Best Man with Benefits (Wedding Dare, #4, McCade Brothers, #3)(2)
Colt sure knew his sister. Not only was she trying to use the laundry glitch as an excuse to back out of tonight’s dinner, she was aiming to back out of being a bridesmaid.
“Let’s not reserve you a pew in the back of the chapel just yet. They’ve got five days to find your dresses.”
“We’ll find them, sir—”
“I have every confidence,” Logan told the manager. “In the meantime…” He caught Sophie’s hands between his and gave her a gentle tug. “Come with me to dinner. You look great just as you are.” She did. Total opposite from the high-powered, high-maintenance, airbrushed-to-perfection corporate types surrounding him most days, and he found her lack of artifice refreshing as hell.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t.” She freed her hands and tucked them behind her back, which made her look like a little girl with something to hide until he noticed how the front of her button-down shirt stretched across her chest, revealing generous, incredibly distracting curves beneath the thin white cotton. Jesus, when had Colt’s little sister turned into a centerfold? He found the transformation of the cute, quiet Sophie of his memory to the Sophie in front of him so unsettling it took him a moment to get his head back on what she was saying.
“…the invitation said cocktail attire. I’ll be the only one dressed like a salesgirl from the Gap.” She actually took another step away and he had a sneaking suspicion if he blinked, he’d open his eyes to find a vortex of empty air where she now stood…maybe one sandal halfway across the lobby.
Thing was, he hadn’t earned an economics degree and an MBA, and founded his own outdoor adventure gear company without picking up a few problem-solving skills along the way. “Let me see if I understand your concern. You don’t want to be the only person there tonight who doesn’t look like they got lost on the way to the red carpet?”
He found the unwilling grin flirting across her lips ridiculously gratifying, and her reply more revealing than she probably intended. “I’d feel too self-conscious…like everyone was staring at me thinking, ‘Didn’t she get the memo?’”
“Okay, I can solve this problem.” He hit her with his patented this-will-work stare, the one he’d perfected five years ago to convince angel investors to put millions into Defy Gravity, a fledgling company best known, until that point, for manufacturing rock-climbing gear. “Don’t move. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
…
Sophie watched Logan stride away. Watched every female in the vicinity discreetly or not-so-discreetly check him out as he passed, and tried not to squirm when those same sharp gazes cut to her and she inevitably became the object of baffled, disbelieving, or outright rude looks. All of them conveyed the same underlying question. Namely, “What the hell is that monument of male perfection doing with her?”
Even as a crazy part of her wished he could really be hers, she imagined shouting, “Calm down. You have not fallen into some parallel alternate universe where the impossible becomes reality. He’s not with me.” But of course, she’d never actually do it. The girl who’d passed out attempting to deliver her single line in her kindergarten class play didn’t have the nerve to engage in a public outburst at a posh hotel.
Anxious to escape what felt like a glaringly bright spotlight, she made her way to an empty chair in a quiet corner, sat, and tucked her card key into the back pocket of her new skinny jeans. Jeans she’d bought on a whim, and packed on an even bigger whim, and was pretty sure now she should have waited to wear in public until she’d lost another five pounds. She stared down at her plain, unpainted toenails. He’d asked her to wait, so she’d wait, even if she would have preferred to disappear. Have a hole in the time-space continuum open beside her and suck her right in.
Poof! She could land back in her hotel room, or, as long as she was dreaming, back in her little walk-up apartment in West Hollywood, sitting on the postage stamp of a balcony she shared with her incredibly hot neighbor, Mark. He was an unrepentant flirt, but she could handle flirting with him and all his equally hot, equally gay friends. Hanging out with them was the very definition of looking for love in all the wrong places, but it was completely safe.
Logan? Not so safe. Not for someone woefully inept at the boy-girl banter. But that hadn’t stopped her from developing an immediate and lasting crush on him the day she and her mom had dropped Colt off at college and met his freshman year roommate. Even now, fourteen years later, she still reverted to the tongue-tied preteen she’d been whenever she found herself in Logan’s presence.
She needed to remember the fascination only ran one way. He hadn’t even noticed her last night when Colt and his groomsmen had crashed the bachelorette party. Admittedly, she hadn’t stuck around long after the guys had arrived—long enough to witness two of the bridesmaids enter into a pact to bed the groomsmen of their choice, and of course, Logan had topped their lists. Seeing one of the girls swipe his room key had been her cue to leave, and slipping out unnoticed hadn’t been difficult. A short, frumpy chick didn’t attract much attention.
Logan, conversely, commanded attention. She couldn’t put it down to height. At six-one, he was tall, but not necessarily the tallest guy in the room. His rock-climber’s physique boasted a truly mind-boggling collection of hard-etched muscles. Not that she’d been lucky enough to make a personal inspection, but she’d spent hours studying a memorable Climber’s World article featuring Logan hanging from Half Dome, wearing nothing but electric-blue Defy Gravity flex shorts. Impressive as his body was, most of those lean, limber muscles stayed hidden under his clothes. His appeal sprang from something deeper than thick black hair and mood-ring hazel eyes staring out from the kind of bone structure a male model would kill for. He radiated…something. Some magical blend of energy, charm, and confidence.