She sucked in a shaky breath, unable to erase those dirty images from her head. She wondered if she ought to go and talk to Dylan about it, actually talk instead of blurting out a random promise and sprinting away. But she couldn’t force her legs to carry her to the door. She and Dylan might have called a brief cease-fire tonight at the carnival, but they weren’t friends, and she got the feeling he wouldn’t appreciate her poking her nose in his business.
The best thing to do was pretend she hadn’t seen what she’d seen. Never mention it to Dylan again. Never think about it.
And never, ever masturbate while thinking about it.
A shudder racked her body, and it took Claire a moment to realize that her hand, of its own volition, had slid beneath the waistband of her Capris. And her fingers were already sneaking their way inside her panties…
After a beat of indecision, she decided to give her fingers permission to continue. One time wouldn’t hurt, she assured herself.
Just one little indulgence.
And then she’d pretend tonight never happened.
Chapter One
Present Day
“You have to tell her I can’t marry her.”
Dylan Wade gaped at his older brother. Okay. Well. That was not what he’d expected to hear when Chris had summoned him to the elegant suite of the sprawling mansion that housed the Marin Hills Golf Club.
It took a second for him to snap out of his shock. “Yeah, right. Very funny, Chris.” He managed a hasty laugh and clapped his brother on the arm. “Come on, pal, it’s time to go. The ceremony starts in—”
“The ceremony isn’t going to start,” Chris interrupted with frazzled green eyes. He shoved Dylan’s hand away and made a wild dash for the wet bar across the room.
Dylan watched in dismay as his brother picked up a glass, poured whiskey all the way to the rim, and slugged back half of it in one gulp.
“I can’t marry her. I can’t do it. You have to go tell her!”
Shit. Chris had crazy-person eyes. And crazy-person hands—he was gesturing wildly, even with the hand holding the glass, and his frenzied movements caused the amber-colored liquid to slosh onto the rich burgundy carpet beneath Chris’s black leather wingtips.
It was becoming painfully clear that Chris was not joking around.
“Put the whiskey down,” Dylan said quietly.
His brother ignored the order and swallowed another mouthful.
With a sigh, he marched over and forcibly grabbed the glass from Chris’s shaky fingers. The suite had a dressing area on one side of the room and a living area on the other, which offered a set of leather armchairs situated in front of an enormous stone fireplace. Dylan promptly dragged Chris over to one of the chairs and forced him to sit.
“What’s going on? Why can’t you marry Claire?” Rather than sit, he crossed his arms and loomed over his brother.
“Because she’s not the right woman for me.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
He tamped down the retort before it could pop out of his mouth. But come on, Chris was only reaching that conclusion now?
Dylan had known from day one that Claire McKinley wasn’t right for his brother. He’d been hoping Chris would eventually see it too, but he hadn’t expected it to happen ten minutes before the couple’s frickin’ wedding. And it wasn’t just a small, private gathering that could easily be disbanded if Chris was actually serious about all this. This was an expensive, showy affair that would unleash waves and waves of gossip if the ceremony were cancelled. The senior partner of Chris’s law firm had graciously rented out the country club for the day so the couple could marry there. There were five hundred people waiting in that banquet hall, including Dylan’s mother, Shanna, who was over the moon about welcoming a daughter into their family.
Shit. His mom was going to be crushed.
“I’ve been deluding myself for months,” Chris was saying, his voice lined with so much misery that Dylan felt a pang of sympathy for the guy. “I kept telling myself that I’d made the right decision by asking her to marry me. Claire’s smart, she’s successful, she’s beautiful. But she’s got a lot of flaws too, and…I thought…”
Dylan sank into the other armchair. “You thought what?”
“That she would change.” Chris shrugged helplessly. “I was hoping she’d eventually start acting like…I don’t know, like the woman I wanted her to be.”
“For fuck’s sake, Chris, you were waiting around hoping your fiancée’s entire personality would change?”
It also didn’t escape him that his brother hadn’t said a word about love. Not even once. But he decided not to point that out.
“I’m an idiot, okay?” Chris dragged a hand through his perfectly groomed blond hair. “Deep down I knew it wasn’t right, but I kept telling myself I had to go through with it. The invitations were already sent out, and Mom was so excited, and then Lowenstein booked us the Lavender Ballroom at the frickin’ Marin Hills Golf Club as a wedding gift—I couldn’t exactly tell the senior partner of my firm, hey, no thanks, the wedding is off.”
Chris’s breathing grew labored. He was visibly trembling now, and Dylan had never seen his brother’s face so pale before.
“I should have listened to Maxwell,” Chris muttered. “He told me she wasn’t a good enough prospect, he—”