The Best Man

by Natasha Anders

  “Answer the question, Shar.”

  “Why should I?” Shar asked laconically, showing her disinterest in Daff and anything she might have to say by keeping her focus on her phone and lazily scrolling through her texts and e-mails.

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” Daff mused. “Maybe because of Ryan Casey? Or Dirk Pieterse? And let’s not forget Bryan Pienaar.”

  Shar’s head shot up, and she went paler with each name Daff itemized.

  “You wouldn’t!” Shar gasped, and Daff’s lips quirked.

  “I so would. And those are just the names off the top of my head. If I really put my mind to it, I’m sure I could come up with many more. Now you tell me what I want to know, or your husband and I are going to have a very interesting conversation.” Shar was married to an extremely wealthy man, old enough to be her father. She loved the lifestyle that went hand in hand with being his wife but cheated on him quite indiscriminately. The older man cheated on her, too, but they both enjoyed pretending nothing was amiss with their marriage.

  “I remember you once telling us that Frank’s an old-fashioned man . . . cheating’s all well and good as long as you’re discreet about it, right? He won’t like learning that half of the town knows that you’re sleeping around on him.”

  “You and your fucking sisters,” Shar hissed suddenly. “With your perfect parents and your perfect lives and your perfect bond. You were always so perfectly fucking insufferable.”

  “Why did you tell those lies about me?” Daff pressed, ignoring the bitter diatribe.

  “It wasn’t a lie, though, was it? You stayed with Jake for three years, and he was heavily into that shit.”

  “Wait, you didn’t tell Jake I was into bondage?”

  “No. You saw Jake and decided you wanted him. And perfect Daffodil McGregor always got exactly what she wanted. Jake and I were . . . I liked him.” Daff blinked in surprise.

  “But you introduced us,” she reminded her, a little blindsided by the revelation that Shar had liked Jake.

  “Because he took one look at you and forgot all about me, didn’t he? He demanded an introduction, and that was it. Daff got the guy. Of course, I knew about his little bondage games—I quite enjoyed them.”

  “You and Jake were sleeping together when I met him? Why didn’t you say something?” Why was she only hearing this now?

  “Right. Like I’d let you know that you managed to steal the guy I wanted. How smug that would have made you.”

  “You were my friend. I would have backed off,” Daff said incredulously. How had Shar developed such a skewed view of Daff and her sisters? Her unfounded jealousy had made her irrationally competitive.

  “Whatever.” Shar shrugged, flipping her artificially blonde locks nonchalantly. “It’s ancient history now. The fact is you stayed with Jake for three years, so you must have been into the BDSM stuff. After you broke up, I thought it would freak out a few of your potential boyfriends if they knew about your particular kinks, but they never seemed particularly fussed by it. So no harm, no foul.”

  Daff stared at the other woman for a long moment and then smiled. She was relieved to now know why men had behaved the way they had with her. And simultaneously surprised by how little it actually mattered to her now that she did know. She wasn’t even angry with Shar. Just sad for her. She had allowed petty jealousy and vanity to ruin her perception of the women she had called her friends. She was a sad, pathetic, desperately vain woman who deserved pity more than hatred.

  But right at this moment, Daff felt neither emotion toward her. She felt curiously apathetic and keen to get away from the woman and the messed-up past she represented.

  “Jake Kincaid?” Daff said, leaning toward Shar confidentially as she spoke. “You could have had him. All you had to do was tell me you liked him. Because that’s what friends do. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you’ve never been a true friend to anyone. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go slumming with my man. You know the one? Big, gorgeous, sexy Spencer Carlisle.”

  With that, Daff turned away from Shar and the past. More than ready to fight for the man and the future she deserved.

  Monday seemed endless. The expansion that Spencer had been so excited about just last month now couldn’t ignite a flicker of interest in him, and he passed just about every nonessential task to Claude.

  The day dragged on, and all he could do was stare at Nelly. Mason was out fishing with his buddy Sam and kept sending selfies of them posing with huge fish. Apparently the fishing at the river mouth—Kleinbekkie—was “epic as fuck” today. Spencer seriously considered ditching work to join them, but in the end he couldn’t even summon up enough interest to play hooky.

