“Really. Your Aunt Cassidy and Uncle Mason just got a baby horse, too.”
Michael scrambled out of his chair, tore off his jacket and then ran toward the house.
“Boy,” said Jeanette. “You’ve got such a way with kids, Maggie. It’s crazy that you and Todd never had any.”
Funny, after all those years, the sadness and the yearning were still there. They drew a slipknot around her heart and pulled tight.
Maggie held up Michael’s jacket. “Let’s see if I can find a stain stick. Oh, and I’d better check on Mom, too—you know, just to make sure she doesn’t have her hands around anyone’s neck.”
To her relief, Priscilla had stationed herself next to the bar and was complaining loudly to Aunt Polly about how awful things had been so far. Maggie threaded her way through an army of catering staff in the kitchen and found the utility room, which about was the size of her entire apartment. It struck her again how greatly her sister’s fortunes had improved. Let’s just hope it lasts, she thought. But if Cassidy and Mason did divorce, Cassidy would at least get this place and—stop thinking, Maggie. Just stop.
The utility room was divided into two rooms, separated by a door. Maggie found a stain stick and sat in the farthest room next to the big industrial-sized washers and dryers. It was pleasant in here, away from the noise. A window gave onto a small forest of utility flags where Mason planned to build a pool.
Maggie heard the door in the front room open, a man’s voice, low, and then a woman giggling. She froze. The stain stick tumbled from her fingers and then rolled across the floor. The giggle was arch and flirtatious, clearly an invitation to do something naughty. Omigod, really? What kinds of grownups had sex in a laundry room? Not just any laundry room, but her sister’s laundry room!
Anger swirled hotly through Maggie as she got to her feet.
“Are you sure we’re safe in here?” the woman asked.
“Well, there’s a lock on the door,” the man replied.
That voice. The hair stood up on the back of Maggie’s neck.
You’ve got to be kidding.
Burning with indignation, Maggie threw the tux jacket on a table and marched around the corner, prepared to drink blood. Jake’s blood. He and his girlfriend couldn’t wait until they got home to act like horny teenagers? And why did the idea of Jake having sex with another woman make her feel as though there was a party she hadn’t been invited to?
Maggie found him in a lip lock with a woman, all right, but it wasn’t the one he’d been with at the bakery. She couldn’t believe it. Her fingers flew to her lips as though it were Jake who kissed her there with such lazy, dangerous purpose. But as she stood in the doorway with her heart racing, anger burned in the pit of her stomach.
“Have you lost your minds?” she exclaimed.
Jake looked up. He’d clearly been about two seconds away from unzipping his pants. Maggie tried to murder him with her eyes. He didn’t seem at all repentant. Instead of fumbling for excuses like any other man, any decent man, he just shook his head and chuckled.
The woman gave a nervous little yip and pushed up a fallen bra strap. Maggie couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she was. Blond, like the last one. Blond like the endless line of beautiful women who probably filled his past.
Despite hating him, she was angrier with herself for responding to the gleam in his eye. For noticing that beneath the tux, he had the kind of lean, muscular body that might give any woman hot flashes. For noticing that he looked at her with the keenness of a man who saw something he wanted.
“Go wait for me in the pavilion,” he told the woman. She slid her eyes in Maggie’s direction and then left without a word.
They were alone now.
Maggie had a sudden urge to say something cutting and hurtful, although she didn’t know what it could be. Jake didn’t look like a man who wounded easily. Plus, he stood between her and the door, which made any dramatic exit impossible.
The muscles in her face quivered with the effort to keep her expression carefully neutral. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking that he mattered to her in the slightest.
His gaze wandered over her unhurriedly before returning to her face. “Well, aren’t you a vision,” he said softly.
“Don’t even try,” she said.
“I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”
“Oh, so you weren’t trying to have sex in my sister’s laundry room?”
He moved around the corner of the table with predatory ease, which made her take a few steps backward. “What part of that bothers you, Magdalene? Or do you prefer Maggie?”
His use of her given name threw her a bit. Nobody called her Magdalene except the grandmother she’d been named after. “How—?”
“I asked Mason.”
Mason was friends with this guy?
Then another thought occurred to her. A terrible thought.
“You’re wearing a tux,” she said lamely. “You’re the new best man.”
“It was fun watching you put that together.”
Mason’s friend, Jasper, had been his original best man. She liked Jasper. But Jasper had broken his leg during the preseason and Cassidy had told her there’d been a replacement, only with all the late nights, bridal registry debacles and drunken bachelorette parties, it had dropped off Maggie’s radar.
Now that radar was blipping just like her pulse, and she thrust out her chin in an effort to conceal it.
“How are you friends with Mason? You don’t play football,” she muttered.
“You’re right. I don’t.”
He offered no further clarification and was close enough now for her to feel his body heat. It worried her how his gaze just seemed to reach inside you and browse around, examining first this thing and then that, turning everything over with a kind of selfish, cynical amusement.
God, how it infuriated her.
“I’m surprised,” she said. “A man like you using his friend’s wedding to sleaze around for women. The one I saw you with earlier—where’s she? You didn’t get tired of her already, did you?”
A muscle flared in his jaw. For the first time since they’d met, she might have gotten an emotion out of him that didn’t involve his hateful smile. “Quite the opposite,” he replied.
“Oh, I see. Well, that worked out nicely for you then, didn’t it?”
Jake positioned himself in front of her, arms crossed. Tall as she was, Maggie had to tilt her head back to see him. He smelled really good, like some kind of heady mixture of sandalwood and tobacco and…man.
Well, she’d just have
