by Lisa Levine
Best Friend’s Second Chance
Wilder Brothers Book 2
Lisa Levine
Contents
1. Prologue (Ivy)
2. Chapter One (Ivy)
3. Chapter Two (Easton)
4. Chapter Three (Ivy)
5. Chapter Four (Easton)
6. ***
7. Chapter Five (Ivy)
8. ***
9. Chapter Six (Easton)
10. ***
11. Chapter Seven (Ivy)
12. ***
13. Chapter Eight (Easton)
14. Chapter Nine (Ivy)
15. ***
16. Chapter Ten (Easton)
17. Chapter Eleven (Ivy)
18. ***
19. Chapter Twelve (Easton)
20. Chapter Thirteen (Ivy)
21. Chapter Fourteen (Easton)
22. ***
23. ***
24. Chapter Fifteen (Ivy)
25. Chapter Sixteen (Easton)
26. Chapter Seventeen (Ivy)
27. Chapter Eighteen (Easton)
28. ***
29. Chapter Nineteen (Ivy)
30. Chapter Twenty (Easton)
31. Epilogue (Ivy)
1
Prologue (Ivy)
Sometimes I had to remind myself that the boys in books were not real and that they never would be real no matter how much I fell in love with them and wanted them to materialize from off of the page. I blamed all the stories that I had read while working at the bookstore for my complete and utter disregard for reality. I also blamed my inability to settle for reality for the reason that I was still a virgin.
No one knew that I was still a virgin, not even my best friends, Bridget and Easton. Everyone assumed that I had already had sex like every other normal twenty-five-year-old woman. I was a ridiculous exception to normalcy, and I knew it. I had only dated two guys in my life—not counting a few blind dates friends had persuaded me to go on and I had regretted almost immediately—and those two guys had ended up breaking up with me when I didn’t want to have sex with them. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex; I really did. It was just that I wanted to have more than sex. I wanted to have the earth-shattering, wide-eyed, love-making that all the heroines in the books that I read had, and I knew that wasn’t going to happen with any of the guys that I had dated. So, I held off for the day that I would meet the guy who would sweep me off of my feet and make me want to take another peek at reality. Unfortunately, that guy hadn’t come yet.
The only guy who was in my life right now was Easton Wilder. He and I had known each other since middle school, and we had been best friends since the eighth grade. Easton was everything that the boys in my books were not. He was a wealthy billionaire investment banker here in downtown Chicago. And although he did have a body that women drooled over and looked a bit like a Greek god with his chiseled features, stunning blond hair, and blue eyes, he knew nothing of romance and certainly wasn’t swoon-worthy. He was a playboy, and he had dated more women than I could count, not that I ever wanted to keep track.
I was, unfortunately, on the receiving end of hearing about all of his conquests, and it absolutely killed me to listen to his stories of torrid one-night stands or one-week relationships. It wasn’t that I was bothered by how much he seemed to love dating women; it was that I wanted to be one of the women he dated.
2
Chapter One (Ivy)
“You should have seen this one, Ivy,” Easton said as he followed me from shelf to shelf while I turned the book spines back to facing the right way and pulled a few out to showcase their covers.
It always bugged me how some customers couldn’t seem to manage to put the books back the way they had found them on the bookshelves. Like, how hard could it be? Clearly, the spines faced out, not the pages.
“She was gorgeous,” he continued as I walked around the corner of another bookcase. “And she was incredible in bed, like amazing. When her body moved, it felt like I was going to—”
“Easton,” I said as my stomach churned. “I don’t need to know all the details. Feel free to leave out the parts that threaten to make me ill.”
He laughed, and his lips spread over his perfectly chiseled face. I had to look away to keep from wanting to kiss him. I found myself having to look away a lot more recently. Bridget gave me a look from all the way down at the end of the other aisle, but I could still see her expression from here. It was the “why don’t you just tell him that you like him” face that she always made whenever she caught me having to shift my focus away from him.
It wasn’t that easy. I couldn’t tell Easton how I felt about him. I hadn’t been able to tell him for nearly a decade. We were such good friends, sometimes too good, and I couldn’t do anything that would risk that friendship. He was literally the one person I had always had. I wasn’t close to my family, and aside from Bridget and Ben—our manager at the bookstore—I didn’t really have anyone else. Besides, I wasn’t Easton’s type.
