Best Man...with Benefits

May the best man sin...

Lauren Sanger is practically the perfect maid of honor, except for one tiny flaw. She hates the best man. Jackson Monaghan is beyond hot—his body is the stuff of sexy lady dreams—but he’s just such a jerk. So when a prank lands them in the same bed, Lauren should have flipped out...instead of having the best sex of her life with the best man!

Jackson can’t figure out how two people with anti-chemistry during the day can have such a wickedly hot sexual chemistry at night. Worse still, he wants more. Enough to dare Lauren into doing the last thing she should be doing—him. But friends with benefits is one thing...enemies with benefits is quite another.

He found himself touching warm, soft female skin...

What?

Oh, she smelled good.

Jackson eased closer. The curving line of her shoulder captivated him. He couldn’t resist—he put his lips where her shoulder met her throat. A pulse beat there, slow and steady. His hand moved downward to capture her breast.

And then she made a sound like a purr and turned to him.

He raised his head to look at her more carefully in the darkness of the hotel room and at the same time she opened her eyes.

His heart stopped. Her eyes opened wide.

Holy hell...

He knew this woman’s name perfectly. And most of the time wished he didn’t.

What was Lauren doing in his bed?

Dear Reader,

If you’ve been to the famous Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, then Hotel Messina might seem a little familiar. I love that part of the world. When I dreamed up my latest Mills & Boon Blaze I was living in Southern California, so it was natural to incorporate my favorite places, including Napa and San Francisco.

When I thought about plot, I drew on the best plotter of them all, Shakespeare. This is my riff on Much Ado About Nothing, with the cynical couple who banter and snipe at each other, but are deep down crazy about each other, and the second couple, the ones who are in love with their ideal vision of love, but the minute the going gets tough they start to fall apart. Naturally, this is a modern and much sexier tale, but I owe William for the initial inspiration.

As always, I love to hear from readers. Please come visit me on the web at nancywarren.net.

Happy Reading!

Nancy Warren

Best Man...with Benefits

USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR

Nancy Warren

USA TODAY bestselling author NANCY WARREN lives in the Pacific Northwest, where her hobbies include skiing, hiking and snowshoeing. She’s the author of more than forty books and novellas for Mills & Boon and has won several awards. Visit her website at nancywarren.net.

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For Elizabeth Jennings and the Matera Brainstormers.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Extract

Copyright

1

QUESTION: HOW DO you know when someone is truly your best friend? Answer: you love her enough to put up with her semi-douchy fiancé and his completely douchy best buddy.

Asked and answered, Lauren Sanger thought, as she sat on a private patio of Hotel Messina, the swish resort located on a small island off the California coast where, in a few hours, she’d be maid of honor in her best friend’s wedding.

Built at the turn of the century, Hotel Messina had housed royalty and A-list celebrities, and been the setting for movies and thousands of weddings.

Amy Ruehl had dreamed of getting married here since she and Lauren had first seen the hotel in a movie back when they were kids. Her parents could afford the outrageous expense, and all the guests had made the trek over to spend the night, celebrate Amy and Seth’s wedding, and then go back to their much more mundane lives.

Or maybe that was just Lauren.

The wedding would take place at four in the afternoon. That’s what it said on the thick vellum invitations, and with the military precision with which the wedding planner and hotel staff had worked this thing, that’s precisely when the ceremony would begin.

It was two now, and the bride and her maid of honor were taking a late lunch break. Their hair was done, makeup awaiting final touches, and their dresses were pressed and neatly hanging.

She and Amy already wore their fancy underwear beneath the thick hotel robes with the gold M logo on the breast pockets.

While they munched on salad and cold cuts and sipped wine, they enjoyed a spectacular view of the white sand beaches and summer blue water that surrounded the hotel. The weather was perfect. A June day without a cloud in the sky and waves that seemed to laugh as they hit the beach.

“Are you nervous?” she asked her best friend. They’d talked about their weddings a lot when they were young. Amy was a firm believer in fairy tales and happy endings. Lauren not so much, but she couldn’t be happier that her BFF’s dream was about to come true. Seth wouldn’t have been her choice, but Amy was crazy about him and that was all that mattered to Lauren.

Amy shook her head, a smile of pure happiness on her face. She always took everything in stride and didn’t worry much about the future. Lauren wondered what it would be like to be such an optimist and was fairly certain she’d never know.

“Seth is the man I’ve waited my whole life for,” Amy said. Her voice trembled ever so slightly as she added, “I love him so much.”

“No messing up the makeup,” Lauren warned, leaning forward to pat her friend’s hand.

Amy blinked rapidly, dispelling the momentary wetness. “My only wish is that my best friend and Seth’s best friend could like each other, at least a little bit.”

