Read the book: «Falling For The Wrong Brother»

Chapter One

Why did wedding dresses have to be so white?

The question flitted through Maggie Spencer’s mind as she hurried down the tree-lined street in Stonecreek, Oregon, the town that had been her family’s home and passion for over a hundred years. Away from the First Congregational Church, away from her family and friends and from her remorseful, apologetic and cheating fiancé.

Oh, yes. Far away from Trevor Stone.

Hurried might not be the right word. It was difficult to hurry wearing five pounds of satin and lace plus high heels that pinched her feet to the point that she was ready to lop off a baby toe just to ease the pain.

She refused to take off the shoes because the physical discomfort distracted her from the ache in her chest. Tears threatened each time she thought of the repercussions of running away from her wedding five minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin.

The clock in the tower overlooking the town square a few blocks away began to chime, echoing the rhythmic lurch in her stomach. The wedding was starting.

Without her.

She gathered bunches of fabric in her hands and draped the dress’s train over one arm. Grammy had insisted on a dress with a train, mainly so Maggie’s younger sister would have a reason to hold it, putting Morgan on display for the good people of Stonecreek.

“It worked for Pippa,” Grammy had commented drily. “Morgan’s backside is just as worthy of going viral if you ask me.”

Although no one needed to ask Grammy’s opinion because she was happy to offer it unsolicited.

A car drove past, honked once. It wasn’t every day that a bride took a stroll in her wedding gown. Sweat trickled between Maggie’s shoulder blades, despite the June breeze fluttering the blooms on the oak trees that canopied the street. Not a cloud marred the robin’s-egg-blue sky, a stroke of good luck for the marriage, according to Maggie’s grandmother.

So much for positive omens.

Maggie kept her gaze forward, sending out a silent prayer the honking driver was no one she knew. Then again, most everyone Maggie knew was waiting in the church. Close to three hundred people crammed into the pews to witness the two most powerful families in Stonecreek finally united by marriage.

Or not.

She picked up the pace, wincing as her heel caught on a crack in the pavement and her ankle rolled. She’d just righted herself when a hulking SUV pulled up next to her.

“I’m fine,” she called, holding up a hand and keeping her eyes trained forward as she lifted her dress higher off the ground.

“You’re going the wrong way, Maggie May,” a voice said, the tone a deep timbre that sent shivers along her bare arms.

The fabric dropped from her hands as that voice ricocheted through her. The tip of one heel tangled in her wedding dress, and she tripped and fell hard to the pavement. She managed to get herself to all fours, tears pricking the backs of her eyes, as much from embarrassment as the sting to her palms and knees.

She focused on drawing in a few deep breaths, but the air escaped her lungs when a pair of scuffed cowboy boots moved into her line of sight.

“Need a hand?”

“I’m fine,” she repeated, giving a little shake of her head. A thousand rattlesnakes could have her surrounded and she still wouldn’t accept help from Griffin Stone.

Faking composure, Maggie started to stand, then yelped when her right ankle screamed in protest.

“You’re hurt.” Griffin wrapped his hands around her arms and lifted her to her feet like she weighed nothing.

Glancing up through her lashes, she saw that a decade away from Stonecreek had honed him into every inch an alpha male, rugged and broad-shouldered. His dark blond hair was longer, curling at the ends as it skimmed the collar of the crisp white dress shirt he wore under a suit jacket. She knew he was well over six feet—even in her heels he towered over her. A few years older than she was, he’d been the cutest boy in high school—and the wildest by far—but now his looks were downright lethal.

“I twisted my ankle,” she confirmed, shrugging out of his grasp and trying not to put weight on her right leg. “Stupid shoes. I still don’t need your help.” She glared at him. “What are you doing here anyway? Trevor said you weren’t coming back for the wedding, and you never RSVP’d.”

He inclined his head and she felt more than saw his smile, a slight softening around the corners of his stormy green eyes. “Last-minute change of plans.”

“You’re late,” she muttered, sweat beading on her forehead as the pain in her ankle began to radiate up her leg. She needed to get away from Griffin and take off the stupid heels her bridesmaids had convinced her to buy.

“Apparently, I’m not the only one.” He took a step forward, then reached around her to open the passenger-side door on his vintage Land Cruiser. “You don’t have to like me, Maggie, but get in the car before you pass out from the pain of whatever you did to your ankle.”

She bit down on her lip to keep the tears at bay. Of all the people to see her in this state, why did it have to be Griffin? He’d been the star of every one of her foolish teenage fantasies. She hadn’t even cared that bad-boy Griffin Stone barely acknowledged her existence, even though she and Trevor had been friends since she’d thrown up on him their first day of kindergarten.

