10
Alice
Mac had barely acknowledged my presence since the steam room.
Afterward I’d followed him to a restaurant where we’d eaten sushi with Mason, Kylie, and Sarah before going as a group to the pool to meet up with the rest of the group.
Sometime around seven, Beck and Sam reappeared. Beck was as relaxed as I’d ever seen her and the two of them suggested taking a boat out on the ocean for cocktails and the sunset.
It was a quiet evening compared to the previous one. No drama or strippers. Everyone got along and nobody got trashed. We finished the evening with more cocktails in the resort lounge before retiring to a more-or-less early bedtime.
Mac hadn’t made any moves to disrupt the evening and had buddied around with the other Knights on the sailboat. He’d even carried on a polite-ish conversation with Sarah and Kylie. There were no signs of devious plans or outright drunkenness, and as the night faded to sleep, I wondered if perhaps I was going a little overboard on watching Mac’s every move.
None of the others commented on my crusade, though I got the impression that they thought I should be enjoying the resort and letting Mac do whatever he wanted. Jules remained the outlier; she still hadn’t forgiven him for the stripper thing.
Of course none of them knew about Mariana, who was staying in the shadows.
As much as I hated to admit that Mac had been a help at all, even inadvertently, the quality of Mariana’s feedback to my questions and concerns had greatly improved since the scene in the bathroom. Where before it sometimes took her hours to get back with me, now she answered immediately. Now all I had to deal with was Beck telling me to stop getting distracted by wedding stuff.
The next day was spent together as a group again. We took a boat out for a day of fun on the ocean — swimming, snorkeling, jet skiing, and sailing. The weather was perfect, warm and sunny once more.
Again, Mac was courteous and friendly. The smile on his face looked a bit plastered on, but otherwise, you’d have thought that the last two days of glowering and gloom had come completely from my imagination. And when we returned in the late afternoon, I was tempted again to admit that maybe I’d been a bit over-paranoid.
It didn’t help that the girls wanted to do a girls night.
“Come on,” Kylie begged. “We need all of us. It won’t be the same without you.”
We were sitting around a large table at the dinner buffet and making plans for the evening.
I grimaced and looked at Mac where he was talking in Mason’s ear, making the gray-haired man chuckle at whatever play-by-play he was being fed. Kylie snapped her fingers in front of my face.
“Dude. I don’t know what your issue with Mac is, but it’s fine. He’s not messing with the wedding. You need to chill.”
I sighed. “Fine, maybe you’re right,” I admitted. “I’ll go with you.”
“Yes,” Kylie said, making a fist pump. “Trust me, this is going to be better than whatever the guys have planned for tonight.”
What the guys had planned was apparently a whole lot of nothing. “The pool, some drinks, maybe the cigar lounge,” Henry told us at dinner. He looked to Sam and Keegan. “Sound about right, boys?”
Sam nodded. “Gotta conserve some energy for the bachelor party,” he said. “I think I’m starting to feel the effects of the thirties.”
“Speak for yourself, old man,” Keegan said. “But I am down for a quiet night.”
I left them talking about the game on Thursday to go to the bathroom. I lingered in front of the mirror after washing my hands, my mind on Mac.
It wasn’t like me to admit defeat, especially not so quickly. But the girls were right. Mac hadn’t been messing with anything. And as much as I’d like to say that was because of my expert babysitting skills, it was just as likely that Mac was starting to get more comfortable with the inevitability of the ceremony and was no longer acting out because he wasn’t getting his way. Beck and Sam had obviously forgiven him for the stripper incident, so why couldn’t I?
His words in the steam room floated back to me. Was I really just being a control freak? It was a possibility. The wedding meant a lot to me. But there was also something thrilling about trying to anticipate Mac’s next move. Watching him from the corner of my eye as he chatted with my friends, wondering what was going on behind those cunning eyes.
Mac’s motives and history were a mystery to me, ones that I wanted to solve like a modern day Nancy Drew. But that was hard with the way he was ignoring me. Maybe it would be better for all of us if I backed off a bit. Maybe it would lead to him opening up more.
On the way back to the dining room, I passed a cracked door. As I was walking by, a clatter and the mutter of voices drifted out of it.
I paused. A sign indicated that it was a banquet hall, one that was not in use at the moment. A gnawing suspicion struck me and, before I could fight it, I peeked into the door.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the gloom, but once they did, I saw the figure of a bulky man that could only be Mac whispering into the ear of a very tall, very leggy blonde woman in a silver dress. He blocked her mostly, pressing her against the wall as his hands traveled her body.
I pulled my head back out before they saw me, but not before I heard her say, “No, not now. Later. Come at eleven.”
I didn’t bother to wait for Mac’s reply, walking angrily back to the table. It didn’t matter and it was stupid that I was annoyed by it. Mac could screw anyone he wanted, as long as it wasn’t the wedding planner or really anyone who had any effect on the wedding. I shouldn’t care. I didn’t care.
I sat back down and started eating my crab legs aggressively, ignoring the conversation that had shifted to Beck’s and Sam’s simultaneous bachelor and bachelorette parties on Friday.
Mac returned with a plate of food a short time later, like all he’d been doing was getting something to eat. He dipped into his food and I watched him out of the corner of my eye.
I was annoyed more at myself than I was at Mac. There was absolutely no reason for me to care about this woman he was going to hook up with. She posed no threat to Sam and Beck’s happily ever after. No, the only reason I was mad was because a horrible emotion had reared its ugly head: jealousy.
In that brief moment that I watched Mac push the girl to the wall, his strong form enveloping hers, his lips inches from her ear, I had wished that I was in her place. My obvious lust for Mac threw dust in the eye of my logical side. It wasn’t a fair fight at all and Smart Alice needed to gain the upper hand somehow. Because there was no possible chance that I was going to fall for another guy that was just as wrong for me as Daniel.
I was waiting for someone who fit my idea of a future husband. And while old Alice might have convinced herself that hot, aggravating bad boys could change their ways, I didn’t think that way anymore.
I couldn’t let myself fall into the trap of the mysterious, gorgeous foreigner across from me. Let him have his blondes. I didn’t need the distraction.
11
Mac
Ignoring Alice for the past twenty-four hours had been an exercise in self-control, something I’d never been the best at.