  After eight hours of doing absolutely nothing, he left the store right at the stroke of 5:00 p.m. and went straight home for an evening of much the same. He was contemplating dinner and his lack of appetite when he saw her. Just sitting on his porch swing and watching the car come up the drive.

  She didn’t move when he got out and watched him somberly as he climbed the three steps up to his large porch. There were three midsize cardboard boxes at her feet and he kept his attention on those, because it hurt less than looking at her.

  “What are you doing here, Daff?” he asked her feet.

  “These are for you,” she said, getting up. The movement automatically drew his scrutiny to her face, and he locked eyes with her and found himself quite unable to look away. Was it his imagination, or was she as miserable as he was?

  “What are they?”

  “This”—she gestured to the boxes as a whole—“is not who I am.”

  What the fuck was that supposed to mean?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “What?” She had the grace to look embarrassed and shrugged self-consciously.

  “It’s a gesture,” she admitted, her cheeks flushing. “Just, please . . . go with it, okay?”

  Confused, Spencer peered at the boxes again. They weren’t taped shut; the flaps were just folded over.

  “I’m supposed to open them?”

  “Yeah, of course, Spencer,” she said, sounding a little exasperated. “Why else would I say they were for you?”

  He lifted his hands, palms up, trying to placate her. She looked apprehensive and kept lifting her forefinger to her lips as if to chew before remembering that she had kicked that habit and lowering it again. The little display of nerves bolstered him a bit, and he warily sank to one knee in front of one of the boxes and opened it up.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it definitely wasn’t a stack of Miles Davis CDs.

  “You like jazz?” he asked, confused.

  “No,” she said, her voice soft as she sank back down onto the swing. “I hate it. But Jeremy Boothe loved it. I dated him for about two months five years ago. And during that time I absolutely loved jazz. Jeremy and I could talk about jazz for hours. He thought we had a real connection. We had so much in common.”

  Spencer lifted the small stack of CDs and turned them over, staring at them for a long time before putting them aside. He sat down on the porch step and reached into the box again and withdrew a pair of binoculars. He looked at them curiously for a moment before turning to face her. Her eyes were shining with tears, but she forced a little smile.

  “Peter Weyland, three years ago, also two months. He was an out-of-towner, a keen bird-watcher, and I took him to all the best bird-spotting sites in the Garden Route. I knew them all, you see, because I absolutely adored bird-watching.”

  “I see,” he said, dropping the binoculars, uncaring where they landed. His eyes remained riveted to hers, and one of the tears that had been threatening slid down her cheek and hung from her trembling chin for a long moment before dropping to her fidgeting fingers. She seemed unaware of it and just kept watching him steadily.

  “There’s more,” she prompted him, and he nodded without looking at the box again.

  “I know.”

  “It’s important,
” she said, her voice quiet.

  “It’s not.”

  “I also have a guitar. I’m quite proficient at it. I learned to play when I was dating Aaron Marks. He was an aspiring musician.”

  “I remember him,” Spencer said, keeping his voice carefully neutral even though his heart was breaking for this beautiful, intelligent woman who had felt the need to pretend—for fucking years—to be someone she was not. When she was amazing just the way she was.

  “A-and I have a surfboard, cookbooks, all these really shitty black-and-white movies, a—”

  “Daff,” he said, inserting just enough volume in his voice to halt the stumbling tide of—what she clearly considered—guilty admission. “Stop. I just want to know which one of those fuckers loved eggs.”

  She made a wet, snorting giggling sound and covered her mouth and nose in horror. He dug into his sweatpants and dragged out a clean hankie and handed it to her. She accepted it gratefully and blew her nose before shaking her head ruefully.

  “Nobody carries hankies anymore.”

  “I do.” She nodded and twisted the handkerchief between her fingers.

  “The eggs? That was Byron Blake, back in the sixth grade. He offered me an egg-mayo sandwich and I liked him, so I accepted it.”

