Her Best Man

Almost. When the doctor had told D.J. that Dax would be okay, D.J. had left just as secretively as he’d come in, unwilling to put his wounded brother through the distress D.J.’s presence would have no doubt caused.

“Allaire,” he said, “I can understand why you’d feel that way about respecting Dax.”

“You can?”

“Sure. You’ve always been sensitive to how others feel. But Dax can take care of himself. I doubt he’s going around thinking about how his every action is affecting your opinion.”

When her eyes darkened, D.J. wanted to smack himself. He hadn’t meant to insinuate that she was entirely out of Dax’s mind. How could anyone forget her?

Yet he couldn’t say that out loud, not without giving himself away and risking another sure rejection.

“What I meant,” he said, “is that he’s probably trying to get on with life.”

She laughed shortly. “You don’t have to sugarcoat it, D.J. He’s moved on after four years, all right. And…well, so have I. I never would’ve agreed to a divorce if I’d still loved him like a wife should.”

Again, a terrible part of him—a part he wanted to disown—lightened at the news that she didn’t feel for Dax anymore.

If that was even true.

But something about the ingenuous way Allaire watched D.J. told him that she really didn’t have any emotion left for his brother.

Then again…

God, he needed to stop thinking about how she still might be drawn to Dax.

He shoved his free hand into his coat pocket. All he wanted to do was go to her, touch her. Damn it, he really hadn’t gotten over her at all, had he? And here she was, more ignorant than ever as to how he felt.

Was he really putting himself through this again? Had he returned to Thunder Canyon to be that same old “nice guy” who’d never stepped up to take what he wanted?

Of course not. He was a respected businessman, a success story. This lovesick adolescent boy stuff was going to disappear any second now.

Any second.

In the silence, Allaire offered him a tiny smile—a hint of devilishness on the face of an angel—and D.J. went liquid.

Damn it.

“The thing is,” she said softly, “I really missed you. Missed our old talks. Missed how we could sit around and never even have to talk. I’ve missed having you in my life.”

He tried to barricade himself against her, but it was useless. Still, he found himself assuming the old D.J.’s way of fooling her, of being that steady, loyal, nonthreatening best friend who just stood back while everyone else went after their heart’s desire. The kid who knew all too well how it felt to be left behind.

“I missed you, too, Allaire.”

Had he ever.

“So,” she said, her smile widening, even though it was still tentative, “since I can’t be hanging around your restaurant for hours and hours, would you want to drop by after Open-School Night tomorrow so we can catch up?”

In public, he thought. A safe meeting.

She added, “I’d really like to spend more time chatting tonight, but I’ve got to do some touchups on the Thunder Canyon Cowboys set before the performance and then hole up with work. How about it?”

“I’ll be there,” he said, once more finding that he was helpless to deny her what she wanted.

The best friend. The nice guy.

They went on to small talk about her parents and how they were doing, about her teaching and how she liked it, about changes the gold rush had brought to Thunder Canyon. Then, after reminding him that she had to get to the dinner theater before tonight’s seating, Allaire told him the best time to meet her tomorrow, and D.J. walked her to her Jeep.

In the meantime, he ripped into himself for falling back into the same waiting-in-the-wings buddy he’d tried to leave behind. Nothing had changed between him and Allaire, and nothing ever would.

Yet when he got into his pickup and chanced a look in the rearview mirror, his heart flared.

Allaire was still standing outside her Jeep, an expression on her face that he’d never seen before.

An expression he couldn’t even begin to decipher.

A flicker of hope remained, lighting him up as she got into her car and drove off.

Chapter Two

“It was just…off,” Allaire said while touching up a painted stream on a background piece for Thunder Canyon Cowboys.

Tori had gotten restless while evaluating her essays at her apartment and had joined Allaire at the empty dinner theater.

“What do you mean by off?” she asked, a soy-cheese-and-tomato sandwich muffling her words as she sat at a table near the stage. Both she and Allaire had been experimenting with vegetarianism the past couple of months, ever since they’d met while prepping their classrooms during the summer. Little by little, the outgoing “new teacher” had encouraged Allaire to come out of the shell she’d built around herself after the divorce.

