She paused at the glass doors of the shiny new small business development center and traced her fingers over the lettering on the door. All her dreams had come true, thanks to the man who teased her about sausage. And she wasn’t going to let him down. No, Aiden Kilbourn would have no choice but to be proud of his MBA-wielding, small business genius wife.
She ducked inside and found her parents, Hugo and May, huddled in the conference room over the cookie tray. Her brothers, Gio and Marco, were racing desk chairs around the four cubicles on the opposite side of the front desk. She’d hired a receptionist, a part-time employee, and an intern. Between the four of them, and the ever-growing list of resources Aiden was developing, they’d make a dent in the small business needs of Brooklyn Heights.
She glanced at the sign-up sheet on the front desk. Next week’s workshop on business expenses and other accounting questions was already booked solid.
“There’s our beautiful, amazing daughter,” May announced as if it had been weeks rather than minutes since she’d last seen Frankie.
Gio cut Marco off with his chair and dumped his brother onto the floor.
“Winner!”
“You guys break it, you bought it,” Frankie said, nudging Marco with her foot.
“Get your ass off the floor, you juvenile delinquents,” Rachel snapped, bouncing little Maya on her hip. Frankie’s niece was wearing a t-shirt that said My Aunt is Awesome.
Frankie liberated Maya from her mother’s arms and held her aloft. She squealed in delight and clapped her little hands.
“Two of my favorite ladies,” Aiden noted, poking his head in through the front door.
Frankie grinned at him. “How’s it going out there, Mr. Mayor?”
“Everyone is eating, drinking, and shopping. I’d call it a success,” he said, his eyes dipping to the V-neck of her dress.
May bustled out of the conference room and whacked her sons on the head. “Stop acting like wild animals,” she snapped.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry, Ma.”
“Why can’t you act more like Aiden?” she demanded. “Look at him behaving.”
When she turned to point at Aiden, Marco and Gio flipped him off.
May spun to shoot her sons a fierce frown, and Aiden used the opportunity to return the one-fingered salute.
Frankie and Rachel shook their heads and laughed.
“You two did good here,” Hugo announced from the doorway of the conference room, a cookie in each hand.
“Thank you, Dad,” Frankie said. “I think we’re going to do a lot of good things here.”
“Maybe you can show your mother how that Book Face Twatter works,” he mused.
Gio snorted. “Frankie’s real good at the Twatter.”
Using the baby as cover, Frankie flipped Gio off.
Aiden plucked Maya from Frankie’s arms and jiggled the little girl in the air before pressing a kiss to her chubby little cheek.
“Think you have a few minutes to sneak away?” Frankie asked. She was going for casual, but the words came out strangled.
She saw the spark in his eyes, knew he thought she had other intentions.
“I always have time to sneak away,” he said, his voice husky.
“Hand over my baby before you say anything gross in front of her,” Marco demanded.
Frankie grinned. A year into the marriage, and neither she nor Aiden had put the brakes on in the fucking-like-rabbits department.
Aiden gave the little girl another kiss and turned her over to her father. He slid his arm around Frankie’s waist and pulled her into his side. “What did you have in mind?” he whispered.
“Let’s go for a little walk,” she suggested, pulling him toward the door.
She’d told no one what she’d done, and the secret was eating her soul. When they’d married, Aiden had opened an account in her name and dumped an obscene amount of money into it so Frankie never felt like she needed to ask for anything.
She’d refused to touch it on principal. Until now.
“Where are we going?” Aiden asked gruffly as he let Frankie pull him down the block, away from the festivities.
“You’ll see,” she said vaguely.
They followed the street west before skirting north and then west again into the historic district until Frankie came to a stop in front of a two-story brown brick building. It had a garage flanked by two doors.
“And what are we doing here?” Aiden asked indulgently.
Frankie pulled the key out of her pocket and took a deep breath. “Hopefully, being really happy and not yelling at me at all.”
She felt the weight of his gaze as she slid the key into the lock.
“Franchesca,” he said her name softly, questioningly.
She tossed him a shaky smile and gave the door a hard shove. It creaked open on rarely used hinges.
Aiden followed her inside.
Thick, worn floorboards drew the eye from the front to the back of the large space.
She waited while Aiden prowled, examining plaster walls and the rickety staircase up to the second floor. Everything was dirty and dusty. It was an abandoned construction zone. The beginning of a kitchen was tucked into a corner. But the back of the building with its series of arched windows that stretched from floor to ceiling were the wow factor.
Frankie waited, gnawing on her thumb while Aiden stood before one of the windows and stared out across the greenway to the murky summer waters of the river. Beyond it, the Manhattan skyline loomed.
“Well? What do you think?” she asked, breathlessly.
“Why don’t you tell me exactly why we’re here, and then I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, eyeing her with that probing look.
“I bought it. For us.” She blurted the words out. “You’ve been saying you wanted to look for a place here, close to the development center and my family. It’s a carriage house or was before someone started the renovations. They ran out of money and sat on it for a few years. Your dad thinks we got a great deal on it—”
“My father?” Aiden asked, swiping his hand over his chin.