He liked the stereotypical pretty, rich girls who ran in his billionaire circle. They all looked kind of the same to me—long, blond hair, blue eyes, tiny waist, and big boobs. I was none of those things, well except for the blue eyes, but even my eyes weren’t the right color of blue. All of those girls who hung on Easton’s arms had eyes the color of a sparkling teal ocean. Mine was more the color of a cloudy sky right before it’s about to storm. I had long and thick, straight, brown hair that I usually kept swept back into a ponytail at work, and when I got home and let it all down, it fell wildly around my shoulders and down onto my back. Instead of the sun-kissed skin that most of Easton’s girlfriends—if you’d even call them that—had, I had the kind of milky complexion that signaled I worked inside a bookstore all day and stayed inside my apartment all night, with as little interaction with the sun as possible. His dates talked about things like money and VIP parties and fashion; I talked about poetry. We were complete opposites, and maybe that was why we had always been such good friends.
“Oh, come on.” He chuckled as he draped his arm over the shelf that I was working on and blocked my hand from fixing the stray book that he knew I would be reaching for. “I think you like to hear the sexy bits.”
He laughed and made a motion with his hips that was meant to be funny but ended up making the inside of my thighs feel warm instead. I could see Bridget shaking her head from my peripheral vision.
I put my hand against his chest and pushed him out of the way while he grinned at me. He had the type of boyish charm that caught other girls off guard. For me, it just made me want to wrestle him to the ground until he surrendered and we both had a good laugh about everything.
“Okay,” he said once he knew that I wasn’t going to listen to any more tales of his bedroom conquests this morning. “You tell me about something then. Who’s the last guy you’ve dated?”
“Oh, that would require searching the archives,” Bridget said as she walked over to stick a misplaced book in my section. “Morning, Easton,” she grinned at him.
“Morning, Bridget,” he laughed. “And it can’t have been that long, can it?” He looked at me and waited for an answer, although he had to realize I never talked about men.
“Why is my dating life any of either of your business?” I asked, feeling slightly annoyed at being put on the spot.
“Everything about you is my business,” he said. “You’re my best friend. That’s how it works.”
Bridget snorted. “Well, since I’m her roommate, I feel like I should have some sort of insight, too.”
“Ugh,” I huffed as I walked around to the other
side of the shelf.
I could see Easton shoot Bridget a glance of confusion as I moved away, and I could see her shrug at him in return.
“Do you want me to stop coming to meet you here?” Easton asked as he came around to my side of the bookcase and looked at me with a more serious and hurt face. That expression made me want to kiss him even more; there was no winning in this situation.
“Of course not,” I said, smiling at him. “You’ve been meeting me here every Saturday since we left college. It’s our thing.”
“Okay, good. Just checking.” He smiled.
Then Easton continued with his rambling, while all I could think about was the tiny corner of his shirt that was slightly untucked from the top of his jeans. It had caught my eye a minute ago, and I wanted to tuck it back in for him but knew that I shouldn’t. I’d tucked in and buttoned up his shirts a million times before, but it seemed different now—harder.
I only had about another thirty minutes left on my shift, and Easton made the time go by quickly as he told me about his latest professional endeavors at his company and the woes of being a handsome, single, billionaire bachelor in Chicago. When my shift was over, we went to the café to sit and have coffee together like we always did. He bought me a latte, and I sat and patiently listened to everything he needed to get off his chest. Sometimes we talked about the past and random memories we had together, which were still funny even today. We also sometimes talked about the future and about what kinds of things we wanted to be doing or to have in a few years. Easton’s goals usually involved money. Mine usually had something to do with a quiet space and a lot of books with time to read them all.
“You know, Ivy, I think you could be less introverted if you put yourself out there a little more,” he said.
I scrunched my face up and frowned. “What’s wrong with being introverted?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, looking as though he was instantly sorry about the way he had phrased it. “I just meant that you might be able to find someone you’d like if you looked up over the top of your books a bit more.”
“Who says I want someone?” I said. “Maybe I like the boys in my books better.”
“Better than me?” he asked playfully.
No, not better than you.
I kept that thought inside my head and pretended to giggle, even though my heart was aching a bit. “Now seriously,” I teased, “who could be better than you? What, are you trying to get rid of me or something?”
“Of course not,” he said as he took a sip of his coffee and looked at me over the edge of his cup with one raised eyebrow. “I just want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” I said. Saying it out loud made it sound like even more of a lie than saying it inside my head.
“Okay,” he said as he went on to change the subject. “Well, I hired a new woman at the firm, and I think she’s going to work out really well.”
“Cool,” I said flatly. I was expecting the next part to be something about how pretty she was.
“She’s really pretty and—”
I couldn’t help but interrupt when my prediction proved true. “Do you ever hire girls based on their expertise?” I asked. “It’s really disparaging to women as a whole when you keep hiring females who you want to sleep with instead of those qualified to do their job.” My inner feminist was currently slapping him across the face in my mind.
“Well, considering that this particular position was just to keep the office clean and go on coffee runs, I didn’t see much reason to vet the girl fully,” he said sarcastically. “But in answer to your question, yes, I always hire based on merit, not appearance.”