Griffin was three years older and a world apart from Maggie. He’d made it clear in the sneering, searing way he had that he thought her nothing more than a silly, spoiled princess. Now she was a pathetic mess.

It grated on her nerves to have Griffin bear witness to the most humiliating moment of her life. Chances were good he’d eventually congratulate his younger brother for escaping a lifetime shackled to the darling of the Spencer family. That thought was equally irritating since her only sin had been trusting the wrong man.

She gingerly put her right foot on the ground, hoping the pain might have miraculously disappeared. Instead, a sharp stab of pain caused her to whimper, and she turned without a word and hobbled the few steps to the Land Cruiser.

To his credit, Griffin didn’t say anything or try to help her. It was like he could sense that her composure was as thin as an eggshell and might splinter into a thousand pieces if he got too close. She hated feeling fragile, hated being hurt, hated Trevor and his litany of excuses.

Griffin shut the door when she finally managed to get herself up into the SUV and gather the dusty fabric of her wedding gown’s train into the vehicle.

He’d left the Land Cruiser running, and Maggie was profoundly grateful for the cool air blowing from the vents. The strap of the heel cut into her flesh, but she didn’t pull off the shoe. There was a decent chance she’d scream or throw up if she did, and neither was going to happen in front of Griffin.

“I’m guessing we aren’t headed back to the church,” he said as he pulled away from the curb.

“I bought Grammy’s house a few years ago. She lived—”

“I know where your grandmother lived.” Griffin’s knuckles turned white gripping the steering wheel. “I grew up here.”

She had the odd sense she’d hurt his feelings, although that would be far-fetched on a good day. Griffin had always made his derision for Stonecreek crystal clear, and he’d left them all behind the first chance he got. Still, she couldn’t help being a champion for the town. It was in her blood. “The neighborhood has a lot of young families now. It’s nice.”

Griffin’s response was a noncommittal grunt, and Maggie let out a sigh. She shouldn’t be trying for small talk, not under the best of circumstances, and let alone when she was running away from her wedding to his younger brother.

Trevor had promised he’d stall as long as possible, so Maggie figured she had about thirty minutes until her family descended on the two-story Cape Cod–style house she’d purchased from her grandmother three years ago.

Grammy wasn’t going to take the news well, no matter how justified Maggie was in walking away.

Another complication, because Maggie couldn’t tell her grandmother the truth. She’d promised Trevor—

“What did he do?” Griffin asked suddenly, like he could read her mind.

“It wasn’t Trevor.” The words were sawdust in Maggie’s throat. “He’ll always be a friend, but we were never suited for marriage.” She gave what she hoped was a bittersweet smile. “I’m just sorry it took me so long to realize it.”

That was good. She sounded regretful but not angry. Surely, people would accept her explanation. Everyone knew Maggie Spencer wouldn’t lie.

“Is he gay?” Griffin asked conversationally.

Maggie’s eyes widened. “No. We had a healthy... I mean, we’re both busy so it wasn’t exactly... Just no.”

“Another woman? A gambling addiction? Internet porn?”

“Why can’t you believe I made the choice to walk away?”

“Because you always do what’s expected, and a union between the Spencers and the Stones is something people around here have wanted for ages.” He pulled up in front of her house and threw the Land Cruiser into Park. “You don’t have the guts to defy them.”

Too stunned to move as Griffin got out of the SUV, Maggie watched him walk around the front toward her side. It was like he’d clocked her with a sledgehammer. A man she hadn’t seen for almost a decade—a man who’d never said a nice thing to her in all the years they’d known each other—had just summed up her life in one sentence, and it didn’t reflect well on her.

Especially because it was true.

“You don’t know me,” she said through clenched teeth as he opened the door. She went to push past him, a challenge with her ankle, but it didn’t matter. Griffin scooped her into his arms, ignoring her protests, and stalked toward the front door.

“Is it locked?”

“No,” she muttered, “and put me down.”

“Once we’re inside.”

He shifted his hold to reach for the doorknob, pulling her more tightly against his chest. She couldn’t help but breathe in the scent of him, tempting and dark like every rebellious thought she’d ever had but never acted on.

His heat enveloped her and she fisted her hands in the lapels of his navy suit jacket. She had the unbidden urge to press her mouth to the suntanned skin of his throat and forced her gaze to remain fixed on his striped tie.

The house was quiet, and he set her gently on the sofa, then knelt down in front of her.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking your ankle.” He pushed up the fabric of her gown, revealing her open-toe sandals with the delicate pearl detail across the straps. The shoes were elegant and glamorous and she needed them off her feet about as much as she needed to breathe.

