His Darling Bride (Echoes of the Heart #3) Page 3

“I might not have known my boss since I was in diapers,” he said to Benjie. “But I’d bet my tips tonight that Rick will see things my way, not yours.”

  “I’d like a piece of that bet,” Clair weighed in.

  “Your guy?” Benjie croaked at Bethany. “Since when?”

  “Since we met in Atlanta,” Bethany’s partner in crime fibbed. He’d obviously been paying more attention than he’d let on to her conversation with her girlfriends.

  Bethany nestled her head against his chest, starting to enjoy herself. “Friends of friends introduced us.”

  “I don’t have to tell you how irresistible she can be,” the cowboy said without a smidge of a Texas drawl. “We sat up the rest of the night talking . . . and so forth.”

  Benjie’s eyes narrowed. “And so forth?”

  “My so forth,” Bethany spat out, while a fresh wave of awareness arced between her and the towering stranger proclaiming how irresistible he found her. “As in my business, not yours.”

  Her rescuer snuggled his cheek against the side of her head, as if they cuddled all the time. She glanced up. Her lips brushed the yummy-smelling stubble along his jawline. Totally by accident. But what on earth was that scent he was wearing? And where could she buy like a dozen bottles of the stuff?

  She realized she was running her hands up the soft sleeves covering his arms. And she was enjoying the tactile sensation way too much, making the dizziness of being close to him worse. She didn’t even know his name, and she was pawing at him, falling down a familiar rabbit hole.

  Any rational man would be sprinting back around the bar. This one gifted her with another playful wink. Meanwhile, her ex was seething.

  “Whatever I do.” She refocused on Benjie before she succumbed to licking the cowboy like a lollipop. “Whoever I do it with, nothing about me has anything to do with you anymore.”

  “I heard you’d started chasing whatever warm body crossed your path,” Benjie mocked, a drunken ass through and through. “I thought maybe since you were back in Chandlerville, you might be ready to settle down.”

  “With you?” Bethany sputtered.

  “You want me to make him go away?” The cowboy sounded like he’d relish the task. His muscular arms tightened around her.

  She shook her head. “He’s not worth it.”

  The humiliation of the spectacle they were making was already bad enough. As was the truth in what Benjie had said. She had chased after emotionally unavailable guys—empty relationships that had flamed out fast and furious. And what did she have to show for it? An even more battered heart than when she’d first come to live with her foster family at fifteen, and even more shell-shocked instincts about people.

  She wouldn’t recognize real love if it hauled off and slapped her in the face.

  She leaned into the stranger holding her. For a second she indulged in his heat, his strength. She wrapped herself in the harmless dream of them really being a couple. Of what it would mean to be part of something lasting that could feel good for more than a moment.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Benjie looked Bethany up and down. “Why the hell are you wasting your life on nobodies like him? You deserve—”

  “You?” Bethany asked.

  Tears welled. Not because of the long-ago hurt he’d caused. But because she’d let herself still care. She’d avoided dealing with this, and him, for so long. She wanted to go back and confront her teenage self. She wanted to shake herself now.

  How could she have tangled up her life with someone who clearly only cared about himself? How could she have kept making the same mistake for so many years after she’d booted Benjie’s ass to the curb?

  “You think I deserve you?” she asked.

  The cowboy turned her to face him, his features no longer teasing. He was quietly furious.

  “Not on your life,” he said. “That’s why you invited me to your sister’s wedding. Right, darlin’?”

  “What?” Bethany and Benjie said in unison.

  She blinked to clear her thoughts. And she would have managed it, too, if the bartender hadn’t pressed her body closer, making everything inside her burst to life with vibrant streaks of inspiration, freedom, anticipation. Emotions that hadn’t consumed her in a very long time. And before now, they’d only come when she was painting.

  She framed his face with her hands, trying to understand when she should be pushing him away.

  “You deserve so much more, darlin’,” he whispered as their lips inched closer. “Anybody can see that.”

