Tempting Her Best Friend(2)

She just needed to get him out of their element, away from their everyday routine, to a place they could stretch the boundaries of their relationship. And what better place to do that than the best city on earth known for people taking chances and risks they wouldn’t normally consider?

She’d thought everything through, even taking the day off work to shop for a sexier wardrobe. Everything she owned before today fell under one of three C’s. Conservative, Casual, or Comfortable. But if she had to dress Nightclub Barbie for a few days to get Dillon to see her as a woman and not some asexual being, then that was what she’d do. Anything to ensure success for Operation: Damn, Aly’s Hot and I Totally Want to Do Her.

Her hand clapped over her mouth, and she barely prevented the fermented grapes from shooting out her nose. That name definitely needed some work. Something to think about later.

Smoothing her sleek ponytail with one hand, she drank some more wine and reveled in the warmth as it slid down her throat. She’d already decided to forego her usual one-glass rule tonight. It’s not like she had to go to work the next day. Plus, she needed the liquid courage to play this whole thing off as an impulsive idea and not her long-ago-hatched plan to date her best friend of eighteen years.

Dillon’s Dodge Ram rumbled as he drove up their street. His aftermarket exhaust reliably alerted her of his arrival a good three blocks before he pulled in. Not for the first time, she ran to check her appearance in the mirror on the foyer wall.

Dillon worked as a foreman at his father’s Denver construction company. After wrapping things up and his commute home from the city, he arrived at their adjoined town houses around the same time every day. And if he ever ran late or changed his plans for the evening, she could count on receiving a text. His reliability was one of her favorite things about him. The fact that it stemmed from an understanding of her need for such things made him even more endearing.

Over the course of their lifelong friendship, he’d witnessed her deal with more than her fair share of instability. Her grandmother called it the Miller Curse. Alyssa was the fourth generation of Miller women who were highly intelligent, only children of single mothers whose lovers never stuck around to love and cherish, much less raise their daughters.

Alyssa’s dad had actually been around the most out of the bunch, but it was sporadic at best and extremely damaging to her mother’s psyche at worst. Alyssa had watched the strong woman become a shell of her former self. And all because she loved a man who couldn’t or wouldn’t love her back.

Alyssa refused to end up like her mom. Dillon and she were perfect together and they’d already been in each other’s lives for almost two decades. She would be the first Miller to have a loving, caring man, and tonight she’d drive the first nail in that curse’s coffin.

The sound of his truck door banging shut made her heart leap. A second car door slamming and a woman’s high-pitched voice had Alyssa peeking through her curtains. Dillon faced the dark-haired beauty he’d been seeing off and on over the last couple of months as she stalked over to the side of his truck. She was definitely not happy about something.

Alyssa’s stomach twisted, and she wrapped her arms around her waist for comfort at the sight of Dillon with another woman he’d been intimate with. Earlier in the week he’d told Alyssa this woman had found someone else she was more interested in, implying she’d been the one to walk away and not him. But watching the two of them now, the brunette reaching out to him and Dillon holding her at arm’s length with a hand on her shoulder as he talked to her, it was obvious that he’d been the one to cut and run.

Just like always.

Eventually, he walked her over to her car and helped her into the driver’s seat. She swiped at her face, stared at him for a moment, and then drove off. He watched her car disappear before he turned and strode up to their porch. Alyssa jumped back from the curtains before he noticed she’d seen the entire episode and dashed into the kitchen.

Her hand shook as she picked up her knife and made even slices through an onion. As moisture pricked the backs of her eyes, she told herself it was the result of the potent onion and nothing more. Even if, hypothetically speaking, she was upset, she certainly wouldn’t have any reason to be. After all, him being single could only help her cause. But something was nagging at her about the situation…

Alyssa shook her head and took a deep breath. It was probably just because he’d obviously bent the truth about how the relationship had ended. She wasn’t used to him being dishonest with her about anything so until she found out why, she knew it would bother her.