The Worst Best Man(97)

Frankie ignored her friend and buttoned her coat. They were halfway to the door when she stopped short. Pru ran into her back. “Hey,” her friend muttered.

Frankie pointed at what had caught her attention. Tucked into a quiet corner in front of the window were Elliot Kilbourn and Margeaux the Dragon Lady.

Elliot had Margeaux’s face cupped in his hand and was moving in for what promised to be an NC-17 kiss.

“Gross,” Pru hissed. “Go before they see us!”

They hurried out of the restaurant, eyes straight ahead. And didn’t stop until they were halfway down the block.

“Well there’s a match made in heaven,” Frankie said dryly.

“You said it, sister,” Pru agreed. “An evil wench and her henchman. We should give them a couple name. Elgeaux? Margel?”

Frankie shuddered and clutched the apple pie to her chest. Nothing good could come from a union like that.





Chapter Fifty-One


Aiden rested his hand on Frankie’s bare thigh in the darkened back of the limo. She’d chosen a short dark purple number with a tempting halter neck that made his fingers itch to untie it. All that stood between him and Frankie’s naked, begging body was two hours at his mother’s fundraiser and a short speech. There was also the ride home from Long Island to Manhattan, but with a privacy screen and condoms stocked in the small compartment under the bar, that wasn’t necessarily a hindrance.

“Do you like your dress?” Aiden asked, skimming his fingertips over her inner thigh.

He watched her open her knees a little wider to accommodate his touch.

Since her lunch with Pru earlier in the week, Frankie had declared herself cured of any worry about what a bunch of strangers with cameras and gossip blog subscriptions had to say about her. Which meant she hadn’t heard anything about what the paparazzi had dubbed Dress Gate.

“It’s very beautiful,” she said, playing with the tulle of the skirt. It nipped in at the waist before flowing into a full skirt reminiscent of 1950s elegance. She looked stunning, fuckable, regal.

“Do you like my hair?” she asked, pushing a pin back in place. It was pinned up in a curling mass leaving her neck bare.

“Very much,” he admitted.

“I watched a YouTube tutorial,” she said proudly.

“You did it yourself?” he asked, his eyebrows winging up.

“I didn’t have time for the salon today.”

“What will society say when they find out you do your own hair?” Aiden teased.

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t care what they say. It’s stupid to drop a couple hundred bucks once a week just to have someone else stab pins into your head. Besides, you’d think they’d have more important things to worry about.”

“You’d think,” he agreed.

She was one of the few people in the world who could be completely immune to the crush of disapproval orchestrated by the media. She’d survived the attention over the Goffman incident, though he doubted the news would let it drop, especially after today.

But she could survive it. Franchesca Baranski didn’t care what a stranger behind a computer screen had to say about her style. And it was refreshing. He’d seen stray negative blog comments destroy entire weeks of the lives of women he’d dated before. “How could they say she wore it better?” “That’s photoshopped,” they’d howl at the screen while dialing their publicists.

It came with the territory of being considered important.

Frankie couldn’t be bothered to care enough to read the drivel in the first place. People could have been singing her praises or tearing her down, and it wouldn’t have interested her either way.

What remained to be seen was how she would feel about him going to bat for her. Aiden reached into his jacket pocket and produced the check.

“Here,” he said offering it to her.

“What’s this?” she asked peering at it in the dark. “Twenty-five hundred dollars? Aiden, I told you I’m not taking your money.”

He tapped the top of the check. “It’s not my money.”

He watched her as a slow smile spread across her face. “Lionel Goffman. And how did you manage that?”

Aiden cleared his throat. There was a lot they had to talk about. But the car was easing up his mother’s drive. “We’ll talk about it later,” he promised.

Frankie tucked the money into her clutch and leaned down to adjust the strap of her stiletto. Her breasts pressed against the fabric of the halter top, begging to be released.

He shifted uncomfortably as his dick hardened. Would he ever stop having that reaction to her?

Oblivious to his lecherous gaze, she sat up and reapplied her lipstick. Dark, sexy red. He wanted to see those lips wrapped around his dick, her big eyes staring up at him as she took him to the edge of reason with her magic mouth.

“Shit,” he muttered.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, snapping her compact shut and shoving it back in her bag. “You’re not getting a headache now are you?”

“More like a cockache.”

Not satisfied to take his word for it, she palmed his hard-on through his trousers.

“Damn it, Franchesca! You’re not helping.”

“Do you pop little blue pills for breakfast? You’re hard twenty hours a day. I didn’t even do anything to you… yet.”