“Let what creep up on you?” Lia asked blankly. “You still fit into your high school uniform. Your weight has remained constant since your late teens.”
“Does this have anything to do with the stuff the aunties were saying last night?” Daisy asked, and Daff laughed.
“They’ve had a lot to say over the years and I haven’t let it bother me yet,” she dismissed and refused to meet their skeptical eyes, digging into her horrible Caesar salad without dressing—eww—with pretend relish.
“But you were eating those canapés last night,” Lia reminded her, her sweet face screwed up in confusion.
“I started the diet this morning,” Daff informed her around a mouthful of lettuce. “Look, can we stop talking about this? I’m not the first woman in the world to eat a salad, for God’s sake.”
“But . . .” Daisy began, but her voice trailed off when Mason’s hand dropped over hers and gave it a quelling squeeze, obvious to everyone at the table. Daisy bit her lip and focused her frown on her glass of wine instead.
Happy that the subject had been dropped, Daff crunched another mouthful of crisp, bland, water-flavored lettuce and tried her best to look like she was enjoying it.
“So last night’s party was—”
“Wait, that’s it? No well-meaning intervention for your clearly delusional sister?” Spencer’s incredulous voice spoke over Lia’s, and Daff bit her lip before leveling a glare at him.
“Back off, Carlisle, this is none of your business,” she gritted, and he met her glare unflinchingly.
“You’re hating every bite of that salad,” he stated, so much arrogant masculine certainty in his voice.
“Still none of your business,” she reminded him, and he shook his head, looking genuinely pissed off. She had no idea why he was so offended by her salad. His reaction seemed unnecessarily extreme. She speared a slice of cucumber with her fork, bloodthirstily wishing it was his thickly muscled thigh. Like she needed his stupid opinion. Like she didn’t have enough people telling her what she should be, how she should look, talk, act, and feel. She didn’t need another voice to add into the crazy mix.
Daisy eyed Spencer and Daff apprehensively.
“This isn’t going to be a problem, is it?” she asked bluntly, and both Daff and Spencer blinked at her in confusion until she elaborated. “The best man/maid of honor thing? I won’t have to be refereeing you guys at every turn, will I? Because that would be exhausting.”
“They’re both adults, Daisy,” Mason said with an affable smile, while his cold eyes promised instant retribution to the next person who upset his fiancée. Whoa. It was the first glimpse Daff had had of lethal Special Ops Mason, and she gulped a bit. “I’m sure they’ll be able to work through their differences.” The silent or else tacked on to the end of that sentence was clear as a bell.
“No problem here,” Spencer said with an easy shrug, his unfathomable scrutiny raking over Daff with frigid indifference. And she struggled to achieve a similar expression on her face.
“Yeah, none whatsoever.” Daff hoped her smile looked sincere, even though it felt unnatural. She ducked her head and went back to her salad, signaling an end to the discussion. The rest went back to discussing the previous night’s party, while both Spencer and Daff remained silent.
Daff continued to poke at her salad, not even pretending to eat it now, and when she caught Spencer’s critical gaze on her again, she exhaled sharply and, heartily fed up with his judgmental crap, excused herself before escaping to the bathroom.
It was a unisex bathroom, nothing fancy, just a single room with four stalls. And it was blessedly empty now that the lunchtime crowd was thinning. She rinsed her face with cool water and swore softly when she reached for the paper towel dispenser, only to find it empty.
“Typical,” she muttered beneath her breath before slamming into one of the cubicles and dragging some toilet paper off the roll. It was the horribly cheap, soft paper that broke when you so much as folded it. She crumpled a handful and dabbed her face with it, cringing when she felt bits sticking to her damp skin.
The door opened, letting in the noise from the restaurant, and light footsteps came all the way to her cubicle. Daff looked up, a resigned sigh escaping when she saw Lia leaning against the cubicle door, arms folded over her chest.
“So, seriously, what’s up with you and Spencer?” Lia asked without preamble, and Daff sucked in an irritated breath.