Not even for her best friend would she lie and feign any affection for Jackson Monaghan. All she said was, “Hey, we both love you guys. That’s all that matters.”

“But we’re going to be seeing you two all the time. You’re the first people we’ll have for dinner in our new place, you’ll be the godmother of our first child, obviously, and Jackson will be the god—”

“You’re pregnant?” Lauren’s voice rose. How had she never suspected?

Amy waved a freshly manicured hand in front of her face. “No. I’m just saying.”

“Stop planning so far ahead.” She put a hand to her chest. “And stop freaking me out.”

Amy’s face suddenly took on an expression that Lauren would call fatuous if Amy wasn’t her best friend. She only wore that expression for one person.

She followed the bride’s gaze and, sure enough, two men came into view on the sand below them. Seth, the groom, and Jackson, the best man.

Clearly, the routine for the men of a wedding party was a lot more lax than for the women. The guys were walking barefoot in the sand, wearing their board shorts and sunglasses. They’d ditched their shirts.

She could picture the pair of them scrambling to get dressed fifteen minutes before the ceremony started.

They were a nice-looking pair, she’d give them that.

Seth was a little on the chunky side. He’d been a football player in college and working a desk job, he’d gone a bit to seed. Jackson, on the other hand, was pretty drool-worthy, she had to admit. He sported the torso of an athlete—no doubt, the result of regular workout sessions with a personal trainer at a fancy gym somewhere. He had the permanent five-o’clock shadow of a jaded rock star. His eyes were an Irish blue; his hair a tousled brown that she suspected was salon-highlighted. Everything about him annoyed her.

She scratched her arm. That’s what Jackson was like, she thought. Like an itch. The more she tried to get rid of him, the more he irritated her.

“Why don’t you like Jackson?” Amy broke into her thoughts. “Every woman I know is crazy about him.”

And that was one more thing that irritated her about Jackson Monaghan. He strutted around as if he was God’s gift, and the sad part was plenty of women were apparently foolish enough to buy in to the ridiculous notion.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s a chemistry thing.”

Amy sighed, finished her wine. “Well,” she said, “I’m going to do everything I can to get you two to like each other.”

Oh, goodie.

* * *

JACKSON MONAGHAN LOVED the feel of sun on his skin and sand beneath his feet. Wearing a monkey suit and being in a wedding party, not so much.

But, for the guy who’d pretty much saved his life, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do.

He and Seth went way back. When Jackson had lost his folks, his grandparents hadn’t known what to do with a grieving twelve-year-old. They’d packed him up and sent him to boarding school.

He’d never been exposed to rich people. Didn’t know shit about life in a dorm, and the other boys had sensed weakness the way sharks smell blood.

He had been scrawny back then. Sensitive. He’d thought nothing could be worse than losing his parents to a car wreck. He was wrong.

Those first few weeks of boarding school were brutal. Until Seth stepped up. Seth was the kind of kid the other boys respected. He was big, tough, not so good at school but great at sports. From Seth, Jackson had learned how to be one of the boys. And he’d learned how to fight back.

So, if Seth wanted him to show up in a tux and pass a couple of rings to a minister and make a speech, he was down.

He wasn’t sure Seth had made the best choice in brides, but his buddy was clearly convinced that Amy was an angel and he wasn’t one to make waves. The fiancée’s best friend, though?

Ouch. Lauren Sanger was hot, no question. But that mouth that looked as though it had been designed to kiss sweetly and talk dirty mostly hurled insults. At him.

“In a couple of hours, I’ll be a married man,” Seth suddenly said.

“Yep.”

“I always knew I’d get married, have some kids—it’s what a man does. But now that it’s here, I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe you’re getting married, either.” Everything was going to change. The beers after work, the weekly squash games, the poker games that lasted all night, the Sunday afternoons spent tossing a football around in the park, the snap decisions to fly across the country to watch a hockey or a football game. All that would be over.

“Nothing’s going to change,” Seth said, sounding almost desperate.

“Of course, nothing will change,” Jackson assured him, knowing that nothing would ever be the same.

“Amy’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” Seth announced. He’d taken to gushing sentiments like this, and Jackson never knew what the correct response was. Usually he said something like, “That’s great.”

“That’s great,” he said now.

Seth stooped to pick up a smooth, round pebble. He turned and tried to skim it across the waves, but the pebble bounced once and sank.

“I just wish you and Lauren could get along.”

“Probably never going to happen.”

“What’s the deal with you two, anyway? She’s gorgeous, smart, funny.”

“I don’t know. Some kind of weird chemistry thing.” He’d thought gorgeous, smart and funny, too, the first time he’d met Lauren. But from that first conversation on, they’d pretty much disagreed on everything. She seemed to spare no effort to get up his nose. And, being a scrapper with a lot of Irish in him, he gave it right back to her.

