Tempting the Best Man - By J. Lynn Page 0,35
look on her face the entire time.”
“It has nothing to do with Maddie.” He downed half his beer. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
Chad shook his head and ignored Chase’s words. “It’s always her.”
He went stock still, staring at the bottle of beer. “Is it that obvious?” he asked on a choked breath. He expected Chad to joke with him, but he remained dead silent.
“Yeah, it’s that obvious,” Chad said finally. “Always has been.”
“Great.”
Chad smiled then. “So what happened?”
He took another long draft of his beer and then told Chad a brief, not-so-explicit version of what happened. As expected, his brother stared at him like he was the biggest kind of idiot.
“I can’t believe you made that offer.” Shaking his head, he laughed. “What did you expect? For her to jump right on that?”
Honestly, looking back, Chase wasn’t sure what the hell he’d expected. Somewhere between the incident in the wine cellar and seeing her in the bathtub, so absurdly sexy surrounded by bubbles, it had been the best thing he could come up with.
Chase tugged a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“That’s the problem,” Chad said. “You were thinking too much.”
Chase scowled. “That makes zero sense.”
“You don’t get it. You’re overthinking this whole thing when you should be doing what your heart is telling you.”
Chase busted into laughter. “Wow, been watching a lot of Oprah reruns?”
“Shut up,” Chad said, stretching his arms over his head. Chase could tell he was uncomfortable as hell in the dress clothes. While Chase favored the nicer stuff, Chad was comfortable only in jeans.
His brother flashed a wild grin. “Okay, how about starting to think with what’s between your legs? Either way, the Mitch thing is bullshit. You know he wouldn’t have a problem with you getting serious about Maddie. Unless you’re only interested in hitting it, and hey, I can understand that; she’s a fine piece of—”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll shove this bottle up your ass,” Chase warned.
Chad tipped his head back and laughed. “Yeah, so like I expected, it’s not a one-night thing, so I doubt Mitch would have a problem with it.”
“Let me ask you a question. If we had a sister, how would you feel if one of our friends was snooping around her skirt?”
“That’s a bad example.” Chad folded his arms, eyes narrowing on one of the pretty bridesmaids. “Our friends suck.”
Chase snorted.
His brother fell silent again, another oddity for Chad. Several seconds passed. “Bro, all of us are a little fucked up.”
“No shit.”
Chad let out a dry laugh. “What we saw our dad do to our mother was messed up. Father was a dick, dead or alive. But you know what the messed-up thing is? That we’re still letting him screw up our lives for us, and he’s not even around.”
Part of Chase wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t lie to his brothers. Of all people, they knew. “I’m just like him.”
“You’re nothing like him,” Chad said heatedly. “But you make yourself like him. I don’t even know why. It’s like some kind of twisted self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“There’s that Oprah shit again.”
“Shut up, asshole. I’m being serious.” Chad placed his hand on Chase’s shoulder. “Out of all of us, you’re the best one and don’t even try to deny it. All your life, you’ve wanted Maddie. She’s been the one thing that kept your ass grounded and for whatever reason, you keep pushing her away.”
This conversation was starting to go into no-man’s-land. Mainly because it was starting to make sense. “Drop it—”
“I’m not finished. Hear me out, bro. You’re not Father. You would never treat Maddie like he treated Mom. Hell, those women you date? You even treat them better. If anything, they prove you’re not like him.”
“What kind of effed-up logic is that?”
Chad shot him a knowing look. “You’re not leading on a single one of them. You haven’t lied to them. You’re not married and flaunting your whores in front of your wife’s face.”
A sharp pang of fear—of actual fear—hit him in the gut. What if he did do that? He could never forgive himself. “I’m not married. That could be the reason.”
“You’d never do that to Maddie,” his brother said. “You know why?”
“I bet you’re going to tell me.”
Chad took a long swig of his beer, finishing it off. “Because you have something that Father never had—the capacity to love. And you love Maddie too much to do that to her.”
Chase opened his mouth to deny it,