“I mean seeing D.J. again was a very different experience.” Allaire stepped away from the backdrop to survey her work, brush poised in her hand. “He didn’t seem like…you know…the old D.J. so much anymore. But then again, he did. Does that make any sense?”

“No.”

Allaire turned back around to find her friend keenly surveying her while leaning back in her faux-buffalo hide chair. Around her, the pre-performance theater stood in dim Old West spectacle, wagon-wheel chandeliers hovering, washboards, saddles and moose heads hanging on the dark plank walls. Large, round shellacked tables stood ready for the beans-and-beef dinners they’d soon be holding. In the meantime, the scent of old wood, must, campfire grub and paint all combined to create an evocative mélange.

Tori was shaking her head. “Allaire, Allaire…”

“What?”

Her friend raised her hands, sandwich and all. “Are you serious? You really didn’t get the dynamics of what was going on this afternoon? Yeesh. I took off and left you two alone when I felt the first couple of vibrations shake the air. So obvious.”

Allaire realized that this was a pivotal moment: she could either open her ears to what Tori was about to say—something she already knew herself but didn’t necessarily want to acknowledge—or she could turn right back around and keep painting herself into the same corner she’d been in for the past ten years or so. A corner filled with frustrated ambitions and torched dreams.

She lifted her eyebrows, inviting Tori to go on.

“You aren’t kids anymore,” her friend said. “And the two of you realize it, but it seems too weird or…something. You don’t fulfill the same niches in each other’s lives, but it’s too discomfiting for you to adjust your lenses.”

Oh, but Allaire had done just that when she’d first seen D.J. in the parking lot. She’d noticed his broader shoulders, a face that had gained more of what a person might call “character.” She’d never understood what that meant, but seeing D.J. today defined it. His eyes spoke of years spent away from his hometown, his skin grown rougher—a man’s shadow-stubbled complexion in lieu of a boy’s baby-smooth one.

At the thought, her stomach flip-flopped, and she barred an arm over it. What would everyone think if they knew D.J. had caught her eye?

“One Traub boy wasn’t enough?”

And she could just hear what Arianna, her older sister, would say. “Why even bother getting involved at all? Love rots.”

However, the worst part would be in having to face her parents. Sure, her mom and dad could handle the small-town gossip with their normal good grace, but Allaire would know what they were thinking all the same. They would silently wonder where their perfect little girl had gone wrong, why she wasn’t as successful in love as she’d been in algebra or literature or her art electives. They would never say aword, yet Allaire would know, deep down, that she’d disappointed them, just as she’d done when she had gotten divorced.

“So,” Tori said, commanding Allaire’s attention, “tell me you’re not going to pretend that you didn’t see it, too. I swear, Allaire, wake up and smell the cupid.”

“Smell the cupid?”

“Or…whatever. Don’t change the subject. It’s not such a bad thing to be interested in someone, you know. Getting divorced didn’t put a scarlet letter on your chest.”

“They didn’t put any kind of mark on me that I didn’t earn.”

“What are you, perfect? You’d be the only one.”

The other woman set her sandwich on her brown-bag wrapping. “You can’t give them the power to dictate your life.”

“I…don’t.” But, oh, she sure did. She’d been born and raised in this town, watched over by the community and held to their expectations. She hadn’t minded, either, because she’d intended to surpass every marker they’d laid out for her, every goal.

Allaire wandered over to rest her paintbrush, then hopped off the stage and joined Tori at the table.

“D.J. was my best friend.” She reached for her quilted hobo bag and riffled through it for a padded photo case. When she opened it, she smiled at D.J. and Dax’s senior pictures. Both were in spiffy suits, Dax looking suave in a smooth matinee-idol way, D.J. looking like he’d rather be yanking off his tie and ducking out of the frame.

“Wow. This is your ex?” Tori said, pointing to Dax.

No surprise—she’d fixated on the elder brother first. Next to Dax, D.J. had always disappeared into the woodwork.

So what had changed about him? Was it maturity that had given him more of an edge, an alluring quality?