  Careening down a slippery slope of her own making, she lost herself in a kiss she wasn’t sure she’d started. Maybe he had. But who cared? He tasted her, and her ears rang. Her body strained closer, and he groaned. His soft, firm lips coaxed, and she was on the tips of her toes, demanding more.

  Faintly, from somewhere far away, she heard Benjie curse. Clair and Nicole cheered. Bar patrons clapped. Bethany ignored it all, reveling in the wonder of being wanted. A current of need swept her away. She’d been here countless times, falling with no bottom in sight and no solid place to stop and wonder if she was making a mistake. But it had never felt like this—this gentlest, most bad-ass kiss of her life.

  Her cowboy was tender while he crushed her closer. He was patient, letting her take the lead, sliding her hands up his chest, linking them around his neck, her fingers running through silky, shaggy hair, knocking his hat away. She gave herself to the freedom of it feeling like . . . painting. This was the way she’d once felt when her art had seemed as easy and natural as breathing. When every time a brush was in her hand, she’d escaped into the rush of being completely herself—the Bethany she’d never been able to be with people.

  This stranger’s touch and kiss were consuming her with the same kind of inspiration, a bewitching spark of perfection she wanted to cling to, claim as her own, make forever real.

  “You two ever gonna come up for air?” Benjie snapped. “Or should I book you a room at the EZ Sleep?”

  The cowboy broke off first. His lips caressed Bethany’s flushed temple while her body trembled. Trembled. And she didn’t do weak. Not anymore, not with men. She stayed plastered against him, not sure yet if her legs would hold on their own.

  He pressed his forehead against hers.

  “Hi,” he said, panting for air.

  She inhaled, feeling people’s attention glued to them. “Hi, yourself . . .”

  “You okay?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure.” Of anything at the moment. Including the answering confusion in the guy’s gaze as his attention dropped to her lips.

  “I hear ya’.” His smile was easy, charming, dangerously addictive. “Your lip gloss. It’s—”

  “Bubble gum.” Her favorite flavor for years. Benjie had hated it.

  “Yum,” said the stranger holding her.

  Bethany peered at him through her Technicolor bangs, gathering herself to apologize and come clean to everyone about their charade. Things were getting entirely out of hand.

  But the guy’s gaze was swirling with desire, his brown eyes nearly black, like rich clouds casting about a stormy sky. His pulse was having a tantrum at the base of his throat. What on earth was she supposed to do about how badly she didn’t want to let him go?

  “Your cologne,” she whispered. “It’s . . . nice.”

  He thumbed her bottom lip. “Some men are nice, darlin’.”

  “Nice or not, you’re going to be in a world of hurt,” said an all-too-familiar masculine voice that most definitely didn’t belong to Benjie, “if you don’t take your hands off our sister.”

  Mike settled the delightful darlin’ against his side. Her petite body had gone rigid. The sweet softness that had melted into his kiss had frozen up, brittle enough to shatter. He hadn’t a clue what he’d gotten himself into. But he had no intention of getting himself out until he knew she was going to be okay.

  He studied the mountain of a man who’d spoken.

  The guy stood, ar
ms crossed, next to the jerk whose mouthing off had been Mike’s excuse for diving headfirst into helping the auburn-haired, purple-banged pixie he’d had his eyes on since she’d claimed a corner of the bar with her girlfriends. Two equally large and angry guys flanked the mountain—all of them looking to be the same age and shaped from the same Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry . . . mold.

  Mike’s protective instincts kicked up a notch. He edged in front of the woman her friends had called Bethany, partially shielding her. She stepped right back around him—not so much rejecting his support as not wanting to need it.

  “Bethie?” The mountain wore a navy pinstriped suit, a ruthlessly starched white shirt, and a loosened maroon tie.

  All of it was Armani, if Mike didn’t miss his guess. But the guy’s street fighter’s stance and the cold glint in his blue eyes hinted that the road to becoming whatever success he was had been neither straight nor narrow.

  “Who the hell is this?” Armani demanded.

  The dirty dog—Did a grown man really allow himself to be called Benjie?—had puffed up again.

