From This Day Forward (The Wedding Belles 0.5)(12)

And she’d very nearly broken him.

Nearly. But not quite. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to let her that close again.

He could tell her now. It was so f*cking tempting to throw all of her assumptions and bullshit in her face.

But doing so would admit a hell of a lot more than he was ready to.

One did not lay his heart at a woman’s feet when she was clearly determined to stomp on it.

“Fine,” he snapped, shoving both hands through his hair in irritation. “You want to go ahead thinking of me as a manwhore, have at it. I want more than some hot-tempered redhead who thinks she knows everything about everyone.”

“I think we all know what you want more of,” she said sarcastically. “More women, more sex—”

Jason didn’t stick around to hear the rest of her rampage. He was out the door, slamming it with more force than necessary before storming into his own room.

Once there, he bent at the waist, resting both hands on his knees, taking deep breaths until the urge to punch something subsided.

Goddamn the woman. She’d always been the only one who could turn him inside out—who could hurt him with careless words.

Once the anger subsided, Jason stood, slumping back against the door in defeat. He pulled his Tic Tacs out of his pocked and popped four into his mouth.

Only then did he realize what had bothered him so much about that first kiss.

These were his first Tic Tacs since before dinner, and yet he’d tasted cinnamon when he’d kissed her.

She’d tasted like cinnamon.

The question that Jason turned over in his mind as he tossed and turned later that night was, why?





“You know that the bride’s blond, not red haired, right?”

Jason very subtly shifted his camera lens away from Leah and refocused on his original target—the bride and groom. “Shut up, Heather.”

The curly-haired blonde next to him smirked.

Heather Fowler was one of the Wedding Belles planners. Or assistant planner. He’d never paid much attention to the hierarchy, other than to know that Heather was Alexis Morgan’s right-hand woman, and damn good at it.

Jason was one of the Belles’ go-to photographers, as was Leah, and after working dozens of weddings, he’d come to know the entire Belles team fairly well.

He got along equally well with Alexis, Heather, and the currently very pregnant Mel, although it was he and Heather who’d connected the most.

There was just something about all of her manic energy and take-no-bullshit candor. They’d clicked almost immediately and had been friends ever since.

Never romantic though. Not even close.

Despite what Leah thought, he was capable of spending time with a woman without nailing her.

“Uh-oh,” Heather said, the smirk heavy in her voice.

He ignored her as pulled the camera away from his eye to scroll through the viewfinder of his most recent shots, making sure they were coming out as he wanted.

“I thought you were over her,” Heather stage-whispered.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” he asked. “Fussing with bows, or safety-pinning hems, or some shit?”

“Nah, the rehearsal dinner is more or less a night off,” she said, leaning in to look at the pictures he’d just taken. “You know, making sure nobody gets too drunk and gives anyone in the bridal party a black eye. That sort of thing. Hey, is that a picture of Leah I just saw?”

He pulled the camera away before her prying eyes could see too much. “Have I told you how grateful I am that both you and Alexis are working this wedding?”

“It’s a big wedding,” she said with a cheeky grin. “Plus, I begged her to let me tag along. I hardly have any weddings of my own yet, since I’m still a junior associate, and there’s no way I’d pass up the bragging rights to seeing the president’s daughter get hitched.”

Jason glanced across the room to where the bride was chatting happily with her girlfriends.

He and Leah had agreed in a terse exchange earlier that she’d cover the bride’s side, while he stuck mostly to the groom’s side, but Jason hadn’t been able to resist taking a few shots of his own of the bride and her father.

It wasn’t every day someone got to share oxygen with the former president, after all.

Although, surprisingly, the whole day had been a good deal less fussy than Jason had feared. Considering they were dealing with the man who’d up until recently ran the free world, the wedding festivities had been relaxed and low-key, minus the not-so-subtle Secret Service agents.

The bride seemed as sweet and refined as she’d always seemed on TV, the groom, genuinely smitten, much to the delighted ribbing of his overgrown frat boy wedding party.

Despite Leah’s accusations that he didn’t believe in happy endings, he knew one when he saw it in progress, and he had a good feeling about Brent and Kylie.

“So what’s going on with you two, anyway?” Heather chirped as Jason shifted to get a shot of the former First Lady laughing with the groom’s mother.

“What’s going on with who?” he asked.

Heather flicked his forearm. “Don’t play dumb. You’ve either had a camera glued to your face or you’ve been watching Leah all day.”

He shot her a glance and wiggled his eyebrows. “Which means you’ve been watching me, huh?”