“That’s Dax, all right,” Allaire said. “He owns the motorcycle shop near the Clip ’n’ Curl. He used to race professionally. Doesn’t he look the part?”

“Allaire, you have good taste.”

Allaire shrugged, but her friend had already moved on to inspect D.J.’s photo.

“Aw,” she said. “The boy next door.”

At that, Allaire’s heart sank a little. She and D.J. had lost so much, and she wished she knew how to get it back. You didn’t find friends like him growing on trees.

But what if they could piece their relationship back together? Hadn’t today been a start?

Couldn’t it be the same, even with everything that’d happened after high school?

“Seems to me,” Tori said, “that you outgrew Dax and found D.J. today.”

A sense of panic—or maybe it was the shock of truth—zapped Allaire. “Wrong. Even if your appraisal held any grain of truth, I’d never date the brother of an ex-husband. It’d be awkward, to say the least.”

“Are you still in love with Dax or something? Because that’s not what you’ve been telling me every time I want to go to The Hitching Post on a Friday night.”

Allaire was already shaking her head. “I don’t love him anymore—not in that way. There’s still a…fondness, I suppose. We don’t hate each other. There aren’t even hard feelings. Our marriage was like one of those songs that doesn’t have a real ending, if that makes sense. It kind of repeated over and over until it faded to nothing.”

Tori was cocking her head, fully invested, urging Allaire to go on.

“Dax and I started dating in high school, and our feelings really were genuine. You know how it is when you’re younger. At that point, real life hasn’t intruded much. There aren’t any big compromises to be made yet. And we didn’t live with each other before the wedding, though we did get married shortly after high school. I gave up all the plans I’d made, like going to a state college and studying art in Europe. Those things didn’t matter at the time. I loved Dax and that was top priority.”

“And you got resentful eventually.”

Allaire wasn’t so sure it was resentment as much as regret. “Sometimes young love doesn’t mature very well, and that was what happened with us. When I was a girl, I was this…I guess you could say ‘fragile dreamer.’ And when it turned out that I had a buried independent streak—something I hadn’t been very aware of—Dax balked. Not that I blame him. He’d been expecting a wife who would devote her time to being with him on the racing circuit, and that lost its shine for me pretty quickly.”

“Understandable. So while Dax raced, did you start pursuing those old ambitions? Did you go over to Europe for some studying?”

“I wish.” She’d still been Dax’s wife, keeping the home fires burning. “But I did pursue an art education on a different scale. I decided that by going back to school and getting a teaching credential, I could still live a few dreams through my students. I mean, teaching—what a job, right? I’d get to share my love of art while creating some of it on my own, too. But Dax didn’t see it that way because he wanted me to cheer him on in every race. One night when he was off-circuit, he said I’d become a stranger, because I hadn’t minded being his pep club before. I took exception to that and asked him if he seriously thought I was just going to remain the same compliant dreamer I had been in school.”

Even now, that particular epiphany surprised her. It’d taken years for her to develop, yet so many things had stayed the same. She was still too worried about what others thought, and though she was much more sensible nowadays, she would always have a heart prone to dreaming.

That’s why she spent so much time doing freelance work besides her teaching, balancing the fantasy with the reality as she avoided having to face hard questions about life.

“Darlin’—” Tori leaned over the table to place a hand on Allaire’s arm “—you still might have a lot of sweet and fragile in you, but there’s the heart of a lion beneath it all.”

Allaire smiled, wondering if that were true, especially as she rested her gaze on the stage-bound set pieces.

She didn’t see much heart in her work at all.

The next night, D.J. made sure he wrapped up his meetings with the Rib Shack contractors on time and was out the door before the clock struck eight. Allaire had told him that she’d almost be done greeting her students and parents by that hour.

And D.J. wanted her all to himself.

As he parked his pickup in the lot, he told himself not to get excited. First of all, other teachers would still be around as de facto chaperones. Second of all, he shouldn’t expect her to suddenly realize she’d made a mistake in marrying Dax and run to him instead. He knew his old friend better than that. Both of them realized Dax would be standing between them, no matter how hard D.J. might hope that she really saw him—the man who’d been waiting for her to notice—and not his brother.

