Best Man to wed

Chapter One

Slowly, gravely, Daenerys knelt in front of the bonfire that she had just constructed, oblivious to the damp seeping into the knees of her jeans, the dying rays of the evening sunlight turning her silky silver hair a melting golden halo and illuminating her in a beam of light as, head bowed, she carefully struck a match with such seriousness that she might have been igniting a funeral pyre.
Which in effect she was, Daenerys acknowledged tiredly as she watched the kindling that she had carefully arranged start to burn, flames crackling as they ran from twig to twig, racing towards the wooden trinket box at their heart.
As she stood up, Daenerys had to dig her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans to prevent herself pulling the kindling aside and snatching the box to safety.
It was over, she told herself mercilessly, closing her eyes, unable to look, unable to watch almost a decade of ceaseless devotion and live being eaten up by the flames. A sharp breeze sprang out of nowhere, ruffling the silky curtain of her hair, scattering sparks from the fire, whirling-deverish-like, amongst its flames, teasing them, snatching from them a handful of photographs, most of them charred beyond recognition, only one of them still recognisable, the pale pink lipstick shape big her own mouth imprinted brightly across its surface.
Tears stung Daenerys eyes, her heart twisting and aching with anguish  as her emotions overcame her willpower and she stretched out helplessly to clasp the photograph which fate it seemed had decreeded that she should not destroy.
As Robb's beloved features swam before her, tears filled her eyes and she missed the photograph, the wind whirling it out of reach. With a small cry, Daenerys tried to pursue it, but someone else reached it before her, taking it from the breeze's playful grasp with mocking ease, a taunting expression passing his broody face as he looked at it and then back at her.
"Jon!" Daenerys said his name with loathing as he came down the garden towards her, still holding her photograph.
Jon might he her darling Robb's younger half brother but no two men could have been more unalike, Daenerys reflected bitterly as Jon stopped walking and studied her bonfire.
Whereas Robb was all sunny smiles, warmth and laughter, good natured, easygoing, an open, uncomplicated individual whom it had all been too heart-breakingly easy for her to fall in love with. Jon was just the opposite.
Jon rarely smiled, or atleast not at her and Jon was most certainly not easygoing, nor good natured and certainly not uncomplicated ; even those who liked and approved of him, such as her mother, were forced to admit that he was always not the most eaisest person in the world to deal with.
"It's because he had to step into his father's shoes while he was still so young." Her mother always said in his defence.
"He was only eighteen when Ned died after all, and he had to take full responsibility for taking care of his sister's, younger brothers and aunt, as well as the business, with Robb."
Her mother always defended Jon, because she adored him. Daenerys knew that, but she hated him, loathed him and she knew that he reciprocated those feelings even if he cloaked his in a more urbane and taunting mockery towards her than she could ever achieve towards him. It shocked her that people who didn't really know them always claimed that of the two brothers Jon was by far the more better looking....
"He's very, very dangerously sexy" one of the girls who worked for the small family company which Jon had taken over on his father's death, had told her.
According to her mother, by hard work and dedication he had built the company into something far more impressive than what it had been in his father's day.
"I'll bet he's a real once in a lifetime experience in bed." The girl had added dreamily.
Daenerys had shuddered listening to her, thinking that if she really knew what Jon was like, how cruel and hard he could be, she wouldn't think that. Personally she couldn't think of any man she'd want less as a lover, but then there was only one man that Daenerys wanted to fulfill that role in her life...in her heart...in her bed, and there always had been.
She had been twelve years since old, a girl just on the brink of womanhood, when she had looked across the table at her first semi grown-up birthday party and had fallen head over heels in love with Robb. And she had gone on loving him and hoping, praying and longing for him to love her in return, not just as his friend, but as woman....his woman. Only he hadn't done so.
He had fallen in love with someone else. Instead he had fallen in love with pretty, funny Margaery Tyrell. Margaery who was now his wife..... Margaery who Daenerys couldn't hate even though she had tried very hard to do so.
Robb and Jon didn't even look very much like brother's. Robb had aburn hair and laughing blue eyes. Whereas Jon had inky black curls and grey smoldering eyes. Daenerys now stood watching Jon in angry resentment.
Daenerys was not a complete fool, she could see that physically some women could be drawn to a man of Jon's type, and that of his type, perhaps as the girl at work said, he was an outstanding example, but she could never find him attractive. There was his temper, and ice cold rapier sharp l, humiliating effective weapon of destruction onto which she has run in furious, blind hot headedness more times than she could remember, and his sarcasm, which could rip your pride to shreds in a matter of minutes.
"What the hell is going on?" he demanded now as he walked towards her.
Silently Daenerys glowered at him. He hadn't looked at the photograph as yet and she itched to demand it's return, her stomach muscles cramping with tension.
"Mum is out" she told him in graciously, "Only I'm here."
"It's you I wanted to see" Jon told her urbanely, walking past her to squat down on his heels and study her bonfire.
Why was it Daenerys thought watching wearily that such an action by any other man dressed as Jon was now.....in an expensive, immaculately tailored business suit, highly polished shoes and a pristine white shirt.... would have immediately rendered him ridiculous, but made Jon look completely the opposite? And why, she demanded irritably from life, should the bonfire.....her bonfire..... deposit it's unwanted windborne waste of smoke and Sooty smudges in her direction and not his?
Life just wasn't fair!