“Absolutely nothing. You know Spencer and I have been amicable enemies for years now.”
“I know no such thing.” Daff was so focused on her sister that she only dimly registered the noise level increasing when the restroom door opened again. “You never seemed to actively dislike the guy, and he definitely didn’t dislike you. Whatever is going on now seems different.”
“It’s not. I’m just not used to seeing so much of him. He’s better in small doses, right?”
“Spencer’s a nice guy.”
“He’s okay. Just not very interesting. I mean, the guy is good-looking, if you go for the big, hulking types, but that’s about it. He has the personality of a mushroom. Bland, boring, insipid. And yes, I know those words all mean the same thing, but, I mean, can you say boring? How can so much hotness house so much blahness?” Daff felt nasty saying the words, but it was better than letting on how she really felt. Or how uncomfortable she felt around him lately and how much she wished she had cultivated a different relationship with him. One that didn’t make her always seem like a rampant bitch. She hadn’t been kind or fair to Spencer Carlisle, she knew that, and the childish interactions of her youth had somehow bled into her adult relationship with him. Well, if it could be called a relationship.
She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she barely noticed Lia’s gasp and horrified step back. It was only when Lia swore—something the younger woman never, ever did—that she tuned back in to the present and to the unpleasant reality that Spencer Carlisle was standing behind Lia. He was glaring down at Daff with an expression on his face that was shocked, pissed off, and hurt all at the same time. It was the latter—quickly disguised—that hit her right in the gut, and she lifted a shaking hand to her mouth as she tried to formulate the apology that he deserved.
She didn’t get so much as a squeak out before his lips compressed and he swiveled on his heel to leave the restroom.
“Shit,” Daff whispered, and Lia was staring at her with eyes so huge they practically swallowed her face.
“How could you say all those terrible things about him?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“Look there’s no need for you to get all uptight about it, okay? I’ll apologize to him and fix it. He’s a guy, he’s probably shrugged it off already. Water off a duck’s back and all that.”
Lia didn’t look very convinced, and, truthfully, Daff felt like a complete jerk, but for God’s sake, why the hell did he feel the need to eavesdrop on them in the first place? Didn’t he know that eavesdroppers never heard good things about themselves? Okay, so maybe he’d been coming to use the bathroom, but couldn’t he have waited until they had returned to the table? He knew it was a unisex bathroom; it was super awkward—and a little creepy—to come in while she and Lia were using it.
She scrubbed her hands over her face and winced when she felt damp bits of toilet paper rolling beneath her palms. She wiped her cheeks on her shoulders, hoping she got most of the paper off, and gestured for Lia to follow her.
When they rejoined the table, everything seemed normal. Spencer and Mason both got to their feet and held out Lia’s and Daff’s chairs. It was something she had found corny about them in high school. They had always done cringey stuff like that. Held doors, helped girls into their coats . . . smarmy, nerdy stuff that seemed to come straight out of old movies. Like they had learned their manners and mannerisms from old-school, long-dead actors in musicals. Recently, watching Mason’s interactions with Daisy, Daff had started to find it charming and sweet. And with the insight that she had lacked as a teenager, she wondered if indeed the brothers hadn’t learned their old-world chivalry from movies. They’d certainly had no other role models around to teach them.
Once they were all seated again, she lifted her eyes to Spencer’s face, but his expression was carefully neutral and he kept his eyes averted. He didn’t seem particularly disturbed by anything she had said earlier, and she wondered if maybe she had imagined the hurt she’d seen in his eyes.
Lia was completely unsettled and upset and kept trying to do things for Spencer. When he reached for a napkin, she grabbed it before he could and handed it to him; if he wanted salt, she passed it to him before he could fully formulate the question. She still looked on the verge of tears, and when she took the saltshaker from him before he could place it on the table, he smiled and took her shaking hand and brought it to his lips for a kiss.
He leaned over and whispered something into her ear, and whatever he said seemed to release Lia’s tension. She practically melted and favored him with a lovely smile, which he returned warmly.