Her Playboy's Proposal

‘Thank you. I think.’ She paused. ‘Right. So you don’t want to be the best man and you don’t want to go to the wedding. I’m assuming you’re trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings, so you could always say you can’t make the wedding due to pressure of work. That we’re really short-staffed and you just can’t get the time off.’

‘I’ve already tried that one,’ Harry said. ‘Dad says my annual leave is part of my contract—he’s a lawyer, by the way, so I can’t flannel him—and he says they can always find a locum or call in an agency worker to fill in for me. Plus he gave me enough notice that I should’ve been able to swap off-duty with someone months ago to make sure I could be there.’

‘How about a last-minute illness? Say we had norovirus on the ward and you came down with it?’ she suggested.

‘Norovirus in the middle of summer?’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Nope. That one’s not going to fly.’

‘You have other medics in your family, then?’ she asked.

‘One of my sisters is a trainee audiologist. But everyone knows that norovirus tends to be at its worst in the winter. All the newspapers make a big song and dance about emergency departments being on black alert at the peak of the winter vomiting virus season.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve thought about practically nothing else for weeks, and there just isn’t a nice way to let everyone down.’

‘So the kind approach isn’t going to work. Have you tried telling any of your brothers that you don’t want to go?’

He nodded. ‘Jack—he’s the next one down from me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He thinks I should be there to support the old man. So does Fin—he’s the next one down from Jack.’

‘And how old are they?’

‘Dad’s kids are all spaced five years apart. So Jack and Fin are twenty-seven and twenty-two, respectively,’ he explained. ‘The odd one out will be the new baby, who’ll be seven years younger than Evan—he’s the youngest.’

‘OK. So you have to go to the wedding. But what about this best man business? Isn’t there anyone else who could do it? Does your dad have a best friend, a brother—or, hey, he could always be different and have a woman as his best man if he has a sister,’ she suggested.

To her relief, that actually made Harry crack a smile. ‘Best woman? I can’t see Auntie Val agreeing to that. She says Dad’s the male equivalent of a serial Bridezilla.’ He took another sip of Merlot. ‘Uncle Jeff—Dad’s brother—has done the duty twice, and so has Marty, his best friend.’

‘So if the three of you have all done it twice, what about your next brother down? Or the youngest one? Could it be their turn?’

‘I could suggest it.’ He paused. ‘But even if I can be just a normal wedding guest instead of the best man, it still means running the gauntlet of everyone asking me how come I’m not married yet, and saying how I ought to get a move on and settle down because I’m ten years older now than Dad was when he got married the first time, and that means I’m totally on the shelf.’

‘Apart from the fact that men are never described as being on the shelf, you would still’ve been a student medic at twenty-two,’ Isla pointed out. ‘And, with the crazy hours that junior doctors work, you wouldn’t have had the time to get married or even spend that much time with your new wife back then.’

‘But I’m not a student or a junior doctor now. In their view, I have no excuses not to settle down.’

‘Maybe you could take a date to the wedding?’ she suggested.

That would be Harry’s worst nightmare. Taking a date to a family wedding implied that you were serious about taking the relationship further; then, when it was clear you didn’t want to do that, someone would get hurt. But Isla clearly meant well. ‘I guess it would be a start—but it wouldn’t stop the questions for long. They’d want to know how we met, how long we’d been dating, how serious it was, when we were planning to get engaged …’ He rolled his eyes. ‘They never stop.’