  “That far back, huh?”

  “Told you I was messed up. To be fair, none of them really expected me to lie about my interests. That was all me, in my sad attempts to be interesting to them. This past year was the first time I found myself without a boyfriend of some kind, and I found it kind of liberating to just do what I wanted to do.”

  He nodded, unable to take his eyes off her. The tip of her nose was pink, her cheeks were blotchy, and her eyes were red. She wasn’t a pretty crier, but he couldn’t remember her ever looking more beautiful.

  She sniffed messily and reached for another box, a shoebox that had been tucked away out of sight beside her hip.

  “Daff, I told you I don’t need to see—”

  “This,” she interrupted firmly, “is who I always longed to be.”

  He scrutinized the box for a couple of heartbeats before reaching for it. She seemed reluctant to relinquish it, and that raised his curiosity.

  He opened the box and stared at the neatly folded slips of notepaper for a moment. They looked familiar. He lifted one and opened it and felt his face go bright red as he instantly recognized what it was.

  “You kept them?” he asked hoarsely. Frankly, he was amazed his voice actually worked.

  “Every single one of them.”

  He cringed and opened the note again.

  “God, this is awful,” he muttered.

  “I love it. I loved all of them. I was such a bitch, Spencer. But I couldn’t bring myself to part with a single one of them. They were so sweet.”

  “I was a horny, troubled teen.”

  “Don’t you dare denigrate my love poems. I never understood why you kept giving them to me. I didn’t deserve them, not the way I behaved, reading them out loud and making fun of you in front of the other girls. I was horrible. Even now I can’t really explain why I did those things, except that I was really scared the other girls would think I liked you back and I’d never hear the end of it. Fitting in meant so much to me; I was so shallow. And every time I read one of your poems, I felt worse about myself, because I could never be the girl you seemed to see.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “I wanted to be this girl, Spencer. I really did.”

  “I put a lot on you, Daff. My home life was shitty. You were this perfect and beautiful girl and I built this fake romance up in my head. You would make my life different and wonderful and worthwhile. It was unfair. I did to you what all those other assholes did—I placed my expectations on you. I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “No, Spencer. You’re nothing like the rest of them. So many of your notes asked questions and showed interest in me. Did I take sugar in my coffee? What was my favorite movie? What was my opinion on”—she laughed softly—“on Hanson?”

  “I hated those little assholes,” Spencer recalled, shaking his head. She giggled outright at that.

  “Anyway, my point is, you were different. You cared. You wanted to know me. You didn’t expect me to like what you liked. And while none of the other guys expected me to like what they liked, either, in the end, none of them actually cared enough to ask me about any of my other interests. They just accepted that I was this perfect, feminine reflection of them. I liked what they liked, and that was it.”

  She got up again and snatched her box of badly written poems back. She placed them carefully on the swing. He couldn’t believe she’d kept them—it made his heart feel so fucking huge in his chest, he thought it was about to burst.

  She straightened and lifted her chin to look at him. He remained seated and perfectly still, curious to see what was next.

  Daff sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and dropped the coat she’d been wearing. It was too damned hot to wear a coat in late October, but she was making a gesture and it required a reveal.

  His eyes drank her in . . . okay, maybe they didn’t so much drink as kind of hop from place to place. He clearly hadn’t been expecting saggy sweatpants, flip-flops, and a ratty old T-shirt.

  “Spencer, I can’t say I truly know who I am. Not just yet,” she admitted softly. “I think I’m kind of a work in progress. I hate eggs, I hate jazz, I fucking hate bird-watching—it’s boring as hell. I like slouching around in my oldest, comfiest clothing. Sometimes I don’t wash my hair for days, and in winter I wear long skirts and yoga pants, like, all the time because I’m too lazy to shave my legs. I have no idea what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life, but I think maybe I kind of liked managing that stupid boutique, so maybe I’ll go to business school and study marketing or something. I enjoyed coming up with creative ways of appealing to customers. Who knows? I’ll go to college and work it out from there. I’m not perfect; I get zits and bloated and cranky as hell when I have PMS, and sometimes I don’t shave my armpits. I—”

  He got up so quickly, she didn’t have time to react, and he had his arms wrapped around her and his mouth on hers in two seconds flat. Daff sighed and leaned in to his kiss, feeling like she’d just come home.

