May the Best Man Win by Mira Lyn Kelly
His brow quirked, and another, even sexier smile presented itself as he shrugged out of one shoulder of his jacket and then the other, swinging it around to cover her.
“Put your arms in the sleeves, Em. It’ll keep you warmer.”
She did and then she was stepping back into Jase, going to her toes because she could and tipping back to take his kiss. She opened beneath the press of his lips, moaned around the stroke of his tongue, and shifted closer.
The air was cold, but well above freezing. And as Jase kissed her, and kissed her and kissed her, she slowly stopped feeling the cold at all. In fact, quite the opposite. She was beginning to burn for him.
But his arms, while still wrapped tightly around her, hadn’t made any headway toward the lower quadrant of her dress. Or her sexy, silky panties. Or even her bra.
Restless, she shifted her hips into him, getting even hotter as she encountered the hard length of his erection. He groaned against her mouth, his fists balling at the sides of her hips.
“Let me buy you dinner tomorrow.”
Emily stilled, all that achy tension begging for release. “What?”
“A date, Emily. And then”—the hands that had been at her hips splayed over her waist and coasted upward until his thumbs were brushing the bottom swells of her breasts—“I take you back to my place and—”
“Blackmail?” she gasped, a nervous laugh following on its heels, because no way. Even Jase wouldn’t stoop so low. And please, like she was so desperate for a few moans that she’d agree to a date she wasn’t interested in?
“Persuasion,” Jase corrected with a low laugh. Brushing his thumbs once more, barely grazing her nipples and then slowly withdrawing. “I want a date, Emily, not your Swiss bank account.”
Oh and how dare he with that barely there contact that had her insides standing up to beg.
“I love how wholesome you make it sound,” she snapped.
This time, the laugh was deeper, fuller. Doing something totally different to her.
Then he was looking into her eyes again, cupping her cheek in his palm. “There’s nothing wholesome about the way I want you, Em. But the way I want you isn’t just about sex.”
A part of her was clamoring to let go. Give in and just say yes. Lean in to Jase’s kiss and let him take her out for a movie or fro-yo—and do all the things he’d promised after. But the greater part of her couldn’t ignore the uncomfortable tension in her back or the increase in her pulse that wasn’t exactly fun. The tightening of her chest.
“You date, Emily. I’ve seen you out. And there’s something between us, so why not me?”
She could barely breathe. Why wouldn’t he just let it go?
Those precious few hookups between them had been off-the-charts hot. Satisfying to the nth degree.
And they’d both walked away smiling. So why push it?
Jase’s brows pulled together, his eyes darkening as he searched her face. “Emily—”
“Because I don’t trust you. That’s why, Jase,” she whispered, the air feeling thin in her lungs.
Jase didn’t move. She could feel his eyes on her, but she wouldn’t look back, staring at the patches of broken concrete around her feet instead.
“It’s too cold to be standing out here,” she muttered, retreating a step and then another. “Especially if I’m not going to get warmed up the way that kiss promised I would.”
“Em.”
Slipping out of Jase’s jacket, she checked the door they’d just come through and, finding it locked, kept walking toward the mouth of the alley. She’d go around front and pay the cover again if she had to. Anything but stand there with Jase Foster staring into her eyes like he wanted the one thing she thought would never be an issue with a guy like him.
“Emily, damn it,” Jase bit out, catching her arm and coming to stop in front of her. “What just happened?”
She looked down at where Jase’s fingers were wrapped in a loose hold around her arm and felt the phantom pain of another hand there. A hold too tight. One that would leave bruises she’d have to cover for a week. Reflexively, she jerked away, rubbing at the spot as Jase’s expression morphed from startled shock to dawning understanding to a potent, jaw-grinding, barely banked rage.
“Eddie?” he demanded, stepping toward her, his eyes more intense than she’d ever seen them. But then, just as quickly, he stepped back, holding his hands out to the sides so she could see he wasn’t about to put them on her.
So he wouldn’t scare her.
Something inside her died in that moment.
Because with Jase, no matter how they’d fought, no matter what insults were thrown, they’d always been on level ground. A part of her reveled in going head-to-head with him, because every time she was reminded that this man saw her as a worthy adversary. This man knew she was strong enough to take him on.
And until that very moment, she hadn’t realized how important it was to her.
“Tell me. Was this fucking Eddie?” he asked, his voice little more than a low threat.
She wasn’t going to talk to him about this. Not now. Not with those stupid tears pushing at her lids.
“Emily, wait.”
But she shook her head. Then, shoulders back, she stepped around Jase, giving him a wide berth, though she’d known he wouldn’t touch her again.
“I’m going inside, Jase. Don’t stop me.”
He let her go.
It wasn’t until she was standing back at the booth where Sally had camped out for the night that she realized she was still clutching Jase’s jacket tight. Holding it against her chest, like she didn’t know how to let it go.
* * *
“What happened to you last night?” Brody asked, shouldering his broad frame—made all the broader by the addition of an insulated food tote and four overflowing handle bags—into Jase’s place. “Thought you were going to stop in at Belfast when Santos finished his gig.”
