To Have And To Hold: The Wedding Belles Book 1 (12 page)

W
HEN
B
ROOKE
FINALLY LIFTED
her eyes to meet Seth’s, she knew she’d made a mistake. Even without saying a word about Clay, or her ruined wedding, he was onto the fact that she was hiding something, and was determined to figure it out.

Well, too damn bad, Mr. Tyler. I’m not going to dwell on my past failures, and I’m certainly not going to let
you
dwell on them.

Her past with Clay was far from a secret. She’d gone out of her way to ensure that it was out in the open, letting the wound get oxygen.

As a result, Brooke rarely felt vulnerable these days—she’d been carefully building a shield around her ever since Clay had been arrested, and most of the time it worked.

But this man . . . Seth made her feel vulnerable. She didn’t like it.

Seth’s gaze narrowed, and even as she was braced for him to eviscerate her, target her right where it hurt and prey on her most vulnerable inner secrets, Seth
surprised her by nodding slowly, and then sitting back in his chair. “Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll go along with your plan. I’ll back out of the wedding planning if you promise to keep me apprised about everything—the planning, and the guy. Those are my terms.”

Brooke let out a little laugh. “Done. That was easier than I thought.”

He held her gaze. “I’m trying to trust you, Ms. Baldwin. Don’t make me regret it.”

“And don’t let your guard down, either,” Grant advised her. “You know Seth’s just going to Google you the second he goes to the bathroom. In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t already.”

“I thought about it,” Seth said, his eyes never leaving Brooke’s. “But some mysteries are far more interesting to unravel by yourself.”

“I’m not a mystery,” she said quickly. Damn it, she sounded defensive. “And don’t pretend you’re at all interested in peeling back my layers, or whatever. You had me all summed up as a ditzy airhead within moments of meeting me.”

“Right. And I’m sure you withheld all judgment on me,” he said. “No snap assumption about who I might have been, hmm?”

She pursed her lips. He knew she’d thought he was the groom.

Fair enough.

Maybe getting it out in the open would make this whole thing feel less . . . tense.

She turned to Grant. “I thought Seth was the
groom when I first met him. He’s all riled up about it since clearly he’s a classic marriage-phobe.”

Grant’s usually at-ease expression flickered, and he gave Seth a wary glance as though Brooke had her foot hovering over a land mine.

“Sorry,” she said quietly. She didn’t even know what she was apologizing for, but instinct told her she’d jabbed a sore spot. And even though her brain was racing with curiosity, her heart knew all too well what it could be like to have someone pick at your wounds when you weren’t prepared.

Still, the thought of Seth Tyler having wounds seemed implausible, to say the least. He was so rigid, so deliberate in everything he did. It seemed impossible that anyone would get the drop on him to hurt him.

But someone had hurt him, she realized as she studied him under her lashes. It was written all over the tense lines of his mouth.

“Don’t apologize,” Seth said curtly. “My idiot friend here is apparently under the impression that I was once closer to the altar than I actually was.”

Grant opened his mouth as though he wanted to argue but snapped it shut and picked up his drink.

“I proposed to my ex,” Seth said in the same bored monotone voice someone might use if they were announcing that it was raining. “She said no. End of story.”

Brooke tried to keep her expression blank, but poker face had never really been her thing. Her heart hurt for him, but more than that, she hurt for the way he thought he had to hold it inside.

She
knew all too well what it was like to put on a brave face when your insides were in splinters.

“Stop that,” he muttered quietly.

“Stop what?”

“Feeling sorry for me.”

“Seth hates pity,” Grant explained.

“Who doesn’t?” Brooke said quietly.

For a moment, her eyes met Seth’s, and a brief spark of understanding flashed between them. Two people who’d been hurt but who would go to their grave before admitting it, even to themselves.

Then the moment was over, and he lifted his glass in a silent, mocking toast.

Grant leaned forward to grab his cocktail off the table, finishing the last sip in one swallow before slapping his palms on his knees and standing. “Well. This has sure been fun.”

“Where the hell are you going?” Seth asked.

“Got a date,” Grant said, pulling out his wallet and extracting enough bills to cover all of their drinks plus tip.

“With whom?” Seth challenged.

