Wedding Party Collection: Always The Bachelor. Barbara Hannay

he was referring to was her. He was beginning to annoy the hell out of her, and she had the sinking feeling that was exactly his intention.

      “Do you think you could possibly enjoy it from somewhere else?” she asked as politely as possible, despite her rapidly mounting irritation.

      “What’s wrong, Ivy?” He leaned forward on his elbows, deeper into her personal space. “Do I make you uncomfortable?”

      That was the last thing she wanted him to think. He no longer had any power over her. She was strong and independent. She answered to no one but herself. “No, but I would like to read a few more chapters before dinner. If you don’t mind.”

      “Not at all. You go on ahead and read.”

      “Thank you.” She turned her attention back to her book. He was quiet for several minutes, but in her peripheral vision she could see that he hadn’t moved from his spot. He was still watching her.

      He was definitely doing it to annoy her. There was no other logical explanation.

      “I saw your mom a few weeks ago,” he finally said.

      She sighed and gathered her patience. So much for sitting outside, reading and enjoying the view.

      She very calmly marked her page, shut the book and looked up at him. Ten years ago she would have thought he looked damned good standing there, the sun reflecting bluish-black off his dark hair, eyes slightly squinted against the glare and crinkled in the corners. The distinguished kind of crinkles that men got. The same things that on a woman were just plain old ugly wrinkles.

      Dillon had that special something, a physical appeal that was impossible to ignore. Or resist. In the short term, anyway.

      As she’d quickly discovered, looks aren’t everything. What he needed was the personality to go along with it. One that wasn’t quite so…annoying.

      “You still fold your page over to mark your spot,” he said. “No matter how many bookmarks you bought, you always misplaced them.”

      For a minute she was speechless. How had he remembered such a mundane, trivial detail about her? She honestly didn’t think he’d been paying attention.

      “Anyway,” he continued, “I was in downtown Dallas for a meeting, and I saw your mom through the window of her shop. She looks as though she’s doing well.”

      “She is.” It had taken a while, but her mom had finally gotten her life together.

      “I would have stopped in for a trim, but I was running late.”

      Only a complete fool would go to his former mother-in-law for a haircut. And while Dillon may have been a big pain in the behind, he was not a fool. Complete or otherwise.

      “I figured I would stop in after my meeting instead. But then I got to thinkin’, she may not have the highest opinion of me.”

      “Gosh, you think?” Her mom had never liked Dillon. Not even when they’d been dating. She’d always said he was too much like Ivy’s real dad. Arrogant and unreliable.

      After Ivy’s dad took off, she and her mom had been forced to stay with Deidre and her parents until they got back on their feet.

      He hadn’t bothered to stick around, and her mom had been sure Dillon wouldn’t, either. She’d warned Ivy repeatedly that she was asking for trouble, just begging to get her heart broken.

      Ivy had wanted so badly to prove her wrong. But her mom had been right, of course, and to this day she’d never let Ivy live it down.

      What would her mother think if she could see her now, stuck in the same house with Dillon for a week? She would probably be worried that Ivy would be foolish enough to fall for him again. The way she had repeatedly fallen for Ivy’s dad, trapped in what she liked to call an on-again, off-again trip through the house of horrors that had spanned nearly a decade.

      Ivy was smarter than that. If there was one thing she’d learned from her mother, it was how not to repeat her mistakes.

      She would worry about her mom Saturday when she flew in for the wedding. Right now she had other, more pressing problems, like the man still staring at her.

      It was clear Dillon didn’t intend to leave her alone. Rather than spend an hour or so before dinner enjoying the sun, she would instead have to remain indoors, where he couldn’t bug her.

      Ivy rose to her feet and grabbed her book. “I guess I’ll see you at dinner.”

      “I thought you wanted to read.”

      “It’s been a long day. I think I’ll take a quick nap.” It was a lie, but there was no way she would admit that he’d irritated her to the point of driving her away.

      She hoped this was just his misguided way of trying to make amends. She hoped she was wrong and he wasn’t actually doing this to annoy her.

      “See ya’ll later,” he called, and as she was shutting the door, she could swear she heard laughter.

       Three

      Bitterness can be handled in many ways. The worst is to pretend it isn’t there. Recognize it, identify it, embrace it. Then get over it.

      —excerpt from The Modern Woman’s Guide to Divorce (And the Joy of Staying Single)

      Dillon was a big, fat liar.

      Ivy sipped her champagne and glanced up at him through the pale pink, lingering light of sunset across the patio table. Eyes as blue and crisp as the ocean stared back, tangling her up in their gaze like a fish in a net.

      A shivery zing of awareness started in her scalp and rippled with lightning speed down to her toes. And though she mentally squirmed and flopped, she couldn’t seem to break loose.

      Instead, she stared him down with a cool, disinterested look. Hoping he couldn’t see the frantic flutter of her heartbeat at the base of her throat. The goose bumps dotting every conceivable inch of her flesh.

      He was supposed to be avoiding her. He had agreed to leave her alone, hadn’t he? Yet, as she feared earlier on the balcony, it was crystal clear that he had no intention of keeping his promise. In fact, he was doing everything he could to make her as uncomfortable as humanly possible.

      And he did it damned well.

      Throughout dinner, every time she looked up from her plate of mostly untouched food, his eyes were on her. He wasn’t even attempting to be subtle, the big jerk.

      At this rate she would be leaving the country a total basket case.

      Blake kept shooting Ivy apologetic smiles, and Deidre had started stress eating. She had finished her own meal and was stealing bites from Blake’s plate when she thought no one was watching. Blake’s brothers, Calvin and Dale, observed with blatant curiosity.

      Deidre’s bridesmaids were another story. The motor-mouth twins—or as Deidre liked to call them, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum—were too busy flapping their jaws to notice Ivy. Or anyone else for that matter.

      They weren’t actually twins, although they may as well have been. They had the same burnt-out blond hair and surgically enhanced, anorexic, size-one bodies. They even shared an identical flair for mindless, irrelevant conversation. Ivy was guessing that their collective IQ’s ranked somewhere in the low double-digits.

      “A toast to Deidre and Blake,” Dillon said, raising his glass, his eyes still locked on Ivy. She couldn’t help but notice that he’d dropped the good ole boy twang. Tonight he sounded decidedly more upper-crust Dallas. “May you have a long, happy life together.”

      Like we didn’t, his eyes seemed to say. Was he suggesting that was her fault?

      Yeah, right.

      Around the table crystal stemware clinked and everyone sipped. Ivy downed the contents