Jase checked down the hall for any of the guys or Molly coming off the elevator, since he’d found another brick propping the “security” door that morning.
“Sorry, man. Emily was there with Sally, and—”
The insulated tote swung in front of his face like it was warding off a coming too-much-information moment. “Not like that, so don’t get your man panties in a bunch.”
“Ahh, what then?” Brody asked, walking past him into the kitchen.
“I fucked up with her,” Jase said, the weight of those words hanging over him.
Hefting his bags onto the counter, Brody clucked his tongue. Christ, the guy could be such an old lady.
“Come on, man, leave the poor girl alone, will you?” Brody answered without turning around. “Joe here yet? I brought him something special.”
Brody loved Jase’s dad and was always bringing him beer from the farthest reaches to try out. “He’s not coming. Some buddy in town or something. And as to Emily, I don’t think I can. But what happened with Eddie… It’s worse than I thought.” Jase leaned back against the counter, Emily’s face when she’d jerked away from him—that fear and pain etched sharp into every soft line—burned into the forefront of his mind. He didn’t think he could ever forget it. “I should have been there for her. I mean, I really should have been there for her.”
Brody turned, that menacing look you almost never saw from him there in his eyes.
“Worse, like we need to pay for gas with cash when we drive out to Upstate New York so there’s no paper trail when we drop in to ‘visit’ Eddie—that kind of worse?”
“No. Not for you, man.” But in truth, that’s about where Jase’s head had been the night before. Seeing the way Emily had reacted to his hand on her arm, it had taken everything he had not to hop in his car, punch the gas, and drive until he had Eddie up against a wall and the answers he needed, obtained in whatever ma
And then he’d followed the pull in his chest back into the bar, where he found Emily at the table with their friends, laughing like she didn’t have a care in the world. Like she hadn’t just been white as a sheet, flinching from his touch as she blinked back her tears.
She hadn’t gone to hide in some corner.
She hadn’t sought out comfort from a friend.
She’d just put on a face no one would ever suspect wasn’t as genuinely happy, confident, and unencumbered as it looked, and she’d gone back to her night. And that was the worst of it. How good she was at covering up. How practiced.
Just the thought of her honing that particular skill made him sick. But he hadn’t turned away.
He’d waited until Emily left with Sally and Romeo, watching her from across the bar until then, keeping his distance because the way her eyes skimmed over him without stopping for even a beat suggested that was what she wanted. And yet, she hadn’t let go of his jacket once. He’d watched her walk out of the bar with it clutched in her hands.
And then he’d gone home and thrown up.
Because he could have stopped it. Whatever Eddie did to her, if he’d just opened his eyes for one damn minute, he could have ended it. He could have stopped it before it began.
He’d never forgive himself.
“I don’t know what he did exactly. I don’t know how bad it was, except to say it was bad enough that Emily’s still got the emotional scars. She hides them really well, but last night”—his stomach wrenched again—“I saw.”
“She wouldn’t talk to you?” Brody asked, shrugging out of his North Face jacket and then tossing it across to the chair in the corner.
“I tried, but she wasn’t having any part of it.” Shoving his fingers back through his hair, Jase laced them behind his head. “Not that I blame her. She tried to talk to me a hundred times when all this shit was going on. When it mattered and I might have been able to do something about it. But I shut her down at every turn, and now it’s ten years too late and—the look on her face, man.”
“So, yeah,” Brody planted his hands on the counter, leaning into the space above it. “You fucked up, big.”
That was the thing about Brody. The guy could always be counted on to tell you what you needed to hear. The truth.
“Here’s the way I see it, Jase,” he said. Digging into the cabinets beneath the island, he pulled out a heavy sauté pan, then eyed it with blatant disapproval, but Jase was long past trying to keep his buddy satisfied in the kitchen. Besides, he knew Brody wasn’t done.
“It sounds like Emily got a raw deal, and to some extent, you played a part in it. What’s done is done, and while there’s no going back to change the past, you can learn from it for the future, yeah?”
“Right.”
“So figure out how you let her down and make up for it.”
How he let her down? Easy. He wasn’t her friend when he’d let her believe he would be.
Brody thumbed the blade of Jase’s kitchen knife and scowled at him. “I sharpened this the last time I was here. What, have you been cutting through tin cans or something?”
He might have used it to break into the plastic clamshell his new running earbuds had come in.
Jase took Brody’s coat to the front hall closet and hung it up, standing there a minute after thinking about what Brody had said.
Friends.
With Emily.
Before last night, he hadn’t wanted to be her friend. He’d wanted her back in his bed. He’d wanted her to be his standing date from Saturday night through early Sunday afternoon. He’d wanted to take her to the next wedding instead of running into her there, and as much fun as all that hot, burning will they, won’t they anticipation could be, he’d wanted to know that after the band shut down, she’d be going home with him.