Desperate to change the subject, he said, “But Amy’s great.”

That got them off the tricky subject of Lauren and they passed the rest of their time talking about Amy and Seth’s plans for the future. Seth had gone to work for his family’s real estate firm and Amy came from money, so it wasn’t as if their future was uncertain.

Not like his. With his brains and his education in software design, he’d been recruited by all the big firms, but he’d chosen to throw in his lot with a start-up. He’d liked that they were involved in clean energy, harvesting wind and wave power. Jackson didn’t have any money. His grandparents had spent what little money his folks had left on that boarding school and given him what was left to pay for university. With no money to invest, he relied on his own hard work. Going for the start-up over the sure thing was the Irish in him asserting itself again, he thought. He preferred the gamble, where he could seriously make a difference to a company’s future, to being just another software engineer at a global social networking company.

He and Seth returned to the hotel with barely enough time to shower and change.

The bride and groom had opted for a garden wedding with a ballroom booked as a bad weather backup, but one look at the sky told Jackson that no backup plan would be needed. Seth and Amy were probably the luckiest couple he’d ever known. Nothing ever went wrong for either of them. They were loved, pampered, rich and nauseatingly happy with each other. Of course there wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky on their wedding day.

Jackson took a final glance in the full-length mirror in his hotel room before heading out. His tie was straight, fly done up. Rings in one pocket, speech in another. He was good to go.

His room was on the third floor where most of the bridal party and a few of the guests were staying. The bride and groom were spending their wedding night in the penthouse bridal suite and the remainder of the guests were scattered throughout the hotel.

Seth knocked on his door and he opened it. “Ready to do this thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” And they strode off down the hall.

The wedding planner had given them a staging area in the lobby, and they showed up with a minute or two to spare. The woman standing there with a headset and a clipboard wasn’t the main planner. She was some kind of assistant. She checked them out, stepped forward and straightened Seth’s tie. “You have the rings?” she asked Jackson, and he nodded.

She spoke into a headset. “I have the groom and best man ready to go.”

They stood around for a few minutes like soldiers waiting to go into battle. It would have been less nerve-racking if there were more guys in the platoon than just him and Seth. But for all that she’d wanted a fancy wedding, Amy had insisted she only wanted Lauren to stand up for her. Which meant Seth only got a best man. No groomsmen.

The assistant pulled out two florist’s boxes, and he was forced to stand there while she attached a white rose boutonniere to his jacket. The smell of roses always reminded him of the only funeral he’d ever attended. He hated that smell.

“And you’re cleared to go,” the young woman said to them, as though they were a pair of jets on a runway.

“Good luck, buddy,” he said.

Seth turned and gave him an awkward hug. They slapped each other on the back, and then they made their way out to the wedding venue.

The garden looked like something out of a cheesy movie he would never watch. Something with Hugh Grant in it and a load of English accents. There were flowers everywhere—on a rose arbor that he and Seth had to walk under, on the chairs lined up precisely on the lawn where the guests were already seated, and all over the gazebo where the ceremony would take place. A harp was playing softly.

The guests were dressed so well, some of the women in hats, that he barely recognized anyone.

He trod down the aisle and paused, as they’d rehearsed, in front of the minister, who consulted a book so earnestly it looked as though he was refreshing himself on the words of the marriage ceremony.

Behind him, he heard shuffling and low conversation. Somebody was sniffling. Crying already? Or allergies? he wondered idly.

After a minute or two, the intro to “Here Comes the Bride” started up. He knew the piece had a real name, but he only ever heard it played at weddings.

He and Seth both turned, as did every person in the audience.

Lauren started walking up the aisle.

He might find spending time with her as fun as, say, stumbling into a hive of hornets and escaping only to land in a field of poison ivy, but he had to admit she looked good.

Gorgeous, even.

Her dress was a pale green that left her shoulders bare. He’d never really noticed what nice curves the woman had or that her legs were spectacular.

She wore her dark hair piled high and whoever had done her makeup had highlighted her big, dark eyes and colored her lips so they looked plump and kissable.

As though she felt his gaze on her, Lauren looked his way and he felt sucker punched.

Quickly, he averted his gaze but not before he’d seen her eyes widen and felt a completely unexpected and absolutely unwanted stab of lust.

That was the trouble with weddings, he’d always thought. They made a person act like a fool. People were forever hooking up at weddings with girls they wouldn’t be caught dead with normally.

He wasn’t going there.

Even as his breath caught in his throat, he assured himself he wasn’t going there.

2

LAUREN WENT THROUGH the motions of being the perfect maid of honor. She took the bouquet from Amy when it was time for her and Seth to exchange rings. Helped her adjust her dress after she and Seth had kissed and they were officially married, then fell in behind the beaming bride and groom with Jackson by her side.

