She parted her lips, but after a second snapped them closed. Oh yes. Only proper decorum and being potential fodder for gossip trumped getting in the last word.
“Cherise, it’s so wonderful to see you again,” a feminine voice intruded.
The pleasant, soft tone shouldn’t have scraped him raw, leaving an oily slide of disgust. He didn’t need to glance behind him to identify the woman. He’d be able to identify that dulcet tone, that light floral scent anywhere.
Identify it, then crucify it.
“Adalyn,” his mother crooned, a smile erasing her frown as she moved toward Adalyn Hayes with outstretched arms. “Don’t you look beautiful?”
Grayson shifted to the side, studying his mother as she warmly embraced his ex-girlfriend. The woman who’d almost become Mrs. Grayson Chandler.
The woman who’d stabbed him so deeply in the back he still had phantom pains from the scar a year and a half later.
She hadn’t changed at all. Still stunningly beautiful with oval-shaped green eyes, delicate features, pretty mouth and long sleek hair as dark as a raven’s wing—or as dark as her heart. A midnight blue gown that glittered as if stars had been sewn into it clung to her small breasts and willowy frame before flowing over slender hips to pool around her feet.
No, she hadn’t changed a bit. But he had.
That beauty no longer stirred desire inside him. Those embers had long turned to dust, incapable of being lit ever again.
“Grayson,” Adalyn purred, turning to him and linking her arm through his mother’s. “I didn’t know you would be attending the gala this year. It’s wonderful seeing you.”
“Hello, Adalyn.”
Damn if he’d lie just for the sake of pleasantries.
“I’ve missed you,” she murmured as if his mother had disappeared and just the two of them existed in the crowded ballroom of the North Shore mansion. “We need to get together for dinner and catch up with one another.”
“I love that idea,” his mother chimed in, patting Adalyn’s hand. “We’ve missed you, too. I was planni
ng a dinner party for next week. You and your parents are invited. I’ll call your mother to officially issue the invitation.”
The conversation sounded benign, but something seemed...off. Too jovial. Too neat.
Too false.
“Matchmaking, Mother?” he asked, infusing a boredom into his tone that didn’t reflect the cacophony of distaste and rage roiling inside him like a noxious cloud. “You don’t think this is a little beneath you?”
“Not when you insist on flitting from woman to woman, behaving like a male whore,” she snapped, and no, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard those words.
Manwhore. Playboy. Embarrassment. But again, that damn not-so-thick skin. The barbed insult pricked him like the cockleburs that would sting his fingers when he visited his grandmother’s horse farm as a child. Back then, he’d plucked them off and rubbed away the nip of pain. Now, with his ex a witness to his mother’s disdain, those nips drew blood.
Deliberately curling his lips into a mocking smirk, he bowed slightly at the waist. “Thank you, Mother. Now tell me what you really think because I sense you’re holding back.”
She scoffed, returning her attention to Adalyn who watched him with a gleam in her eyes. A gleam that heralded trouble. For him.
“You’re thirty years old and it’s time to put away such childish behavior. The future CEO of Chandler International needs a good woman by his side supporting him. The board will not endorse or accept a man whose name and picture ends up on those dirty little gossip websites as often as the business section.”
He stiffened. The smile he gave his mother was brittle, felt close to cracking right down the middle.
“Well then I guess it’s a good thing I don’t intend to be the future CEO of Chandler International. Which makes the board and my love life nonissues. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see several people I need to speak with.” Bending his head, he brushed a kiss over his mother’s cheek. “Mother. Adalyn.”
Without waiting for the diatribe about his rudeness, he pivoted and strode away from the two women, the noose that had slowly been tightening around his neck loosening with each step.
He should’ve seen this coming. His mother had been less than subtle about her wishes for him to settle down and marry. Especially in the last six months.
Since Jason had died.
The thought of his brother lanced him through the chest, a hot poker that hadn’t cooled in the time since his death. With a thirteen-year age difference and the knowledge that Jason was the favorite between them, they hadn’t been close. But Grayson had loved his older brother, respected him. And the tragic randomness of a brain aneurysm had only made Jason’s death harder to accept.