It irked her that she couldn’t read him. Frankie nodded. “Ferris helped me set up a corporation so I could buy it without you knowing. Surprise?”
He stared at the view once again and then returned to her face. Aiden started toward her.
“Tell me what you’re thinking before I die. Do you like it? Do you hate it? I thought we could renovate it together. The Greenway is literally in our backyard, and we’ve got the square footage for a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. The roof is sound. We could have one of those cool rooftop terraces…”
He reached her and gripped her hips, pulling her against him.
“Aiden, seriously if you don’t say something right now, I’m going to freak out,” Frankie said.
He didn’t speak. He kissed her instead. A soft, sweet slide of tongues. A leisurely sampling that left her knees weak.
“You’re not yelling,” she said as she pulled back. Her hands fisted in his shirt.
“It’s perfect, Franchesca,” he said softly, nudging her chin up. She felt the knot in her stomach loosen. She met his gaze, saw the softness in his eyes.
“We can still keep your penthouse,” she began.
“Our,” he corrected her.
“Our,” Frankie repeated. “But this will be nice too… eventually. I mean, it’s kind of a pile of crap right now but—”
“I love that you did this,” Aiden said, cutting off her rambling. He started to sway from side to side to music only he could hear. Frankie followed his lead, hypnotized by the love she saw in his eyes. “We’ll make it our own. We’ll watch the fights with your brothers here, host Thanksgivings here. You and I will curl up on the couch at the end of the day and eat Chinese food and complain about the fortune cookies. We’ll argue about everything. You’ll break dishes. I’ll eat everything that you cook. We’ll escape from it all here. You and me.”
&nb
sp; Frankie felt tears prick her eyes. He was painting her a picture of their future together, and she’d provided the canvas.
“All in,” Frankie whispered to him.
He brushed a thumb across her cheek. “All in, my Franchesca.”
Want more Frankie and Aiden?
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FREE bonus epilogue.
One Year Later
Author’s Note to the Reader
Dear Reader,
Where do I start? As always, I started the book with an idea of where it would go. I thought this was going to be just a light, funny, rom-com set in paradise. And then Frankie and Aiden got deeper, their conflict got more intense, their families got more complicated. Basically, I fell head over freaking heels for these two and their hot mess of a non-relationship.
I was so sure Frankie would get her heart broken and then she ended up doing the breaking. It’s like I have no control over these people! I hope you loved them as much as I did!
I set the wedding in Barbados because it’s one of my favorite places to go with Mr. Lucy. We went specifically so I could soak up the research for this book... also some sun. And all the rum. The white sandy beaches, the turquoise water, the insane minivan public transportation. It’s ah-mazing.
Anyway, if you loved Frankie and Aiden, please feel free to hop over to Amazon and leave a gushing review. If you hated them and you’re still reading this note, I admire your commitment.
Do you want to hang out and be BFFs? Follow me on Facebook and join me in my reader’s group: Lucy Score’s Binge Readers Anonymous. And if you want first dibs sales and awesome bonus content, definitely sign up for my newsletter! I hope to see you around!
Xoxo,
Lucy
Acknowledgments
•Jaycee at Sweet ‘n Spicy Designs for this hella hot cover
•Dawn and Amanda for your editorial eyeballs of awesomeness
•Mr. Lucy for ignoring my Christmas request for knock-off Uggs and buying me my first real pair… and then not yelling at me when I immediately got a grease stain on them (can Uggs be dry-cleaned??)
•Jodi for once again turning my mangled chunk of a blurb into something exciting and one-click worthy
•Joyce and Tammy for being amazing in Binge Readers and in real life
•Sushi
•The Will & Grace reboot
•Tacos. Always tacos.
About the Author
Lucy Score is a Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon bestselling author. She grew up in a literary family who insisted that the dinner table was for reading and earned a degree in journalism. She writes full-time from the Pennsylvania home she and Mr. Lucy share with their obnoxious cat, Cleo. When not spending hours crafting heartbreaker heroes and kick-ass heroines, Lucy can be found on the couch, in the kitchen, or at the gym. She hopes to someday write from a sailboat, or oceanfront condo, or tropical island with reliable Wi-Fi.
Sign up for her newsletter and stay up on all the latest Lucy book news.
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Website: Lucyscore.com
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Readers Group at: Lucy Score’s Binge Readers Anonymous
Want more from Lucy? Read on for:
1.Sneak peek excerpt of By a Thread.
2.Lucy’s Booklist
By a Thread Sneak Peek
If you enjoyed The Worst Best Man by Lucy Score, you'll love her grumpy boss romantic comedy By a Thread.
Dominic
I’d avoided her since Tuesday just to prove that I could.
Just to prove to my stupid cock that it did not run my life. That I wasn’t a carbon copy of Paul Russo.
