The muscles in her face quivered with the effort to keep her expression carefully neutral. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking that he mattered to her in the slightest.
His gaze wandered over her unhurriedly before returning to her face. “Well, aren’t you a vision,” he said softly.
“Don’t even try,” she said.
“I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”
“Oh, so you weren’t trying to have sex in my sister’s laundry room?”
He moved around the corner of the table with predatory ease, which made her take a few steps backward. “What part of that bothers you, Magdalene? Or do you prefer Maggie?”
His use of her given name threw her a bit. Nobody called her Magdalene except the grandmother she’d been named after. “How—?”
“I asked Mason.”
Mason was friends with this guy?
Then another thought occurred to her. A terrible thought.
“You’re wearing a tux,” she said lamely. “You’re the new best man.”
“It was fun watching you put that together.”
Mason’s friend, Jasper, had been his original best man. She liked Jasper. But Jasper had broken his leg during the preseason and Cassidy had told her there’d been a replacement, only with all the late nights, bridal registry debacles and drunken bachelorette parties, it had dropped off Maggie’s radar.
Now that radar was blipping just like her pulse, and she thrust out her chin in an effort to conceal it.
“How are you friends with Mason? You don’t play football,” she muttered.
“You’re right. I don’t.”
He offered no further clarification and was close enough now for her to feel his body heat. It worried her how his gaze just seemed to reach inside you and browse around, examining first this thing and then that, turning everything over with a kind of selfish, cynical amusement.
God, how it infuriated her.
“I’m surprised,” she said. “A man like you using his friend’s wedding to sleaze around for women. The one I saw you with earlier—where’s she? You didn’t get tired of her already, did you?”
A muscle flared in his jaw. For the first time since they’d met, she might have gotten an emotion out of him that didn’t involve his hateful smile. “Quite the opposite,” he replied.
“Oh, I see. Well, that worked out nicely for you then, didn’t it?”
Jake positioned himself in front of her, arms crossed. Tall as she was, Maggie had to tilt her head back to see him. He smelled really good, like some kind of heady mixture of sandalwood and tobacco and…man.
Well, she’d just have to stop breathing.
“You know, we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot, Magdalene.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Maggie doesn’t really suit you. It’s a good name for a dog, perhaps—”
“You really love to hear the sound of your own voice, don’t you? The ringtone on your phone is probably just you saying your own name.” Oh, she liked that. That was a good snap.
“You almost make me wish I were spending more time in Cuervo,” he said.
“Why?” she replied. “So you could try to get my clothes off, too?”
Jake gazed down at her with his glacier-blue eyes, 007 tux and intoxicating maleness. “I have a feeling there’s a lot there to see,” he said.
It didn’t sound like he was being in the least sarcastic, and her body betrayed her by responding to the rough hot caress of his voice.
“I have things to do.” Maggie brushed past him, glad to have the last word, glad to be heading toward the door.
He caught her by the arm. She felt the sensation of contact sizzle through her. The smirk on his face was replaced by something more serious.
“Save me a dance.”
* * * *
So far, it had been one hell of a day.
Jake Sutton sat on the back porch and smoked another cigarette, his fourth and way more than his daily allotment. Vices, if you didn’t manage them, managed you.
He let the silky texture of the smoke glide over his tongue as he gazed at the rolling hills of Mason’s ranch. Maybe there was something to the idea that Texas bred a special kind of woman. He thought of the actress he’d snuck into the laundry room. Then he thought of Maggie Roby.
No comparison.
Maggie heated his blood. The actress merely heated his imagination.
Jake reckoned he knew a real woman when he saw one. They were a lot more complicated than the artificial variety. But then complications, in life or in business, were nothing more than an opportunity to figure things out.
He liked figuring things out.
The ranch sat on more than a hundred acres. From the veranda, he could see the fenced-off pastureland in full bloom. Bluebonnets carpeted an open field on the south side, thinning out around a grove of huisache trees. Even the trees were covered in April flowers, orange pom-pom-looking things they didn’t have up in Dallas. Of course, it was kind of hard to tell when you were on the phone all day inside a glass tower in the middle of downtown.
Jake patted his tux jacket to make sure his phone was still there. He wanted to check his messages, but had promised Mason no phone calls, no texting, and no losing the ring. He patted his other pocket. Yep, the ring was still there, safe and sound. See? He totally had this.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding.”
Jake looked up and saw Mason step outside on the porch. Mason paused to take a deep breath of sunshine and ranch life, or so it seemed. He turned toward Jake with a grin.
“Are you trying to avoid anyone in particular or are you just out here being your usual dick self?” Mason said.
“Probably both,” Jake admitted.
“Aren’t you supposed to be inside best-manning or something?” Mason sat in the white wicker rocker next to him. The chair was too small for his big frame, which forced Mason to stretch out his tuxedoed legs. “I just stopped security from shooting down a drone over the pavilion.”
Jake flicked the ash off his cigarette. “Being famous…it ain’t for pussies, is it?”
“Well, you can’t blame the poor bastards for trying.”
Jake studied Mason out of the corner of his eye. He looked happy and—Jake struggled to place it—sure of his place in the world. “You’re not even nervous, are you?”
“Nope. When you know, you know. Cassidy is my best friend. She’s my everything.”
“I almost envy you,” Jake said. “I haven’t met that woman yet.”
Mason scooped a handful of pebbles out of the planter next to him and pitched them one by one into the tall grass. “Where’s your date for the wedding?”
“Not talking to me. So I offered to send her back to Dallas and she accepted.”
Mason shook his head. “See, I don’t get that.”
“Get what?”
“Why you go out of your way to piss people off.”
Jake crushed his cigarette stub into something pink and shell-like that he hoped was an ashtray. There was no point