  “He’s the jerk who just had his tongue down your sister’s throat,” Benjie slurred, well on his way to being blackout drunk. “He’s probably in her pants, too. Says he’s her plus one to Dru’s wedding. I heard Bethany’d lowered her standards since I left for college.” He directed the last bit of verbal poison at the woman standing proud and tall between Mike and the others. “Must be exhausting,” he said to Bethany, “panting around Atlanta for lowlifes to hook up with.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Armani said as Mike’s hand clenched. “You need to shut up before I—”

  “Don’t,” Bethany told her brother. She glanced back at Mike, then down at his fist. “Both of you back off.”

  “Listen to her.” Benjie’s next slimy smile was for Mike. “You’ll do your time for assault, and then I’ll come after you in civil court. My parents’ lawyers are sharks. You’ll be bartending the rest of your life to cover my settlement. That’s an awful lot to put on the line for a cheap piece of country ass.”

  Armani flattened him with one lightning-fast punch.

  Benjie dropped like a stone.

  A whoop went up around the bar.

  “Oliver!” Bethany shouted over the commotion.

  Benjie pushed himself up, rolled over, and flopped back down on his ass. Armani braced to take another swing. The other brothers, none of them looking anything alike except for their size, appeared to be just as pissed and ready to wade in. Benjie shook his head, his bell clearly rung.

  “I’ll have your ass,” he slurred at all of them.

  Armani reached into his suit jacket’s inside pocket. He pulled a card from a small leather folio and tossed it to the ground.

  “Have your mommy and daddy’s legal team call me,” he said. “A half-dozen witnesses will vouch that you took the first swing.”

  “I’m in.” Bethany’s blonde girlfriend took a long pull of her Stella.

  One of the brothers stepped to her side and kissed her soundly. “My kind of woman.”

  “That’s the story as I saw it.” The brunette who’d been sitting to Bethany’s right stirred her cocktail with her finger.

  Heads nodded all over. Including Law’s, behind the bar.

  Law had been friendly enough to Mike all shift, but he wasn’t looking entirely pleased with the current turn of events. Mike was right there with him. There was a fine line between helping and causing more harm than good. And his involvement in whatever this situation was had most definitely tipped into the latter category.

  “Get out of here,” Armani told Bethany’s ex. “Stay clear of my sister if you know what’s good for you. My family’s been patient. My sister’s been more than reasonable putting up with you after what you pulled in high school. Now I’m telling you to get. And stay gone.”

  “This is between Bethany and me.” Benjie used his Braves jersey to wipe at the mess the mountain had made of his nose.

  Armani cracked his knuckles.

  The gutless wonder inched closer to the door.

  “Our family’s a package deal, Carrington,” advised the blond guy cuddling with Bethany’s friend.

  “You nip at one Dixon,” the third brother weighed in, “we all bite back. That glass jaw of yours’ll stay intact a whole lot longer if you remember that.”

  Benjie stormed out the door.

  “I can fight my own battles, Oliver.” Bethany looked regal as a queen as she confronted the posse of male disapproval that was now being directed toward Mike. She was all of five-foot-nothing. And she wore what looked like a vintage dress that she’d thrown on over a pair of paint-splattered jeans, frayed down to holes in both knees.

  Mike would have recognized her as a kindred artistic soul, even if he hadn’t overheard her and her girlfriends talking about her painting. She was vibrant, vivacious, with an uncontainable energy he’d felt instantly drawn to. So when she’d outright asked him for his help, and then kissed him senseless to sweeten the deal, and then had gone along with his lie about them dating in Atlanta . . . Was it any wonder that he’d lost his mind and dove headfirst into bedlam?

  He caught himself grinning down at her like a besotted ass.

  “Nice boots,” he teased.

  They were red leather and coated with the same misting of vermillion and fuchsia as her Levi’s. When she scowled at his smirk, and then the heel of those audacious Justin ropers came down on his instep, he bit back a curse that was part pain, part admiration at her gumption.

  “You’ve invited a stranger to the wedding?” the blond brother asked.