Yet Griffin touching her was too much when she was in pain and emotionally vulnerable.

“I can handle it.”

“Let me look.” He undid the ankle strap, and she was amazed at how gentle his calloused hands were as they gripped her leg. “I was a combat medic during my time in the army.”

The pain had lessened slightly, or maybe she’d become numb to it. “You wore your dress blues to your dad’s funeral.” It was the last time Griffin had been home to Stonecreek, although she doubted he considered the town his home any longer.

His broad shoulders stiffened, but he nodded.

“Are you out of the army now?”

Another slight nod.

She winced as he manipulated her ankle, rotating it gently to one side then the other. “Why did you leave?”

He glanced up at her, his gaze both guarded and intense. “Why didn’t you marry my brother?”

“I already tol—”

“Trevor did something, Maggie.” He lowered her foot to the floor and sat back as he studied her. “Tell me what it was.”

“So you can rush off and slay my dragons?” she asked with a laugh, flipping her gown down over her knees. “Playing the part of hero doesn’t suit you, Griffin.”

Something flashed in his gaze, but it was gone before she could name it. “An understatement, especially coming from you.” He stood and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “Your ankle should be fine when the swelling goes down, but you might want to rethink your heel height in the future.”

She bent forward and undid the strap on her other shoe. “It was my wedding day. The shoes were special.”

“It’s a strange phenomenon,” he said quietly, “the focus on the details surrounding a wedding. Seems to me the only important part is a man and woman committed to loving each other for the rest of their lives.”

Emotion clogged her throat. “Yes, well... Trevor and I love each other. We’ve been friends forever. Everyone knows it.”

Griffin raised a thick brow. “Then what are you doing here?”

A car door slammed, saving her from answering.

“My family,” she whispered, glancing around wildly like she could find a place to hide. A ridiculous idea, because there was no hiding from what she’d done today. Not in Stonecreek.

“I’ll go out the back, then circle around to get my car.” Griffin was already moving toward the hallway leading to the kitchen. “No one is going to want me here for this.”

I do, Maggie wanted to tell him, although she couldn’t figure out why. Griffin was nothing to her.

“Are you staying in town long?” she blurted, using the arm of the sofa to lever herself to standing. She needed to be on her own two feet—or at least the one that wasn’t screaming in pain—to face her grandmother.

Griffin looked over his shoulder, raking a hand through his already-tousled hair. The air between them sparked, his gaze going dark as Maggie sucked in a breath.

“Put some ice on that ankle,” he said instead of answering, then disappeared down the hall.

A moment later the front door burst open and various members of her family flooded through.

“Are you okay?” her father asked, tugging at his black bow tie.

“Are you crazy?” Vivian Spencer, Maggie’s grandmother, asked, pushing past her son. “You can’t call off the wedding, Mary Margaret. It isn’t done.”

“She just did.” Maggie’s sister, Morgan, followed Grammy into the house, picked up a cardboard box from a wingback chair and then sat down.

“No sass from you,” Vivian scolded, wagging a finger at Morgan.

Sixteen-year-old Morgan, the picture of teenage petulance, responded with an eye roll and a dismissive sigh. Grammy’s eyes narrowed, although her angry gaze returned to Maggie.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, looking at each of her family members.

Her fourteen-year-old brother, Ben, shrugged out of his rented tux jacket. “You should have seen how bad people were freaking out,” he told her, his eyes going wide. “Trevor’s mom looked like she wanted to shank someone.”

“Definitely me,” Maggie muttered.

“Jana Stone wasn’t going to shank anyone,” their father said. “Naturally, she’s upset and confused.” He glanced toward Maggie and then away. “We all are.”

Ben didn’t look convinced. “If someone handed her a rusty knife, she would have gutted Maggie like—”

“Not helping, Ben.” Jim Spencer leveled a glare at his teenage son.

Undeterred by the gruesome talk, Vivian moved toward Maggie until they were inches apart. Grammy barely reached Maggie’s chin and she’d proudly been a size-two petite for as long as anyone could remember. Her hair was teased into a silver pouf, and she wore a rose-hued coat and matching crepe dress that made her look like she took fashion advice from the Queen of England.

Her diminutive stature belied the fierceness of her spirit. Maggie’s grandmother was more than the family matriarch. She was the backbone of the Spencer clan, still with a hand in actively managing most of the family’s business holdings in town and the land they owned throughout the valley.

