With a straight face, Clay said, “The lodge didn’t have staff.”
Dylan chuckled. “You make that sound like we’d be roughing it.”
Not looking at all bothered, Clay asked, “Did you want to be the one cooking breakfast for all of us, Dylan?” With an arched eyebrow he challenged his wife. “Or cleaning up after the ten of us, Lexi?”
Lexi laughed, “Lord, no. Add all the staff you want, babe.”
Clay nodded. “I’m always wrong until people realize how right I am.”
Still seeking to cheer Claire, Dylan said, “That should be my life’s motto.”
She shot him a faint smile. “It would be better than some you might have chosen in the past.”
Dylan had learned early that playing the clown was an effective way to lighten someone’s mood. His mother had been very ill for a long time when he was young, but his antics with Connor had never failed to make her laugh. “So I shouldn’t tell you how talking about a steel vagina led Connor and me to stop at this all-you-can-eat seafood place where we literally ate so much lobster they threatened to have us removed if we ordered another plate?” He referenced his height. “Hey, they should have known we could pack food away.”
Claire cocked her head to one side. “Okay, now I’m curious. How do you get from vaginas to lobster?”
In unison, Connor and Dylan said, “Swedish meatballs.”
“Vaginas of steel.” Dylan held up his fingers and referenced the size of an inch. “Balls of steel. Balls. Meatballs. Swedish meatballs. The topic made us hungry. But seriously, they were about to toss us out before someone recognized us. Then they couldn’t feed us enough.” He touched his stomach. “Lobsters are a lot of work for very little meat, but we did our best to eat ourselves sick, didn’t we, Connor?”
“We sure did,” his brother said with a chuckle.
“I can picture it so clearly.” Claire laughed so hard she wiped tears from her eyes. She needed that—to just let out some tension. When she stopped, she touched Dylan’s hand lightly. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Dylan smiled down at her then turned and caught Aly watching him. She wasn’t laughing along or even smiling. He shrugged and returned his attention to Claire. “I’m surprised you’re not lecturing us on our choice of topics.”
Claire shook her head as she said, “No lectures necessary. Every suggestion I gave you was for your public persona. Here with friends, we’d always rather you be you.”
You be you.
Dylan nodded even as her words echoed through him. He was very much still a work in progress. There was the beer-drinking, bar-fighting, construction-loving man he’d been before the Barringtons had come into his life. There was the serious big-screen actor he’d become. If someone asked him who he was, he would be hard-pressed to answer them. Was it possible to be two people? His brother brought out one side, time away from Connor and his family allowed him to explore the other one.
No one who met him away from Connor called him a meathead.
No one who had known him his whole life would believe he could attend a public event without embarrassing himself.
He glanced over at Aly again. It didn’t require a PhD to guess which side she thought was the real him. They’d been thrown together at several events. He’d tried being nice to her. He’d tried flirting with her. He’d even tried ignoring her. Her disdain for him remained the same.
She was a beautiful woman. Intelligent. A gynecologist known for moving the field forward via technology and focused research. If she ever stopped glaring at him, he might tell her how admirable he thought her dedication to her field was. All he wanted was for them to find common ground, some semblance of a friendship that would make things more comfortable when they were all together—for Connor as well as for Angelina.
Aly looked up from her tablet. For just a second he thought he saw something in her eyes besides irritation, a spark of interest, but it was fleeting and he dismissed it as imagined.
While holding Aly’s gaze, Dylan answered Claire, “That’s good, because all I’ll ever be is me.”
Aly looked away and Dylan sighed.
It’s going to be a long trip.
Once again Aly attempted to focus on the article on her tablet. Normally it was a subject that would have held her interest with ease. The initial reason she’d gone into medicine was a realization that what had happened to her mother hadn’t been an isolated case. It was inconceivable to Aly that the United States had the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries. Her passion had become to understand why over half of the deaths occurred postpartum and what could be done to prevent them.
Over time she’d built a reputation for partnering with companies to develop female-specific diagnostic technology. To stay ahead of the curve, she read medical studies voraciously. She’d never be wealthy, because she used the income she made from her designs to further fund research around the world.
She was not the type of woman to fawn over movie stars or put much value in the superficial. Dylan Sutton was everything she had no interest in—all wrapped up in one incredibly tall, impressively muscled, above average delicious body. He had the classic strong jaw, eyes a woman could lose herself in, and dark blond hair. Although he was nearly two years older than Connor, they shared enough physical characteristics that most thought they were twins. Add a little fame and women literally threw themselves at both men, even though Connor was soon to be married.
Fools.
Men who can have any woman don’t settle for one.
Aly glanced at Connor who was chuckling over something Angelina said to him. Okay, there were exceptions to the rule. If Connor were a dog, he’d be a Labrador—always happy, always friendly, loyal to the core. It was impossible to not like him.
Her attention shifted to Dylan again. She blamed her wandering eye on a flaw in the jet’s lounge design. With the seats lining the sides in a U-shape, it was impossible to not constantly be aware of what the other passengers were doing. Thankfully he hadn’t chosen to sit beside her or she would have gotten nothing done.
As she watched Dylan bend his head so he could hear something Claire said, a flush warmed her cheeks and her grip on her tablet tightened. Of all the things Dylan did that she found grating, his ability to turn her on topped the list. And that he did it effortlessly was truly unsettling.
Raised in a quiet household by a father who taught part-time at Weill Cornell Medicine and still worked as an electrophysiologist in New York City, Aly was more comfortable participating in a medical peer review than attending a social event. A woman in her mid-twenties, she was experienced when it came to men and sex, but neither had done much to hold her interest in the past. If she ever did marry, it would be out of a sense of duty. Her father often said that intelligent people needed to procreate as prolifically as those with lower IQs to keep a balance in the population. Her life plan included finding a well-educated, socially conscious, kind man to settle down with.
Before then, if she required sexual release, there were always toys or the occasional hookup with men she met through her work. Intelligent men understood that sex need not be confused with emotion or commitment. It was a biological function of all healthy humans of a certain age. A person’s sex drive was determined mostly by their level of testosterone or estrogen as well as a few other less tangible factors.