  The man’s curve of a smile suggested that he might be enjoying himself more than he was letting on. He and the bad boy still standing beside Oliver sported identical navy T-shirts with what looked to be a sheriff’s department insignia stenciled over their hearts.

  “Dru said you’d RSVP’d stag.” The third guy’s Southern accent ran the deepest.

  Bethany inclined her head toward the room full of avid spectators. “My dating life isn’t fodder for public discussion.”

  “Does your dating life have a name?” Oliver asked. “Who is this guy, Bethie?”

  “Mike Taylor.” Mike didn’t bother offering his hand, mostly for fear that he’d pull back a bloody stump.

  “He and I were . . .” She searched Mike’s features, as if asking if he was sure he wanted to do this.

  “Bethie and I”—he shot her a disbelieving smirk at the adorable nickname—“have been dating off and on in Atlanta.”

  “Right.” She looked more than a little shell-shocked by the story they’d concocted on the fly.

  “I’ve just moved to Chandlerville temporarily,” Mike added, keeping his end of things neutral.

  “Only family calls her Bethie,” the blond cop said. “And except when our parents do it, she hates it.”

  “Which is exactly why you oafs keep at it.” Bethany ran her fingers through the spiky bangs that looked just right on her.

  She studied Mike again, long and hard, as if measuring him for a suit.

  Or a coffin.

  If she told him to get, he’d head around the bar and be grateful for the hot-as-sin diversion of having her in his arms for a few minutes. Which wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t mind pretending for a little while longer. Long enough for her brothers to stand down and give her and Mike a few minutes alone. His mouth was watering for another of those bubble gum–flavored kisses.

  Her cheeks flushed bright pink, as if she’d read his mind. Then she took his hand and stared down her family.

  “Leave Mike be while he’s in town. Stop acting like a pack of redneck yokels seeing to their little woman.”

  “Does Mom know he’s coming to the wedding?” asked the lighter-haired guy.

  “You’re my brother, Travis, not our dad.”

  “I didn’t see a plus one for you on the guest list,” said the other cop. “Dru’s been driv
ing me crazy with it.”

  “And you, Brad Douglas, aren’t officially my brother for another month.”

  Her grit and sass outshone her sprite-like stature all to hell and back. And damn, Mike liked sass in a woman. He licked his bottom lip. Then he locked gazes with the brother in the two-thousand-dollar suit, who appeared to be as good at reading minds as Bethany was. Oliver looked ready to throw another punch.

  “Look,” Mike said, “I didn’t mean to make trouble.”

  He didn’t do this kind of thing at all.

  Gorgeous, spirited women who kissed like sex bombs were great. But he sensed this one was different, and for the life of him he couldn’t say why. Except that Bethany had had him on the ropes with one look. With one hesitant request for help, she’d laid claim to protective instincts that Mike had buried deep. Which was the biggest red flag of all not to get involved.

  There was a reason bartending had become an escape for him whenever he cobbled together the time to indulge. The easy flow of the lifestyle, listening to customers, harmlessly flirting with women, talking sports with the guys, and serving everyone with an anonymous smile . . . It made Mike happy. Mostly because people forgot about him between one sip of their beer and the next.

  For a couple of years after he’d left home, he’d worked in whatever bar job he could snag. Cutting ties with his old life, he’d traipsed all over mixing just enough drinks to pay his way to wherever he wanted to go next. Living a drifter’s life had cleared his mind, slain the worst of his demons, and given him perspective. It had saved his sanity and taught him how to leave personal drama to other people.

  These days, he’d rebuilt enough structure and connection in his life to be good again to someone besides himself. He couldn’t come and go as often as he liked, but he was once more making a difference in the world. Most days he even managed to find a way to like himself. But complicated family dynamics like the one playing out around him were never going to be his scene again.

  “I never meant to—” he started to say.

  Oliver held up his hand. “This is a private matter. And considering that my brothers and I have never set eyes on you, and you just had your hands all over our sister, this would be a good time for you to find somewhere else to be.”