There was an invisible force field between her and the best man. They couldn’t stand each other, so what had that strange moment been about when he’d stared at her as though he’d never seen her before and she’d felt for a second as though she couldn’t breathe?

No doubt he’d seen as much crazy hooking up at weddings as she had. Or maybe he was one of those guys who thought bridesmaids always wanted sex.

She’d rather have sex with—well, she couldn’t think of anybody she’d rather have sex with right at the moment, but the point was she didn’t want to have sex with Jackson Monaghan.

Although, looking around the crowd at the number of women checking him out, she seemed to be the only single woman who didn’t.

They were stuck side by side in the receiving line, and she shook hands and kissed cheeks and smiled politely as guests passed by on the way to congratulate the bride and groom. A woman named Cynthia who had gone to school with her and Amy held on to Jackson’s hand a little too long.“You look so good in a tux,” she gushed. Then, still holding his hand, she turned to Lauren. “Doesn’t he? Doesn’t he look good in a tux?”

“Yes. He looks like you could slip him a twenty and get seated at the best table in the house.”

“Oh, I know exactly where I’d seat you,” he said to her, his eyes narrowing.

Cynthia giggled awkwardly and moved on.

She blinked her eyes. “Not the best table? What would that take? Fifty bucks?”

He squinted his eyes like a gunslinger at high noon. “We could work together. In that dress you look like the cigarette girl at the bar in Mad Men.”

There was a break in the stream of guests coming down the receiving line. Amy turned to her and said, “How are you holding up?”

“Fine. Except Jackson thinks I look like the cigarette girl at the bar in Mad Men.”

Amy’s eyes grew wide. “That’s so weird. That’s exactly what you said when you first tried on the dress.”

It was one thing to say it about yourself, and another thing to have a guy say it about you. But Amy had already turned to greet the next guest who stopped before her.

The wedding was designed so that guests could enjoy drinks and appetizers outside while the wedding party had their photos taken and then move inside for dinner and dancing later.

Amy was so happy it was impossible not to feel happy for her and an equally elated Seth, pleased everything had worked out for them and hopeful for their future.

The wedding party spent an hour with a professional photographer who had the easiest job in the world since the location was nothing but one big photo op and Seth and Amy were two blissful, attractive people.

But Gunter, the photographer, was German and a perfectionist. He took ages setting up each shot, ordering his assistant to move Amy’s bouquet slightly to the left, waiting for the slight breeze to drop before snapping a photo of the newlyweds.

Then he brought Jackson and Lauren into the photos. They stood stiffly side by side, not touching. Gunter stared through his viewfinder, shook his head, muttered, “Nein,” and then muttered some more in German. He stepped forward and placed Lauren’s bouquet in her right hand and took her left. He picked up Jackson’s right hand and posed his arm so that Lauren rested her left wrist over his, her palm resting on the back of his right hand. Gunter then turned the two of them so they angled toward the bridal couple, which put her body up against the best man’s.

She felt ridiculous and awkward with the warmth of his arm beneath hers and the feel of his hand under her palm. She felt the rigid hardness in him that was probably a combination of muscle tone and the same tension she felt.

“Smile like this is the happiest day of your life,” Gunter instructed them.

“I’m not that good an actress,” she muttered before pulling out a fake smile for the camera.

Amy suddenly turned, breaking the stiff pose. “Isn’t this fun?” she cried. “Can you imagine anything better?”

“Being trapped in an airless glass tank crawling with tarantulas?” Jackson said softly.

“Swimming with sharks while bleeding from an artery?” Lauren said.

“Plunging to earth right after the parachute doesn’t open?” he countered.

She was so glad when the photo session was over and they were released to join the party.

Even though Amy and her mother had tried to keep the numbers down, there were well over a hundred guests. Including the frat boys, as she and Amy called Seth’s school friends.

The frat boys had all grown up together in a fancy boarding school, and as far as Lauren could tell, they’d never outgrown their schoolboy pranks.

If Amy and Seth walked into the bridal suite and found a naked porn star reclining on the bed, or a copy of Sex for Dummies on Seth’s pillow, she wouldn’t be surprised.

She wandered among the guests, chatting to those she knew, making small talk with strangers. Her index finger throbbed from where she’d burned it last night. She’d stayed up late finishing her wedding gift for Amy and Seth. She was a stained-glass artisan and she’d completed a tricky window for the townhouse Amy and Seth had bought in downtown San Francisco with some generous financing from their parents.

She hoped Amy liked the piece. It was one she was really proud of. She fished an ice cube from the glass of ice water she was drinking and held it to her sore finger.