The Second Best Man

Chapter Two

“Cass!” Wren’s voice cut bright and easy across the terrace, utterly unaware that she’d just detonated something. “Come here, you have to officially meet Eli, best man, professional grump, surprisingly good at picking centerpieces”

There was no version of this where Cass could pretend she hadn’t seen him. She’d been caught looking. He’d been caught looking back. So she did the only thing she knew how to do in rooms like this one: she smoothed her expression into something pleasant and unreadable, and she let Wren pull her across the terrace like nothing at all was wrong.

Up close, he was worse.

Five years had sharpened him rather than softened him; the boyish edges she remembered were gone, replaced by something more deliberate, more contained, like a man who’d learned to hold himself very still so nothing important could get out. He wore the stillness the way his whole family wore money: like it had never once occurred to him he might need to explain it.

“Eli,” Wren said, “this is Cass. My maid of honor, my best friend, the only person who’s ever successfully told my mother no and lived. Cass, Eli Marchetti.”

“We’ve met,” Eli said.

His voice hadn’t changed either. That was almost the worst part five years ago, and it still landed in her chest like a hand closing around something.

“Have you?” Wren looked between them, delighted, missing the temperature entirely. “Small world.”

“Small town,” Cass said. “It has a way of doing that.”

Something flickered across Eli’s face not quite a smile, not quite anything Cass could name, and he extended a hand like they were strangers, like there wasn’t a hallway five years and forty feet from where they were standing that neither of them had ever mentioned out loud.

Cass looked at his hand for a beat too long before she took it.

His grip was steady. Hers wasn’t, and she hated that he’d know it.

“Cass Reyes,” she said, like he needed the introduction. Like he hadn’t already carved himself a permanent, unwelcome apartment in the worst parts of her memory.

“I know,” Eli said, and something about the way he said it quietly, carefully, like he was picking his way across ice made her want to either laugh or throw her champagne in his face. She hadn’t decided which.

“Well,” Wren said, oblivious to the current running under the small talk, “now that the awkward introductions are out of the way, Eli, tell her about the seating situation. Actually, no, don’t; she’ll murder me before the wedding even happens. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”

“Tell me what,” Cass said, too fast.

Wren just grinned, already being pulled away by someone else, already three conversations ahead of this one. “Tomorrow! Ten a.m., the planning office. Don’t be late, I love you, bye.

And then she was gone, swallowed by the party, and Cass was standing alone on the Wentworth Club terrace with the one person in Harbor’s Rest she’d built her entire adult life around never having to speak to again.

The silence stretched. Somewhere behind them, a string quartet started on something slow and expensive.

“You look well,” Eli said finally, which was such a strange, formal, useless thing to say that Cass almost laughed for real this time.

“Do I?”

“You do.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “The pleasantries. We don’t have to pretend this is normal.”

Something shifted behind his eyes not quite a flinch, but close enough that she noticed. “No,” he agreed. “We don’t.”

“Good. Then I’m going to go find the bar, and we can go back to not speaking, and everyone can be spared the trouble of watching us be civil at each other for the next.” She stopped. Did the math she hadn’t let herself do yet. “How long is this wedding, exactly?”

“Six months of planning,” Eli said. “The wedding itself is in October.”

Six months. Cass felt something cold drop through her stomach.

“Right,” she said. “Well. I’m sure our paths won’t cross much.”

Eli didn’t answer that right away, and there was something in his silence, something careful, something that looked almost like guilt, though Cass couldn’t imagine what he’d have left to feel guilty about after five years of getting exactly what he wanted that made the back of her neck prickle.

“Cass,” he said slowly, “did Wren not tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“The seating situation, she mentioned.” He said it like he already regretted being the one to say it. “The wedding planner paired the bridal party for duties. Fittings, tastings, vendor meetings. Maid of honor with the best man.”

Cass went very still.

“For the next six months,” Eli said, “we’re going to be doing all of it together.”

Behind them, the string quartet swelled, and somewhere across the terrace, someone laughed too loud, and Cass Reyes stood frozen in the gold light with her heart going hard and fast against her ribs, thinking that whatever she’d braced herself for when she agreed to come back to Harbor’s Rest, it had not been this.