Fuck! Had I known that Stuart was that insensitive to Lia’s feelings, I would have found plenty of guests to fill up the empty seats on this side.
“Bastard,” I grumbled, forcing myself not to look at my watch again, and trying to think about anything else except the guy my best friend was about to marry.
Nope. Don’t think about that!
I was far better off just thinking about Lia, and not the jackass she was going to meet at the altar in approximately…eleven more minutes?
Don’t do it, Conner! Don’t look at your damn watch again. Focus, man. Just think about Lia and not the damn wedding.
I shifted positions in my seat, feeling edgy as hell as I pictured Lia’s killer smile.
When she was younger, that radiant grin had always made me feel like I was her hero.
As an adult, it affected me somewhat…differently.
Oh, hell no. It was better to think about how it was with Lia when we were younger, when I’d still looked at her like she was a kid.
I tried to relax as my thoughts went back to those early, much more innocent times during my long friendship with Lia.
I’d been a senior in high school, and Lia had been a freshman the first time we’d met.
Some bastard had been trying to feel her up in the hallway next to her locker at school.
One broken nose later—his, not mine—had generated that very first smile Lia had laid on me, the one that had changed my entire world from that day forward.
I took a deep breath, and forced myself to keep my mind in the past as I swiped a bead of sweat from my forehead.
After I’d left her attacker on the hallway floor holding his bloody nose, I’d taken Lia home to her grandmother’s house, and we’d been tight friends ever since.
The following year, I’d gone away to Harvard, but we’d never lost touch. We’d talked a lot on the phone, and we’d always spent as much time as possible together on my college breaks.
Our worlds had been different back then, but it had never seemed to matter.
College drama. High school drama. They were similar enough, and after all Lia had been through, she was a hell of a lot wiser than most of her high school classmates.
I released a deep breath, but I lost the fight to keep my brain focused on the past.
Dammit, how could I not think about Lia as an adult? The majority of the years we’d spent as best friends had been after she’d finished high school.
She’d grown up.
I’d tried like hell not to notice how beautiful she was once she’d crossed into womanhood, even though my dick had rarely let me forget it.
And Lia and I had remained best friends for almost a decade and a half now.
I’d forced any and all carnal thoughts about her out of my head for years, chalking up my body’s reaction to her once she was an adult to rampant male hormones. I wasn’t going to be that guy who lost somebody as important as Lia just because I couldn’t control my dick.
Hell, I’d been a guy in my twenties, in my sexual peak. Why wouldn’t my dick get hard every time I saw Lia, even if she was my best friend?
Problem was, once I’d hit my late twenties and then my thirties, my attraction to Lia had gotten worse instead of better.
It probably wasn’t until I finished my law degree at Harvard, and had moved back to Seattle permanently, that I really knew the way I felt about Lia wasn’t going to change. No matter how much I chose to live in denial.
Once we were physically in the same place, and we started doing everything together like best friends do, that damn attraction had morphed into something that was probably perilously close to…obsession.
Hell yes, I’d wanted to take our relationship to another level for years. Sadly, I wasn’t sensing that same desire on her side.
Lia had claimed to be attracted to me…once. Too bad she’d been twenty-one years old and drunker than a skunk at the time. Even sadder, she didn’t even remember that declaration the next morning. Hell, had she given me a single sign that she was attracted to me when she was in her right mind, I would have taken her up on the offer in less than a heartbeat, and gotten her naked before she could change her mind.
Unfortunately, the signal that she wanted anything other than friendship had never happened after that one, very tipsy profession. Not once. Nothing. And when there wasn’t a single ounce of hope, what in the hell was a guy supposed to do?
She’d dated.
I’d dated, hoping to hell I’d eventually find a woman who felt as right as Lia did when we were together.
Yeah. Well. That had never happened.
There had been a time, about two years ago, that I’d gotten so frustrated that I’d finally been ready to put our friendship on the line to tell Lia the truth. I’d been ready to do almost anything to convince her that the two of us should be dating, and burning up the sheets together, instead of looking for that connection somewhere else.
It was shortly after I’d made that monumental decision, but before I could tell her how I felt, that Lia had met…Stuart.
As usual, my timing had totally sucked.
I clenched my fists, and let out a low curse, as I let that critical voice in my head beat the hell out of me.
Face it, Conner, it’s too damn late to do anything now. You should have spoken up a long time ago, but you didn’t. How damn many opportunities did you need? Lia has been an adult and single for almost a decade. And Stuart? What the fuck? It’s not like you couldn’t have fought for Lia when they first started dating. You knew he was a dick, and that he probably wasn’t the right guy for her from the very beginning. You think you’re uncomfortable right now? How are you going to feel when Stuart the dickhead is actually Lia’s husband? Just remember, you’re in this damn position right now because of years of denial and missed opportunities.
“Shut the fuck up!” I mumbled aloud, shutting down the internal lecture.
Yeah, so here I was, in a church, seated on the bride’s side, literally waiting for the woman I loved to walk down the aisle and marry another guy. How fucked up was that?
“If it’s too late, why in the hell am I even here?” I questioned myself quietly.
Dumb question, because I already knew the answer. I was here sweating bullets because I couldn’t not be here for an event that was so important to Lia.
I looked around, trying desperately to find something that felt like Lia, some kind of sign that she’d actually had a hand in this whole lopsided fiasco of a wedding.
I scowled, my eyes narrowing as I noticed the abundance of tulips that were present on the altar, and in the flower arrangements decorating the aisle. “Tulips? Lia doesn’t even like tulips. Where in the hell are the roses and daisies?” I rasped, taken aback by the fact that I couldn’t find a single one of her two favorite flowers.