“Sorry,” I murmured. “I just assumed—”
“It’s okay,” Easton smiled as he reached across the table and held my hand. He’d been holding my hand since we were teenagers, and I wished that it hadn’t always felt like something more than casual to me. “It’s not like I don’t have a track record of being a bit of a playboy.”
“A bit?” I teased.
He released my fingers so that he could gently pinch my arm as punishment for my jab at him. Then he went on to describe how pretty the new girl was and how he was sure she would accept his invitation to go out for drinks once he asked her. I sometimes wondered how he got away with dating his employees. I thought for sure there was some sort of rule about things like that, but maybe when you were a billionaire, the rules didn’t apply to you. I knew that Easton’s older brother—the eldest of five siblings—had actually ended up marrying one of his employees, so I guess there were exceptions to that rule if one existed. I only half-listened to him as he spoke now since I knew it wasn’t about anything important aside from who he would be bedding next, and I preferred not to hear about that anyway.
Instead, I daydreamed about what it would be like to be more than friends with him. I let my mind wander as I sipped my latte and occasionally nodded to pretend like I was listening. I let a little fantasy play out in my head, behind my open eyes, about what would have happened if I had reached out to tuck his shirt into his pants while he was leaning against the bookshelf in front of me.
In my imaginings, Easton always made the first move. In my mind, when I put my fingers just inside the waistband of his jeans to tuck the fabric of the shirt inside, he would have pushed his hips forward toward me, and as soon as I looked up, he would have taken my face in the palms of his hands and kissed me. Then there would have been some sort of impassioned moment in which he would have pulled me up against him and our bodies would have crashed into the shelf and knocked the innocent books from their places and onto the floor in scattered piles at our feet.
I had never kissed Easton, not even in a round of spin the bottle, or just to be goofy, or to practice before his other dates during high school. The closest I had ever come to kissing him was when he would occasionally kiss me on the cheek or on the top of my head. Usually, that only happened when he was either extremely happy about something or when I was extremely sad. Just like a true best friend, he would hug me and give me a little peck. But what I really wanted was to feel his tongue slide into my mouth as we wreaked havoc on the bookshelves.
I was jarred quickly back into reality when I felt Easton’s finger on the corner of my lips. I jerked my face backward and looked at him.
“Sorry,” he said as he took his hand away. “Didn’t mean to startle you, but you had latte dripping out of your mouth like a zombie. You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said as I shook my head to shake away the daydream. “I guess I just kind of zoned out there for a minute.”
“You need to get more sleep,” he said.
That doesn’t work, either, because you’re in my dreams, too.
3
Chapter Two (Easton)
Ivy seemed to be acting a little more jittery than usual today. I mean, she was always kind of shy and jumpy but not usually around me.
We told each other everything. Actually, we probably told each other too much. But that was the way it was with best friends, at least it was the way that it was with us. I guessed you would think that I would be closer to one of my five brothers then I would be to her, but there was just something about Ivy and me that had taken off right from the start and kept us together like glue. She was also one of the few people I knew who would tell it to me straight. Most of the people in my circle were wealthy, obnoxious, or both, and most of them didn’t have the balls to tell me anything that I didn’t want to hear. For as timid a girl as Ivy could sometimes be, she never had any problem calling me out on my bullshit.
But every once in a while, on days like today, I got the feeling that she was holding something back.
“So, what do you think?” I asked her.
“What do I think about what?”
“I don’t know about everything, I guess,” I said.
Ivy laughed. “That’s a pretty deep question,” she said. “Anything in particular on your mind?”
“Kind of,” I
answered. “I just got to thinking that I’m almost twenty-nine-years-old, my older brother, Jake, is already married, and maybe it’s time for me to try to find one good woman to be with instead of a different one each week.”
Ivy looked at me as though I’d grown a second head.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said while she fidgeted nervously with the sleeve on her disposable coffee cup. “I just didn’t expect to hear you say that, I guess.”
“Yeah, me neither, to be honest.”
“What changed?”
“Not sure,” I said. “Maybe you’re finally getting to me.”
“What?” she asked, looking as if she had been caught off guard.
I laughed. “You know, all of your lecturing about how I shouldn’t be sleeping with so many women; maybe that stuff is finally sinking in.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right. Well, for what it’s worth, I think it’s a good idea for you to try to find someone you like spending time with for more than just a hot minute.”
“The problem with that is that I don’t like spending time with any of them for more than a few days. I’m not trying to be offensive or sound like an asshole; I just can’t seem to find a girl I want to be around all of the time. I’m starting to think she might not exist.”
“I’m sure she’s out there somewhere,” Ivy said. She seemed as if she was tired today, or maybe something was bothering her. “Look, you can spend a lot of time with me without wanting to run away. So clearly, you’re capable of it.”