The Spencers, along with the Stones, had founded Stonecreek in the mid-1800s. It still grated on the nerves of various relatives, Grammy included, that the town had officially been named Stonecreek instead of the planned Spencerville.

The Stones claimed that founders Jonathan Spencer and Charles Stone flipped a coin for naming rights. According to Spencer family lore, Charles got Jonathan drunk, then sneaked out to file the town’s name in the early-morning hours while his friend slept off a night of whiskey and women.

That spark lit the fuse on the Hatfield-and-McCoy-esque rivalry between the two families. The friction had ebbed and flowed over the decades until settling into a civil, if awkward, truce.

Recently, the animosity had heated up again. The Spencers had been the more successful family for years, owning most of the businesses in town, as well as much of the land in the surrounding area. But Griffin and Trevor’s father took over the struggling family farm when the boys were still in diapers. Dave Stone began growing grapes in the volcanic soil and within a decade had turned the vineyard into one of the leading producers of pinot noir varietals in the lush Willamette Valley.

Suddenly, power shifted, and the rural farming family began to assert its muscle in ways the Spencers didn’t appreciate. The power play was subtler these days, with deals over dinner and drinks more than fistfights at town meetings. It had been Vivian who’d pushed Maggie to view Trevor as something more than a platonic friend.

Both of them had gone away to college, then returned to Stonecreek to work with their respective families. It had been easy to ramp up the childhood friendship to a more intimate level.

They’d dated for three years, and Trevor had been at her side when she’d won her first mayoral election, becoming the youngest person to hold that office in the town’s history.

If you asked her grandmother, it was the two families’ combined support that had propelled Maggie, relatively inexperienced in politics, to victory in the election. But Trevor had made her feel like she’d won on her own merit, and remained quite possibly the only person in either of their families who believed it.

He’d proposed last Christmas. Of course, Maggie had said yes. So what if their relationship was more of a comfortable partnership than romantic or exciting? She didn’t need excitement and believed Trevor felt the same. Oh, how wrong she’d been.

“You embarrassed me today,” her grandmother said, pale blue eyes flaring with temper, “and brought shame to the Spencer name.”

Maggie swallowed and purposely put weight on her right foot, focusing on the physical pain instead of the emotional sting of her grammy’s words.

“Mom.” Maggie’s father let out an exasperated sigh. “Let her explain.”

“Can you explain yourself, Mary Margaret?”

“I changed my mind,” she whispered, her gaze trained on the corsage pinned just below the collar of her grandmother’s dress. “Trevor and I realized we don’t love each other in the way two people who are getting married should.” She couldn’t look Grammy in the eye as the half-truths spilled from her mouth.

Not complete lies. She went into the wedding with a bone-deep understanding that her marriage to Trevor had more to do with her family than any kind of grand passion. But she would have gone through with it if she hadn’t walked in on him locked in a furtive embrace with the curvaceous date of one of his groomsmen.

“What did Trevor do?” Grammy demanded, much like Griffin had earlier. Good thing Maggie wasn’t a gambler because she clearly had no poker face.

“Nothing.” She lied outright this time. She’d decided at the church that she’d rather be the bad guy in this scenario than the poor, duped and undesired fool. Trevor had agreed. He would have agreed to anything Maggie had asked. “I’m sorry, Grammy. I’ll take back the gifts and write apology notes to each of the guests. I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right.”

Vivian held up a weathered hand, the manicured tips of her fingers trembling. “This cannot be undone, Mary Margaret.” She turned to Maggie’s father. “Take me home, Jim.”

He glanced between his mother and older daughter. “Maybe Maggie doesn’t want to be alone right—”

“She made her choice,” Vivian said through clenched teeth. She waved a hand at both Morgan and Ben. “Let’s go.”

Morgan stood and placed a hand on her dad’s sleeve. “I can stay with—”

“We’re all going,” Vivian insisted, walking toward the front door without a backward glance.

“It’s fine,” Maggie whispered when Morgan’s delicate brows drew together. “I’ll text you later, Mo.”

Her father took a step toward her, but Maggie shook her head. “It’s okay. Go. I’m fine.”

He looked like he wanted to argue, but she forced a smile and motioned for him to follow Grammy. Right now she needed time alone.

“I love you,” her dad whispered, then walked out behind Grammy and Morgan. Ben turned back to her with his hand on the doorknob.

“I wouldn’t have let Mrs. Stone shank you,” he said gravely.

Maggie managed a watery smile. “Thanks, buddy.”

He nodded, shutting the door behind him. As soon as the latch clicked, Maggie’s knees buckled. She collapsed to the hardwood floor with a sob, her life in pieces around her.