an expert on all things female. “So what’d you do?” Joe prodded.
I got into a shower in front of her, in hopes of scaring her away. Unfortunately, Fletcher admitted remorsefully to himself, it hadn’t worked. And now, all Fletcher could remember was Lily’s eyes roving over him as her face flushed and her breathing grew shallow. And he wondered what it would be like to see her in—and just out—of the shower.
“Have we been missing something here?” Mac leaned in closer. His work as sheriff had trained him to notice absolutely everything. “Have you two got something going on?”
“Nope.” Fletcher said honestly as Lily sent him yet another heated look. And just as suddenly, inspiration hit. Fletcher caught and held Lily’s eyes until she finally blushed and turned away with a haughty snap of her head. “But we just might,” he drawled.
Dylan scoffed. “Fat chance, considering she’s got her eyes on another prize.”
Fletcher had never taken well to disrespect. He wasn’t going to start now. He finished the last of the barbecue on his plate. “You think I can’t do it?”
“Win her attentions?” Mac sopped up the last of his barbecue sauce with a piece of sourdough bread. “You bet.”
Fletcher set his plate and bottle of beer aside. “You’re on.”
Cal blinked, sure he had missed something. “What?”
Fletcher stepped closer and dropped his voice to a husky whisper. “Hundred dollars says I can make Lily Madsen forget all about going out with Carson McRue.”
Joe shook his head, predicting, “She’ll never give up on a date with the hunk, if only because it’ll mean losing the bet she made at her twenty-fifth birthday party last week.”
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