But now, more than all that, what he wanted, the only thing that mattered, was making sure he never had to see that look on her face again. If he had any hope of being able to look himself in the mirror, for once he needed to do the right thing by her.
Pulling the phone from his jeans pocket, he headed into his office and sat down at his desk. It didn’t feel right, so he moved to the couch. Stretched out, but then stood again before coming to grips with the fact that it wasn’t the seat making him squirm.
Screw it, he’d get comfortable with this later on.
“Hey, Em, I know it’s late notice, but I’ve got some people coming over to watch the Blackhawks play at two thirty and thought, if you didn’t have anything going on, you’d like to come. You know…as friends.”
Chapter 17
Friends.
If any other guy had thrown her a line like that, Emily would have laughed in his face. Okay, she wouldn’t do that because even guys with bad lines had feelings. But she’d have been thinking “Ha!” in her head as she nodded politely and then found a considerate way to say no…in no uncertain terms.
But this wasn’t any other guy. This was Jase. The man who’d told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t friendship material. And now he was asking her for a chance to try again. To show her that he could be the friend he should have been in high school. To prove to her that she could trust him…with more than just her body.
Talk about the stuff of nightmares.
Intentionally making herself vulnerable to the guy whose shabby treatment of her in the past had devastated her? She’d have to be crazy.
He knew it too. Which was probably why, when she’d been too stunned to even answer, he’d filled the silence with the simple statement, “Just think about it. I hope you’ll come.”
She wished she could say that simple curiosity had kept her from dismissing the offer out of hand. A need to discover for herself what friendship, Jase-style, encompassed. If there was a benefits package. How quickly she’d be eligible.
Only deep down she knew it was more than that.
Which made the fact that she was standing outside his door—with bags of pretzels, Bloody Mary mix, an arsenal of drink fixings, and vodka in one hand, and a Pyrex dish of her favorite fatty, cheese-based dip topped with sweet-pepper relish in the other—absolutely insane.
It wasn’t too late. She could still leave. He’d never have to know she’d been there.
Yeah, that’s what she’d do. She’d take the dip, go home, and eat the whole damn thing herself.
She hadn’t taken a step when the door opened. But Jase hadn’t seen her yet. He was turned into the apartment, telling someone behind him that Molly was on her way up. She knew enough about Jase and his group of besties to know that Molly was Molly Brandt, Max’s sister. The only double X chromosome in their group and, from the few brief encounters they’d had, a crazy lot of fun. She could do this.
Just then, Jase turned and the instant his eyes landed on her, that easy smile he’d been wearing was wiped from his mouth, replaced by a look of clear shock.
Emily shifted uneasily, her eyes darting down the hall for Molly, or anyone, before she looked back at Jase and, with a resigned sigh, handed him his jacket. “I didn’t… Um… Thanks for this last night.”
Then clearing her throat, she nodded down to what she was carrying. “So I didn’t know how much to bring.”
Suddenly, that smile he’d been wearing was back, only brighter and more devastating in every way.
“You brought yourself. That’s all I was hoping for,” he said, stepping back to let her into the apartment instead of pulling her into his arms. Which made sense under the framework of friendship, she figured. And her hands were full. Then he was taking her bags and leading her back to the kitchen she knew in the biblical sense—where Brody O’Donnel was wearing a half apron tied around his waist, his jaw-length russet hair tied back from his face while sautéing something that smelled unbelievable.
“H
Jase was setting her bags down on the impressively sturdy breakfast table she’d been introduced to before when he turned back. “You still like spicy, right, Em?”
She nodded and accepted the taste, moaning in a way that only Jase had ever made her moan before.
Maybe he recognized the sound, because suddenly he’d stopped what he was doing and turned to her with a raised brow.
Heat rushed into her cheeks and she lifted her hands, laughing. “It was that good.”
“Better have been out of this damn world to earn that sound from you,” Jase teased, standing just close enough to keep it between them. Then—in the name of friendship, she supposed—he stepped back again. “She brought Bloody Marys.”
“Can I make you one?” she asked.
“Hell, yes,” Brody boomed with a smile suggesting she’d offered him a first-class upgrade on his international flight rather than a drink, and she found herself laughing for no real reason, except that the guy just had a way of making her feel good.
She started on the drinks, happy to have something to do rather than stand around ogling Brody’s cooking or, worse yet, Jase in his jeans, sexy bare feet, and Blackhawks jersey.
“Hey, boys,” a singsong voice called from where Jase had left the front door open. Then Molly was breezing in, a shock of fuchsia mixing with her flyaway white-blond hair. She stopped, her mouth dropping open. “Emily, so cool you’re here. And with drinks too!”
Molly piled her load with the rest, unloading a couple of bags of chips, a tub of french onion dip, and three beers. “Max is running late, but he’ll be here in about thirty, and Sean will be up anytime. He was stuck on his phone out front, doing that thing where he pinches his temples with one hand and looks like he’s talking to his shoes. I’m guessing it’s his dad.”
Molly ripped open a bag of her chips and stuffed one in her mouth, chewing with an indulgent smirk. “Tasty.”