Page 31 of Best Man
I shake my head at my thoughts and fall on my own food like a starving dog. Finally, when my hunger is appeased, I sit back and watch him eating the salad.
“I always wondered who ate that,” I observe, and he shakes his head.
“I suppose it’s useless to ask if you eat five a day.”
“Not at all,” I say primly. “I had a Fab lolly earlier on. That’s got strawberry and milk in it, so I’ve had my fruit and dairy.”
He shakes his head. “I’m amazed you can manage to walk and talk at the same time. Not that you make any sense while you do it.”
“Zeb,” I chide. “Give in to my charm. I know you feel it. The force is strong in me.”
“And so is the bullshit,” he observes, a small smile tugging at his lips as I roar with laughter.
When I sober up, I stare at him. “So, Max?” I say. “An old friend?”He looks at me with one supercilious eyebrow raised and a small smile on his lips. “Have you fucked him?”
He blinks. “I often wonder if you’ll ever lose the ability to ask inappropriate questions.” He shrugs. “Today is not that day.”
I look hard at him and he shakes his head. “No, of course I haven’t.”
“Why do you say of course not? He’s gorgeous.”
A shadow crosses his face almost too quickly for me to notice, but I do. “You think he’s good-looking?” he says in a voice wiped clean of expression.
“Good-looking and like a very loose cannon,” I observe and he laughs, the shadow falling away.
“You’d be right. And in answer to your question, I haven’t slept with him because he’s my stepbrother.”
For some reason that takes me completely by surprise. “Your stepbrother?”
He looks amused. “His mother was my father’s last wife.” He considers. “That sounds as if he’d found the one. Regretfully, it just meant he died before he could trade her in for a newer model.”
“How many did he have?”
“Seven,” he says almost reluctantly, looking out towards the wood.
“Seven.” My voice is high and loud and a pigeon who’d alighted onto the balustrade gives a startled flutter and flies off.
Zeb shakes his head. “Max’s mother was the seventh. He was fourteen when they got married, and I was twenty.”
“And you’ve kept in contact? Were you close?”
He shrugs. “Not at first because that’s a big gap at that age, but he’s one of my best friends now. Somehow he just held on.” He looks almost bemused at the concept and my heart twists. Then he shrugs. “I do keep in touch with all of my stepmothers though.” He looks suddenly awkward. “It wasn’t their fault the marriages failed, and they were very kind to me.”
I study him, feeling a rush of something push through me. I don’t know what it is, but it’s strong, and accompanying this rogue feeling is an urge to comfort him. Why, I don’t know. He’s the most confident and sexy man I’ve ever met, but for just a second he looked so vulnerable.I think of all those stepmothers and my own family where my parents have been married for thirty years. I open my mouth, but the moment is lost as he stands up and reaches over to the small table at the door.
“This came with the food,” he says, brandishing a leaflet. “It’s the itinerary for the week.”
“Itinerary? That sounds ominous,” I say slowly, reeling a little at the abrupt change of subject.
He shoots me a wry look. “Frances is a planner. She loves social occasions and is under the impression that her guests should be organised to within an inch of their lives. This is nothing. The last itinerary I had from her was two A4 pages long.”
“Lovely,” I mutter. I wipe my fingers on my napkin and reach out to take it from him. “Let’s have a look.” I read quickly down the list and then more slowly, my heart sinking. “What the fuck?” I say, looking up at him where he’s leaning back against the balustrade, his eyes alight with mirth. “Watercolour painting, brass rubbing. I bet that’s not half as dirty as it sounds.” He laughs, and I carry on reading. “Cordon bleu cookery lessons and clay pigeon shooting. I wish I’d seen that earlier. If I’d known there was a gun on the premises, we could have shot our way out.”
“Like Bonnie and Clyde,” he says lightly.
“No, that ended badly,” I chide him. “And double-breasted suits don’t flatter me.”
I look down at the list again and shake my head. “Fuck,” I grumble and he laughs.