Grant ignored this, instead reaching down for Brooke’s hand and raising it up to his lips as he bent, kissing the back of it in a gentlemanly gesture that Brooke found oddly charming. “Ms. Baldwin, you are beyond lovely. It was a pleasure.”

Seth rolled his eyes, and Grant gave Brooke a sly wink before stepping back, clamping his friend on the shoulder in farewell, and strolling out of the hotel bar without a backward glance.

“Do you think he really has a date?” Brooke asked.

Seth
shrugged. “I doubt it.”

“Why, because he’s in love with your sister?” Brooke asked sympathetically.

Seth’s face went blank in stunned confusion. “What?”

Brooke froze. Was this not common knowledge? It had taken her exactly five minutes of being in Grant Miller’s company to figure out that he had it bad for Maya, but judging from the stricken look on Seth’s face, he had no clue.

“He’s like her brother,” Seth said.

“
Like
her brother, but not,” Brooke said, keeping her voice gentle. “But you would know better than me. Maybe I read the whole situation wrong.”

“I’d like to think that you did.” Seth dragged a hand over his face. “But . . . Grant didn’t handle it well when I told him about Maya’s engagement. I didn’t think a thing of it, because I didn’t handle it well, either. I assumed his motives were protective. Brotherly.” His eyes widened as he registered the full implication of what Brooke was insinuating. “Holy shit.”

“Maybe they were,” Brooke rushed to interject. “Look, I shouldn’t have said anything, really. It’s the dang martini, loosening my tongue. It’s why I don’t usually drink with clients.”

Seth’s smile was slow and dangerous as he leaned forward. “Don’t drink with clients, huh? And yet here you are.”

“I’m here because Grant asked me to drinks, and Grant is not my client.”

“Huh,” he said. “But you could have told Grant
you wanted to grab a drink elsewhere. And yet you came right back into the hotel where you knew I’d be.”

“Because I wanted to talk to you. About the wedding, and us working something out so your sister can actually enjoy her wedding planning,” she added quickly.

“And we’ve come to a mutually satisfactory agreement,” he pointed out.

She hesitated, feeling like it was a trick statement somehow. “Yes.”

His smile was slow and confident. “Yet, you’re still here.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but . . . he was right. She was still sitting here, and even stranger, she didn’t want to leave. A part of her didn’t want this moment to end, even though she wasn’t sure if it was actually pleasant.

He gave her a knowing smile. “Rethinking your strategy?”

She finished the rest of her drink. Sure. They could go with that. “Let’s just say that willingly putting myself in your company on a regular basis brings a whole new level of meaning to ‘taking one for the team.’ ”

His smile dropped, and for a second, Brooke could have sworn he looked almost hurt. Which made no sense, because the man didn’t even pretend to like her. He might want her, yes—Brooke wasn’t stupid—but he’d made it clear he didn’t
want
to want her.

And yet the expression on his face right now looked suddenly, horribly, lonely, and for the life of her, Brooke couldn’t figure out how she felt about that.

Seth
gave a curt nod and finished the rest of his own drink. “So we’re done here, then.”

“Mr. Tyler.”

His eyes flicked up, cold and ice-blue as always, and yet . . . maybe they weren’t cold so much as wary. And perhaps she could understand that. Just a little.

“Do you want—” Brooke licked her lips and tried again. “Do you want to have another drink with me?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Here? Now?”

She nodded.

Seth studied her in that cool, assessing way he had so perfected. Then he stood, and Brooke’s heart sank—both from the disappointment of having taken a risk that hadn’t paid off and from the strange pang she had at the thought of watching him walk away.

But he didn’t walk away.

Without so much as a hesitation, he rounded the small cocktail table to sit beside her, settling into the seat Grant had vacated just a few minutes earlier.

His distance was perfectly respectable. He didn’t crowd her, didn’t touch her, and yet somehow he seemed so much closer than Grant had been.

“This okay?” he asked quietly, suddenly looking adorably unsure of himself.

Brooke smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, this is just fine.”

Seth held her gaze until the arrival of the waitress ended the moment.

“Martini?” he asked, jerking his chin at her empty glass.

“Yes, same thing, please,” Brooke said, smiling up at the waitress. “Belvedere, slightly dirty.”