He walked into the school’s side entrance, moving past a rainbowed sign that said Open-School Night! Allaire had told him that she was based in Mr. Richard’s old classroom, so D.J. headed straight there. Funny how he still recalled these locker-lined halls, even with the changes—a new wing of classrooms, a revamped office area. Even the same stale school air lingered.

When he found Allaire leaning against a wall and chatting with another teacher, he almost tripped over his own boots. His pulse threaded in and out of itself in a demented race.

Her pale hair was up in that spiky bun again, and she was dressed in a beige suit with black piping that reminded him of a Victorian woman. Even her shoes were those black ankle boots that buttoned up the side.

She was his every fantasy, right here, in the flesh, and D.J. didn’t know if he had it in him to ever claim her.

But, again, he hadn’t come back to Thunder Canyon for Allaire. When he’d left, he’d promised himself that he would return only when he truly became a man worthy of winning her, and he wasn’t sure when he’d get to that point. Or if he ever would. Besides, it wasn’t in D.J. to disrespect Dax by taking up with his former wife. Even though D.J. and his sibling hadn’t spoken much over the years—only via phone calls when Dad had passed from a heart attack—they were still related. Still bonded by family, although D.J. hardly felt the connection.

When Allaire spotted him, he could’ve sworn that she was affected, too. Her gaze locked with his, digging into him until his heart blasted against his breastbone, chiseling at it.

Then she stood away from the wall, sending him a cool smile that had him wondering if he’d imagined the moment.

He took that as a hint to approach, his boot steps echoing off the walls like beats of a clock going backward in time.

Nodding at the older female brunette next to Allaire, D.J. said, “I’d forgotten how this place smelled.”

The brunette laughed. “Teenaged bodies. Sweat, perfume and a general sense of wildness.”

“Smoke, too,” D.J. added.

“From the bathrooms.” Allaire gestured down the hall, where a banner advertised the homecoming dance in pink-glitter glory. “We do our best to monitor, but it’s not always good enough.”

Quickly, she introduced D.J. to Mrs. Steph, the PE teacher and softball coach. Then the other woman excused herself, eager to get home to her family.

“Looks like the place cleared out,” he said while Allaire began walking him down the hall, away from her closed classroom.

“We got a rush around six-thirty. Now everyone’s in the family room watching prime-time TV, I suppose.”

Her talk was light, casual, but the ghosts of old kept thickening every word, weighting them with far more than she probably intended.

“You giving me a tour?” he asked, trying diligently to keep himself in check. But all he wanted to do was reach out—just one time—and touch her hair. He imagined it’d be as soft as the shampoo she’d always used: a lavender concoction. Yet now there was a certain kick to the scent that hadn’t existed before. It drew him until he had to fight himself back.

“A tour was the plan.” She grinned up at him, and it was as if they were back ten years, him walking her to physics or U.S. history. “You haven’t seen the new cafeteria yet. It’s our pride and joy.”

“Must be a trip for you to see how things change before your eyes here. It’s weird enough for me. All the benches and windows seem really small now.”

“Perspective, D.J. How can you not see things differently when you’ve come back here as a millionaire?”

The term struck him as uncomfortable. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

Allaire shot him a curious glance. “Why not? You’re almost a Horatio Alger story—a kid who went to seek his fortune in a big city, apprenticing, then discovering he had a real knack for the restaurant business.”

Honestly, D.J. considered his success to be a bit ludicrous, his swollen bank account obscene. He’d never thought making so much money doing something he loved to be possible. But he’d paid a price, and the cost had been losing touch with the woman he’d secretly loved.

“Honestly,” he said, “I’m still not used to it all.”

She smiled, more to herself than him, really. “That’s not surprising. You were never flashy.”

Not like Dax.

Though the thought went unsaid, it was there, a solid specter.

She seemed to realize it, too. Flipping the subject, she said, “I’ll bet you have to pinch yourself every once in a while as a reminder that you can afford fine things, huh?”