  “You’re so fucking beautiful, Daff. And when you turn into a hairy yeti in winter, I’ll still think you’re gorgeous. Maybe—but probably not—I’ll pop your zits for you.” He grimaced comically. “Yeah, probably not, but I’ll yell my support from the other room if you feel the need to pop them yourself.”

  “Spencer,” she whispered, snuggling her face into his neck. “My gesture. You’re ruining it.”

  “Sorry. But not really sorry.”

  She sighed.

  “That’s supposed to be ‘sorry not sorry.’ I have much to teach you, grasshopper,” she intoned gravely, and he grinned. “Anyway, I was going to say, I can’t say I truly know who I am . . . but I do know that I like myself when I’m with you. And I think that’s because I’m not trying to be this perfect woman around you.”

  “I don’t want a perfect woman, Daff, I want you—” He paused and then grimaced. “That sounded so much better in my head.”

  “Spencer,” she said, grabbing his head in her hands and holding it steady so that she could look into his eyes. “I’ve been so miserable without you. I love you and I don’t really think I can live without you. So I want those strings.”

  “Daff, we don’t have to rush into—”

  “Strings, Spencer! They’re important, because I would prefer not to have to peel more skanks off you in the future. I want them to know you’re off-limits. That you’re mine and I’m yours.”

  “Fine . . . but you’re going to have to allow me time to work on my own grand gesture, because I want to marry you, Daff, but I’m not fucking proposing to you on a porch full of your ex-boyfriends.”

  She giggled.

  “This shit is all headed for the charity shop tomorrow, you know
that, right?” he warned her, and she nodded, finding herself quite unable to stop smiling. He caught her eyes and smiled back.

  “I’ve been miserable without you, too, darling,” he said, and she melted at the sound of the endearment. “I never want to be without you again. So please. You have to be sure this is what you really want, Daff.”

  “No take-backsies, Spencer. My life is too damned desolate without you.”

  “Daff, it’s not just me, it’s also—”

  “Charlie. I know, Spence,” she reassured, reaching up to cup the side of his face with her palm. She loved the feel of his stubble abrading her skin. “You guys are a package deal. As long as she’s clear that there’s going to be a lot of embarrassing kissing and stuff in her immediate vicinity.”

  He grinned.

  “I’ll make sure she understands that some things are just as inevitable as the tides.”

  “Why are we still talking?” Daff asked, going onto her toes to steal a kiss. “I want to ravish your gorgeous bod, Carlisle. Stop delaying the inevitable.”

  He growled and grabbed her ass and hauled her up against him. Confident in his strength, she hooked her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist while he supported her butt in his palms and ate her mouth.

  “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Spencer,” she breathed when they came up for air moments later. “And I’ve decided that I deserve you.”

  He grinned shyly, that sweet smile that had so ensnared her heart, and anointed her lips with the gentlest of kisses.

  “That’s my girl.”

  EPILOGUE

  “So last week was fun,” Sam Brand, who stood next to Lia for the bridal party picture, said into Lia’s ear, and she shot him an appalled look. How could he be bringing that up here at her sister’s wedding? Where anybody could hear him?

  The ceremony had been beautiful, of course. Perfect and romantic, everything that Lia had hoped hers would be. Daisy and Mason’s vows—which they had written themselves—hadn’t left a dry eye in the crowd. Lia was happy for Daisy, but she couldn’t help but feel a stab of envy as well. If Clayton had been a better man—the right man— Lia could have been the one exchanging vows with a man who treasured her and loved her above all else. Instead, this was her sister’s wedding and Lia was saddled next to this man—who was interested in nothing but bedding her—for the duration. And he kept making excuses to touch her and breathe on her and brush against her and now he was speaking to her.