I didn’t know exactly what the hell was going on. But I’d wasted more brainpower on Ally Morales in the week and a half since I’d met her in that stupid pizza shop than on anything that actually deserved my attention.
That was a problem.
And I was the smart guy who decided that since I’d proved I could leave her alone, I next needed to prove that I could be around her… and not want to fuck her.
I’d requested her.
It wasn’t a big deal, I told myself as I glanced at my watch again. I’d requested admins before. Ones I knew would be less annoying or wouldn’t make weird nervous humming noises if I asked them a direct question.
Requesting Ally didn’t mean anything.
I wasn’t interested. Not in that way. I didn’t sleep with people who pissed me off and pushed my buttons. I was, however, curious about her.
What took a woman from being a semi-successful graphic designer in Colorado to a server living off bananas in New York? Her credit wasn’t great. The credit report noted a shit-ton of credit card debt in the last three months. But the street view of her home address—yeah, okay, so I’d looked up her address. I wasn’t happy about that either—showed a family home in a nice neighborhood in a decent commuter town in Jersey.
She didn’t own the house, but I’d stopped short of doing a totally legal property search to see who did.
I’d also stopped myself a dozen times from looking for her on social media.
I wasn’t an impulsive guy. This itch to learn more about her annoyed me. I didn’t even like her. But her company photo did make me laugh. I called up the picture again on my screen and smirked. Was she mid-sneeze?
There was a knock on my open door, and I jolted in my chair.
Ally was standing in my doorway with a coat draped over her arm and a backpack slung over her shoulder. “Ready to go, Charming? Or do you need a few more minutes with your porn?”
I closed her picture and rose.
Those eyes went wide, and her lips formed an O.
I glanced down, wondering if I’d forgotten to zip my pants or something.
Nope. Zipped. “What?” I demanded.
Silently, she shook her head.
I looked back down. No stains. My tie was still tied. My vest still buttoned.
“Do you have a problem?” I asked, enunciating each word.
She shook her head. “Nope. No problem,” she finally croaked. Now she was looking everywhere but me. The carpet appeared to be quite fascinating. Her neck was turning an interesting shade of pink.
“Try to pull yourself together before the meeting,” I suggested, brushing past her.
Greta was waiting by her desk with my coat and briefcase. “Be nice,” she ordered.
Ally snorted behind me.
“I’m always nice,” I growled, shoving my arms through the sleeves of my coat.
Both women shared a laugh at my expense.
“You’re a funny guy, Dom,” Ally said, slapping me on the shoulder. She had apparently recovered from whatever seizure or psychotic break had rendered her mute. “Nice to meet you, Greta.”
“Good luck, Ally,” Greta said with a traitorous wink.
We didn’t talk in the elevator, each doing our damndest to pretend the other didn’t exist. But as more people crowded in, I found myself pressed up against her in the corner. What was this annoying electric buzz every time we touched? Even through layers of clothing, I was still keenly aware of her shoulder pressing against my arm.
Hell, the guy from twenty-three was brushing my sleeve with his elbow as he played Tetris on his phone, but that contact barely drew my notice. There was a tension between Ally and me, wrapping itself around us and pinging back and forth.
I didn’t like it.
The doors finally opened like a reprieve, and we stepped out into the lobby. I led the way trying to get a few steps ahead of her so I could not smell that lemon scent that was messing with my head.
“Hey, Ally! How’s it going?” A man wearing brown cargo pants and a cap that looked like it had once been a woodland creature shifted the half-dozen Dior bags he was carrying to wave.
Ally beamed.
I’d seen her smirk. I’d witnessed her annoy
ance. I’d even seen her laugh once or twice. But this was something else entirely.
Her face lit up with actual joy. Didn’t she know joy had no place here? I wanted her to be as annoyed and uncomfortable by my presence as I was of hers. I wanted her unable to function.
“Buddy! Doing a little shopping?” she teased.
He laughed, a braying, donkey-like sound that was too loud to be dignified.
“Yeah, right! Doing a little pickup for a fancy photo shoot,” he called. “You?”
“Heading off to a fancy meeting,” she told him with a wink.
“See you at lunch tomorrow,” he yelled as the elevator doors closed.
She was still grinning when we climbed into the SUV.
“Good afternoon,” Nelson said when he slid behind the wheel. “I took the liberty of getting you each a protein shake for the drive.”
Nelson’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, and I felt his unasked question. Before today, I’d never once asked him to make a special trip for food or drink before a thirty-minute ride.
“Wow, thanks!” Ally said, making a grab for one of the shakes.
I picked up mine, pretending like I wanted it. “Who was that guy?” I asked her.
“Who? Buddy?” she asked, peering into the cup.
I saw the way her eyes lit up, and as annoying as I found her and as much as I enjoyed our back and forth, the hunger I saw there made my chest tight. I wanted to ask her why.
Why, when she had a full-time, decent-paying job, was she hungry?
“His name is Buddy?” I asked instead.
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