She’d hit the nail on the head, as usual. No one else had ever come close to understanding his every thought. Still, she would never guess that he wished he could use his money to fulfill all those dreams Allaire had treasured in high school: moving to Paris to study the exhibits in the Louvre with all the time and care this would require, setting up an easel on the banks of the Seine to paint the sunset over the water.

But none of that mattered anymore. It couldn’t. Hell, even if D.J. ever summoned the courage to tell her how he felt—or, he told himself, how he used to feel—about her, he would always wonder if she was seeing him as the runner-up to the dashing Dax.

D.J. didn’t want to be her consolation prize, especially since he’d spent a lifetime being second best to his sibling—with Allaire, and even with D.J.’s own dad.

When they reached the cafeteria, which was locked for the night, she peeked through the windows, clearly not recognizing that she was tearing D.J. apart.

“Come here.” She waved him to her side.

He hesitated, then obliged her. Her scent filled him up, made him dizzy.

“They put in a food court,” she said. “Don’t you wish we’d had something like that way back when?”

D.J. didn’t give a hang about the cafeteria.

He must’ve taken much too long to answer, because she peered up at him, her soft lips shaped as if to ask a question. Yet she stopped before a sound came out. Then, almost imperceptibly, she put distance between them. It wasn’t even physical space: it was far more devastating because it was mental, emotional.

“I wish you hadn’t gone to Atlanta,” she finally said.

What could he say? I left because, at your wedding, I wanted to die, Allaire. I couldn’t stand to see you pledging yourself to Dax when I should’ve been the one standing with you at the altar instead.

But voicing that wasn’t in anyone’s best interests. However, there was another reason he’d left, one he’d never told her. Maybe now was as good a time as any to do it since the anguish wasn’t so immediate anymore.

“I’d had enough here in Thunder Canyon,” he said. “Enough of a lot of things.”

“Like…what?” She looked as if she regretted bringing up the subject, but there was something about her that seemed to egg him on, too, as if she wanted him to come clean.

Hell, that was probably just a wish begging for fulfillment.

“When we were kids,” he said, “you might’ve noticed that Dax and I weren’t that close. I’m guessing it became even more obvious after you married.”

Allaire turned to lean against the cafeteria window. At the same time, she kept a chasm between them.

“I suspected that you two weren’t bonded. I never knew why, though.”

“That’s because we never enjoyed what you might call a ‘buddy-buddy’ relationship.”

Allaire frowned, processing something in that quick mind of hers. He’d missed watching her think.

“See,” she said, “I would’ve expected you two to be close after your mom died when you were so young.”

Maybe it should’ve been that way. When Mom had gotten in that accident out near the bypass, Dax had been eleven, D.J. ten.

“It happened the opposite way,” he said, noticing that his voice held a note of latent pain. Maybe this was all much closer to the surface than he’d thought. “Instead of bonding with each other in the aftermath, we went into our own personal caves. I became studious, Dax became interested in his motorcycles, just like Dad. They would work together, night after night, not saying anything, but you could tell it made them feel better. It gave them solace.”

“And that put you out in the cold. Oh, D.J., I never realized that.”

“I never told you. Besides, it’s all in the past.”

The lie tasted foreign on D.J.’s tongue, and he realized that he’d never graduated from the profound sense of isolation that had resulted from being ignored by his dad and brother. He wasn’t about to admit that their bond had made him envious. He’d worked too damned hard to overcome it, and just because he was willing to let Allaire in on some explanations didn’t mean she would get any others.

It was best to hide his resentment toward Dax for stealing their father’s attention when their mother had so recently been snatched from their lives, too. D.J. didn’t even like to recognize this acrimony in himself, and his unwillingness to face it had caused the hard feelings to escalate, then fester when Dax had won Allaire’s affections.

D.J. had been the odd man out in so many ways, but he’d always tried to master the complex. All the same, he kept hating himself for never having the bravado to step up and claim the woman he loved, just as he should’ve stepped up to claim his dad’s attention, also. What made things so much worse, though, was that D.J. knew that he—and he alone—was responsible for all this fruitless pining.