“I’ll take another Manhattan,” Seth said.

When
Brooke turned back to him, he looked amused.

“What?” she asked.

“A dirty vodka martini . . . somehow that seems to be exactly the perfect drink for you.”

Brooke tilted her head. “Do you always mean for things to sound the way they do when they come out of your mouth?”

“How’s that?”

“Provocative.”

“What’s provocative about repeating your drink order?”

“The dirty part,” she muttered, looking away.

His laugh was low and sexy. “Ms. Baldwin, I assure you that I didn’t mean it inappropriately, but I’m intrigued that you took it as such.”

She ignored this, deciding that if she was going to survive this—whatever “this” was—she’d need to get the upper hand.

“So tell me about this woman,” she said, keeping her voice light. “For someone who’s so anti-wedding, it sounds like you came rather close. Grant seemed to agree.”

“Grant’s delusional. Although, I never said I was anti-wedding.”

She snorted. “You don’t have to. You wear your skepticism like a scarf.”

His expression turned considering. “I think marriages can work, absolutely. I just don’t think they work for the lovey-dovey reason you see in the movies.”

“Lovey-dovey? Really?” Brooke asked. “Also, could you be any more cliché right now?”

He
gave a little laugh. “You get that a lot, huh?”

“Let’s just say the whole ‘true love is a fantasy’ routine is a bit tired.”

“And what would you have us all subscribing to?” he asked as the server approached with their two cocktails balanced perfectly on a tray. “That we’re all just waiting to be tamed by the right woman?”

Brooke waited until the server had placed their drinks down and moved away, buying herself some time.

“Not tamed,” she responded finally. “We women just want—we hope . . .”

Brooke trailed off, and Seth shifted his body to face her more fully, his expression turning earnest. “What? What do you hope?”

“That someone good will love us,” she said quietly.

He blinked in surprise, and she gave a little sigh as she picked up her drink. “I know. It’s sad, really, how simple it is. But the truth is, I don’t think any of us women really want or need the roses and the fancy dinners or even the poetry so much as we just want the love.”

Seth said nothing as he watched her take a sip of her martini. She should watch herself. Martinis packed a punch, and the glasses at this bar were large. And yet, while she certainly felt the buzz from her last one, she also wasn’t entirely sure that it was just the alcohol at work.

She was pretty sure the man next to her was every bit as intoxicating as the vodka. Maybe more so.

“Okay, so what’s your take on it?” she said, embarrassed by how vulnerable she felt after her
overshare. “You said that marriages could work, but not for the ‘lovey-dovey’ reasons. Why do you think some of them last, then?”

“For the same reason any merger works. When both parties stand to benefit equally, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.”

Brooke stared at him. “That’s . . . that’s . . . hideous.”

“How so? Everybody wants something, Ms. Baldwin. It’s just a matter of ensuring each side can offer the other what they want.”

“All right,” Brooke said, turning toward him and matching his posture. “I’ll play along. What is it that your ex wanted that you couldn’t offer?”

His head snapped back a little, and Brooke gave him a victory smile. He hadn’t seen that one coming, and that was exactly her point. It drove her crazy when people talked about relationships in that cool, emotionless tone right up until the point you talked about
their
relationship.

“Nadia . . .” His gaze drifted to somewhere over her shoulder as he considered. “I don’t know what Nadia wanted. I’m not sure that Nadia knew what Nadia wanted. Maybe that was the problem.”

“What about you? What did you want that she wasn’t offering?”

His eyes came back to her, and Brooke suddenly felt just a tiny bit breathless. No, it definitely wasn’t the vodka that was her main problem. It was him.

“I want stability,” he said quietly. “I want someone who won’t offer up any surprises. Not that Nadia was volatile; I just didn’t know what she was thinking. I like to know. Everything.”

“So,
your ideal mate is a robot,” Brooke said.

He gave her a rueful smile. “Believe it or not, I do understand just how unreasonable I must sound. It’s why I’m not exactly holding my breath to get married anytime soon. Or ever.”

“At least until they come out with an attractive cyborg model,” she said with a little wink.

They were sitting closer now. Just inches separating them. When had that happened?
How
had that happened?