Best Man's Conquest Read Online Free Page B

caused her enough grief? Couldn’t he act like an adult and leave her alone?
    Just as she’d suspected. He hadn’t changed a bit.
    â€œDale told us you guys used to be married,” Dee said as Dillon returned to his side of the table and slid easily into his seat.
    The way he could look so relaxed and casual, yet emanate an aura of authority, boggled the mind.
    He retrieved his napkin from the table and draped it in his lap. “That’s right.”
    Dee’s eyes widened a fraction and she looked to Ivy for affirmation. “Really?”
    â€œWe were,” Ivy confirmed. “For about a year. A long, long time ago.”
    â€œ He married you? ” Dum asked, looking first at Ivy, then to Dillon, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Wow. I really thought Dale was kidding.”
    Gee, thanks, Ivy wanted to tell Miss Tactless. Just go ahead and say what’s on your mind. Don’t worry about my feelings.
    â€œShe left me and broke my heart,” Dillon said, flashing Ivy a wry grin.
    A look passed between the twins, like sharks who had just smelled blood in the water and were gearing up for a feast.
    â€œ She left you? ” Dee, who obviously missed the sarcasm oozing from his words, clucked sympathetically, shooting Ivy a look of disdain. She reached across the table to pat Dillon’s hand and assured him, “You deserve better.”
    Oh, please. Ivy experienced a severe mental eye roll. Even if she had wronged him somehow, which she absolutely hadn’t, it had been ten years ago.
    â€œIt’s no wonder,” Dum said. “Blake, didn’t you say she hates men?”
    Deidre’s jaw fell and she shot Blake a look.
    â€œThat’s not what I said,” Blake told her, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He turned to Ivy, looking as though he wanted to disappear. “I swear, that’s not what I said. I was just telling them about your book. Man-hating never entered the conversation.”
    Ivy believed him. In all the time she’d known Blake, she’d never heard him say a disparaging word about anyone. But she could see the needle on Deidre’s stress meter creeping into the red zone. Deidre eyed the Tweedles’ untouched chocolate mousse with ravenous eyes and asked, “Would anyone like seconds on dessert?”
    â€œNot me,” Dillon said, rubbing a hand across what Ivy was sure was still a washboard stomach. “I’m stuffed.”
    â€œLike she needs seconds,” Dee mumbled under her breath, but conveniently loud enough for the entire table to hear. Dum snickered and Blake’s brothers exchanged a look, one that said Deidre’s fluctuating weight had been a topic of conversation in the past.
    That didn’t surprise Ivy. The Tweedles hadn’t exactly been Deidre’s first choice for bridesmaids. In fact, they weren’t her last choice, either. They ranked somewhere just below the never-in-a-million-years category. But Blake’s brothers were the groomsmen, per their gazillionaire father’s demands, and they had refused to stand up in the wedding without their girlfriends.
    Since Deidre would be stuck as a part of the family for the next fifty years or so, and Daddy was footing the bill for the wedding—and the house they were moving into after the honeymoon, and the cars they would be driving—Deidre felt it best to acquiesce.
    The whole arrangement set off warning bells for Ivy, but she was keeping her mouth shut. Deidre seemed happy, and Ivy didn’t want to burst her bubble. There was a very slim chance it would all work out, and Ivy was clinging to that hope.
    An uncomfortable silence fell over the table, and Deidre lowered her eyes to her lap, shame flaring in red-hot splotches across her cheeks. Blake looked awkwardly around, everywhere but at the woman he should have been speaking up to defend. Ivy felt torn between defending her