Wedding Party Collection: Always The Bachelor. Barbara Hannay
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This game he was playing was getting more complicated by the hour. It would be so much easier if she knew the rules, but she had the uneasy suspicion that there weren’t any.
She tried to work up the enthusiasm to be annoyed but didn’t see the point. Her anger was wasted on him. If anything, he seemed to enjoy getting her riled up. “Was there something you wanted?”
He flashed her that sexy, simmering grin and wiggled his eyebrows. “You know what I want, darlin’.”
Oh, that. And here she had been hoping he wanted to play checkers.
Then he—Oh, my God—pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the bed beside him.
Hunk alert.
All that bronzed skin and lean muscle was making her eyes cross.
He patted the mattress. “Why don’t you slip out of that robe and squeeze in here beside me.”
If only he knew how tempting that was.
The bedroom was the one place he had never disappointed her. And it wasn’t just the sex, although, Lord knew that had been out-of-this-world marvelous. But, being something of a nerd, one of her favorite things had been to just talk. Back then, few people had had the privilege of meeting the intellectually intriguing man lost behind the rebellious, party-boy facade. Some nights they had made love for hours, then had lain awake until dawn discussing social issues and politics and world events.
She wondered when that had stopped. When going out to the bar with his buddies had become more appealing than spending time with her. When the discussions had turned into arguments, the arguments to angry sex. Until even that had no longer been able to connect them. Until they had been just plain angry.
When she didn’t move, he sighed and let his head fall back. His neck was lean and tanned, and she could see a tiny mark under his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving. “Is it safe to assume that we’re not going to pick up where we left off downstairs?”
“What happened downstairs was a mistake.” A huge, monster-size, “ginormous” mistake.
“Wouldn’t be my first, and I doubt it’ll be my last.”
“That doesn’t justify what we did. It’s pretty obvious we have some unresolved issues, but I don’t think hopping into bed is the way to fix them.”
Not that it wouldn’t be fun.
He flashed her that hungry, devilish grin. “The only thing unresolved between us is that we still make each other hot. And hopping into bed together, right here, right now, is the perfect way to fix that.”
“May be that was the problem with our marriage. May be it was only about the sex.”
“Who could blame us, since we did it so well.”
She shot him a look. One he would no doubt recognize as exasperation. “I’m serious, Dillon.”
“So am I.” He reached over and pulled back the covers. “Come here, I’ll remind you.”
She just stood there, arms folded over her chest. He blew out an exasperated breath and fell back against the pillow. It was so typically Dillon, so familiar, her heart ached the tiniest bit.
“Darlin’, you’re sending so many mixed signals I’m getting whiplash. Did you or did you not kiss me? Twice in fact.”
“Call it temporary insanity. Let me say this loud and clear so there’s no confusion. We are not having sex. Not today, not tomorrow, not ten years from now.”
“How about Saturday? Could we do it then?”
“Never.”
He considered that for a second, then asked, “When you say sex, do you mean intercourse only, or are you lumping foreplay in there, too?”
She wasn’t going to justify that with a response. “No wonder our marriage went to hell. You can’t be serious for two seconds.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched, and she knew she’d hit a sore spot. She seemed to have a knack for doing that. “How’s this for serious? I can tell you exactly why our marriage went to hell. You didn’t trust me.”
So, they were back to blaming her. How typical. And to think that only a few minutes ago she had seriously been considering sleeping with him. “If I didn’t trust you, Dillon, I had a damn good reason. You weren’t exactly reliable.”
“Reliable?” Now he looked downright resentful.
“Did I ever make you a promise I didn’t keep?”
She wanted to be able to say yes. But the honest truth was, he’d never broken a promise. When he gave his word, he’d never failed to follow through. The tricky part was getting him to make the promise in the first place.
Did that make him unreliable or self-centered? Or simply smart enough to know his own limitations?
And what difference did it make now?
“No,” she admitted. “You never made a promise you didn’t keep, but like always, you’re grossly oversimplifying. It wasn’t about lies or broken promises. In all the time we were together you never once showed an ounce of incentive. A drive to succeed.”
“How do you figure?”
Was he kidding? “Dillon, you were flunking out of school! All you did was drink and gamble.”
He shrugged. “So?”
So? Was that all he had to say? Just so? “You had so much potential. You could have gone so far.”
“Could have? I run a billion-dollar corporation, Ivy. How much further did you expect me to go?”
“You know what I mean,” she said, although he did have a point. But turning out okay despite his behavior didn’t make it right. It just meant he was lucky.
“What I know, Ivy, is that my future was set. My parents had been priming me since the day I was born. I knew that when my dad retired I would take his place. You may find this hard to swallow, but I considered it an honor. One I took very seriously.”
He sat up, closer now. Too close. His eyes serious. It was unsettling because Dillon didn’t do serious very often. “But, damn it, if I was going to be chained to that company for most of my adult life, I was not going to spend my youth with my nose buried in a textbook. I was going to have fun.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“You did know that. You knew it because I told you a thousand times. Every time you rode me because I skipped class, or blew off studying to hit a party. I never lied to you, I never made a promise I didn’t keep. I never gave you a reason to not believe what I said was true, but that wasn’t good enough for you. Which brings us right back to where we started. You. Didn’t. Trust. Me.”
He was turning everything around, making it look like it was her fault.
May be he was right. May be she hadn’t trusted him completely. But it was more complicated than that. “You may not have given me a reason to mistrust you,” she told him, “but trust has to be earned. You have to make promises to keep them.”
“If you didn’t trust me, Ivy, why the hell did you marry me?”
“I wish I hadn’t!” she shot back, regretting the words instantly. It was one thing to be angry, but that comment had been downright mean. A vicious low blow.
Dillon gave her this look. Not cold or warm, annoyed or insulted. His face was a blank page. A blank page in a book whose language she had never been able to translate. “I’m real sorry to hear that our life together was such a disappointment for you.”
Awkward silence echoed through the room like thunder.
It had happened again. No matter how hard they tried, they just