Just A Little Fling. Julie Kistler
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punch to her solar plexus. Wow, that was weird. Must be the champagne. Maybe it had gone down the wrong way. So why did she still feel compelled to drop to the floor and check under his kilt?
Behave, she ordered herself.
“My dad asked me to stop by to make sure you’re all enjoying yourselves,” Ian offered. “I see you’ve got champagne, but the bar is also open—anything you want, courtesy of the Highland Inn. The waiters aren’t going to start serving dinner for a while, though—the photographer is taking a few extra family pictures. But as nonfamily, you guys are off the hook, so you might as well have a few drinks, a dance, whatever.”
He skimmed a quick glance around the table, long enough for Lucie to get a good glimpse of the color of his eyes. Blue. A beautiful, rich shade of blue that made her feel as if she’d just dived into the deep end of Lake Michigan. Or Loch Lomond. You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll peek under your kilt on the wayyy… She knocked back another glass of champagne.
But his gaze lit on her…and lingered.
“Wait,” he said, and her heart felt as if it had stopped right there. Oh, she was waiting, all right. He narrowed his eyes. “I remember you from the rehearsal dinner. It’s Lucie, isn’t it?”
He knew her name? She was shocked. Especially since she’d been sitting about a football field away from him at the rehearsal dinner.
“Aren’t you Steffi’s sister?” he asked.
“Half sister,” she corrected quickly.
“What’s a half between friends?” He held out a hand. “I’ll bet they’re waiting for both of us, and I don’t think your mother is a woman you want to leave hanging.”
“Ginetta isn’t my mother,” Lucie said quickly. That should have been obvious—Steffi and her mother were both tiny in stature, barely five feet, with dark hair and eyes. At five nine, with wayward, wavy red hair and green eyes, Lucie wasn’t even in the same ballpark. “Steffi and I…We share the same father.”
“That still makes you part of the family.” When she didn’t take his offered hand, he reached for hers, pulling her to her feet. “Come on, don’t be shy. I don’t want to have to come back for you. The faster we get this whole photo thing over with, the faster we can join the party.”
We? What we? But she didn’t have a chance to find out.
Stumbling along behind him, Lucie stared down at their joined hands, watched the pleats in his kilt frisk his well-shaped calves, gulped, blinked twice, shook her head, and gulped again. But he held on, steering them both across the ballroom and out the side door.
Uh-oh. What was wrong with her? For one thing, she’d shed her jacket and loosened her blouse, so she wasn’t presentable for pictures. For another, she should’ve told him that no one would be champing at the bit, waiting for her to pose for family pictures.
She knew Steffi and Ginetta like the back of her hand, and they weren’t going to like this. In their minds, there was Family—Dad, Ginetta and Steffi—and then there was the outsider, the nuisance, the nitwit—Lucie. She tried to get along with them, really she did. But they’d made it clear for years that she was persona non grata.
Ian pulled her behind him into a side room where a small cluster of people milled about, including the bride and groom. “Ian!” three different people cried at once.
“Ian, let’s get a move on,” the groom said impatiently. “Come on, we’ve been waiting for you.”
“Hey, I completed my mission as fast as I could.” He smiled, dropping Lucie’s hand, but then slid a casual arm around her. “Look, Steffi, I found your sister.”
“Half sister,” the two of them said automatically, as their mutual father, Donald Webster, started to get pink and fidgety, glancing between the bride and her mother as if he expected one or the other to blow sky-high.
A self-made man, he had a horror of looking tacky to those more sophisticated or higher up the social ladder, like the old-money Mackintosh family. Lucie recognized the symptoms—he always got that nervous shift to his eyes, those beads of sweat on his upper lip, when he felt outclassed.
There was an awkward silence.
“Excuse me. I’ll just…” She’d never had any desire to annoy her father or put a crimp in Steffi’s big day. So Lucie edged backward, ducking around Ian’s arm and making for the door. “I’m sure Steffi wanted, you know, immediate family, and I’m sort of, well, extended.”
“No, no, I’m sure—” Ian began. She heard his brother whisper, “Steffi? Don’t you want your sister in the family pictures?” but the photographer was trying to push them into some sort of arrangement, and Lucie took her chance to escape.
She did pause for one extra second, however, long enough to watch the Mackintosh family pose as gracefully as you please, as if they had just stepped into an ad for greeting cards. They stood tall, exuding wealth and style. From the distinguished parents to their two elegant, fabulous sons and poised teenaged daughter, this family made a picture of perfection. And when they smiled, the whole room seemed to light up without any need for flashbulbs.
Wow. Lucie looked at them with real envy. No wonder Steffi wanted to marry into this family. It wasn’t just that her groom was adorable and wonderful, rich and charming, although he certainly seemed to be. No, it was the whole family. They were perfect. But what would they want with Steffi?
None of her business, was it? She had a table full of wallflowers to get back to. As she slipped away into the reception, she heard the photographer behind her command, “And smile!”
IF ONE MORE PERSON told him to smile, Ian Mackintosh swore he’d start knocking heads together.
God, he hated weddings. Especially this one, with its boatload of pseudo-Scottish junk, outrageous number of bridesmaids, and way too many people smiling and pretending to be thrilled for Kyle.
Thrilled? Ha! His brother was making a huge mistake. Colossal. What else could you call it when a great guy like Kyle signed up for a life sentence with a twenty-one-year-old bimbo with a hot bod and the brains of a twig?
Ian wasn’t that fond of the idea of marriage, anyway. As far as he was concerned, you traded a few minutes of pleasure for a lifetime of effort and commitment, boredom and compromise. He hated compromise. Even his parents, who looked like a flawless match on the outside, had had their share of ups and downs. It seemed like a full-time job for his dad to keep that marriage humming.
He loved his mother and his sister dearly, but they were often on some other planet he couldn’t—and didn’t really care to—understand. He just wasn’t sure he could ever put that much work into something as mercurial and infuriating as a woman.
Besides, as he’d watched friends get married over the past few years, they’d so often seemed to be doing it for the wrong reasons—because somebody’s parents were pushing it, or the girlfriend wanted a baby, or he was the right age, or she had a nice smile, or he was lonely, or all their friends were married…
It didn’t take long for one or the other to be miserable. It didn’t take long for Ian to run in the other direction. The merest hint of matrimony on the mind of a woman he was dating had him saying goodbye.
And he was even more convinced he was right now that he’d seen Steffi in action. Sure, he’d tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, and he’d been kind of amused by her sister, the sneezy redhead. At least she seemed like a real human being. But when he’d brought Lucie back for family pictures, snotty little Steffi had acted ruder than rude—to her own sister.
“Half sister,” he said under his breath.
Fine. A bimbo, a social climber and a bitch, and she’d just married his brother. Wonderful.
What the hell was Kyle thinking, marrying Steffi? “She must be something special in the sack,” he muttered,