Free The Best Man for the Job by Lucy King Page A

could be the one to reform him, even if she wanted to, which she didn’t, if she hung around she could well find herself wanting more instead of closure.
    Given everything she’d endured today and the way her emotions had got the better of her it wasn’t entirely surprising. Her confidence and her self-belief had been bashed. Things she’d always thought she’d known had been proved false. And as for her emotions, well, those were all over the place.
    But however justifiable her behaviour today had been she still didn’t like it. She didn’t know what it meant. Didn’t have the energy to work it out.
    Nor did she have the energy for the night of heaven Marcus was no doubt planning, tempting though her body clearly thought it was. She needed space, time and distance to figure out that today was nothing more than a blip, that the sex, even though spectacular, had been just that and that she’d be back to normal in a jiffy.
    So, all in all, she thought, watching the bouquet sail through the air and land in Marcus’ hands, it was lucky she’d booked herself on the seven-o’clock train back to London.
    * * *
    God only knew where the suggestion he join Celia in the drive for the throwing of the bouquet had come from. All Marcus knew was that he’d caught that flash of vulnerability again and he’d found himself wondering how the hell he could have ever thought her uptight and judgemental when she clearly had a core of marshmallow. A deeply hidden core of marshmallow, admittedly, but there nevertheless.
    And as a result of the glimpse he’d got of it, he was now waving goodbye to Dan and Zoe, who were heading off on a two-month honeymoon in South America in a vintage convertible, while clutching a bunch of pale pink roses and feeling a bit of a berk. But he reckoned he could live with that. Especially if it meant that Celia felt obliged to express her gratitude for his chivalry in bed later.
    As his pulse began to race at the thought of the long, hot, steamy night ahead, during which he’d make sure she expressed her gratitude over and over again, Marcus wondered if she’d be up for meeting up once back in London.
    Now that they’d lost the hostility he wouldn’t mind getting to know her a bit better. He might have been acquainted with her for close on the twenty years he’d known Dan, but he didn’t really have a clue how she worked. As an adolescent he hadn’t been interested, at eighteen he’d just wanted to get into her pants and as an adult the animosity had acted as a barrier to thinking of her as anything but a thorn in his side. Now, though, he was thinking he’d quite like to find out.
    Which was odd because up to this point he’d never really wanted to explore the minds of the women he’d dated. It wasn’t that he didn’t think they’d be all that interesting. In fact, he was sure they would be, because he didn’t date bimbos. The women he went out with were bright and entertaining, yet despite that he’d just never been sufficiently engaged to want to try to dig all that far beneath the surface, even with those who lasted weeks instead of only one night. He didn’t really know why this was, it was just the way it had always been.
    Celia, however, intrigued him. Her mind, her work ethic, her ambition and her drive as much as the spectacular body beneath the dress. With hindsight she always had fascinated him, even when she’d been needling him. Maybe particularly when she’d been needling him. And he didn’t really know the reason for that either.
    What he did know, however, was that he’d like to see more of her. Literally, of course, because he still hadn’t seen her naked, but also because this thing between them deserved a lot more exploration.
    And while anything long-term clearly wasn’t an option when they had polar-opposite views on marriage and family, that didn’t mean that if she was up for it they couldn’t have some fun in the meantime, did it?
    In fact, why wait till