Fresh tears smarted in her eyes. Hastily she blinked them away just as she heard Jon commenting sardonically. "What exactly is the purpose of all this self sacrifice Daenerys?  I hope not some immature and ignoble hope that out of the ashes of this maudlin act a new and stronger love for Robb will rise, like a pheonix, only this time one that he shares, because if so......."
"Ofcourse not" Daenerys denied swiftly, too shocked by his contemptuous accusation to pretend not to understand what he meant.....or to deny the purpose of the bonfire.
It was typical ofcourse, Only Jon could make that kind of assumption about her motivation for doing something ; Only Jon could accuse her so unfairly.
"If you must know" she told him bitterly, "I've been trying to do what  you've been telling me I should do for years, and that is to accept that Robb doesn't.... that he never...." She broke off swallowing hard as her emotions threatened to overwhelm her.
"Damn you to hell Jon," she swore shakily. "This has nothing to do with you.....and you have no right...."
"I am Robb's brother" he reminded her crisply. "And as such it's my bortherly duty to protect him and his marriage from......"
"From what ?" Daenerys demanded shakily. "From me.....?" Bitterly she started to laugh. "From me" she repeated. "From my love......"
"Your Love! " Jon interupted her, his mouth twisting. " You don't even began to know the meaning of the word. In the eyes of the world you might be a mature woman of twenty-two but inside you're still an adolescent " he told her crushingly. "With all the dangers to yourself and to others that implies."
"I am not an adolescent" Daenerys denied furiously, angry flags of temper burning in her cheeks.
"The way you can't control your emotions says that you are" Jon corrected her coldly. "And like an adolescent " he continued bitingly. " You positively enjoy wallowing in your self-induced misery, the self-aggrandised "love" you claim you feel for Robb. But you ofcourse, being you, have to drag everyone else into the plot as well."
"That's not true" Daenerys gasped furiously.
"You........"
"It is true" Jon told her grimly. " Look at the way you behaved at the wedding......Do you think that a single person there didn't know what you were doing....or how you felt?"
"I wasn't doing anything" Daenerys protested, her face as white now as it had been red before.
"Yes you were" Jon told her. "You were trying to make Robb feel guilty and to make everyone else feel sorry for you. Well it isn't people's pity you deserve Daenerys...it's their contempt. If you really loved Robb.... really loved him.... you'd put his happiness over your own selfish, self-induced misery."
"You claim that you are not an adolescent any longer, that you're an adult. We'll try behaving like one" Jon told her coldly.
"You have no right to speak to me like that " Daenerys told him chokingly. " You have no idea how I feel or what......."
She froze as Jon burst out laughing.....a harsh, contemptuous sound that splintered the early evening air.
"No idea? My dear Daenerys, the whole town knows how you feel."
Daenerys stared at him.
"Nothing to say?" He jeered.
Daenerys swallowed painfully. People did know how she felt about Robb. She couldn't deny that, but jot because she deliberately flaunted her feelings to make Robb feel guilty, as Jon had so unfairly claimed.
It was simply that she had been so young when she had first fallen in love with Robb that it had been impossible for her to keep her feelings hidden, and she had loved him so long that people were bound to have noticed. But she had never, ever as Jon was claiming, used her feelings to try and manipulate Robb, or indeed anyone else, into feeling sorry for her.
Ofcourse she hated the fact that people were aware of her love for Robb......why else on the evening that he and Margaery had broken the news of their engagement to the family had she made a silent vow that somehow she had to find a way to stop loving him.
All right, so far she might not have been successful, but atleast she had tried......and was still trying.
It should have helped she knew, knowing that Margaery was so right for Robb and that they were so very, very much in love: with any other girl but Margaery she might have suspected that the gesture of hers in ensuring that Daenerys was one of the trio who was tricked into catching Margaery's wedding bouquet had been, at best, a clear warning to her that it was time to find a man of her own, and at worst a tauntingly vindictive underlining of the fact that she had lost Robb. But Margaery was far too genuinely nice and warm hearted to do anything like that and her motives, Daenerys knew had been completely altruistic.
That hadn't stopped it hurting though. And now here was Jon, deliberately making that hurting worse.
"How I feel... what I do is none of your business" was the only response she could manage to Jon's taunt.
"No?" Jon gave her an ironic look. "Well what is my business is the fact that you are employed by the company as a linguistic and Interpreter and, as such I see that you are down to fly out to Kingslanding for the international conference next Wednesday."
"Yes" Daenerys agreed listlessly. The previous year when the conference had been arranged, she had believed that Robb would be representing the company at the conference and when he had asked her if she would like to go too she had walked on air for days afterwards, her imagination fuelling wildly  romantic and, she realised, looking back, totally impossible fantasies featuring the two of them.
She reality she knew now would be rather different. Even if Robb had still been going, the four days of the conference would be filled with meetings, whilst she would be called upon to use her language skills, both in verbal translations and paper work, which from previous experience she knew would keep her tied to her hotel bedroom when she wasn't attending the conference with the company sales team.
"The flight time has been changed" Jon informed her. "I'll pick you up from here at six-thirty. I've got to drive past on my way to the airport, so........"
"You'll pick me up?" Daenerys interupted him shocked. "But you aren't going. Robb......."
"Robb is on honeymoon, as you very well know, and won't be back for another week" Jon reminded her grimly, giving her a tauntingly sardonic look as he added angrily. "Surely even you aren't self-deluding enough to believe that he would cut short his honeymoon to go to Kingslanding with you. It was that what you were secretly hoping, Daenerys.... secretly wishing he would do ?y God, just when the hell are you going to grow up and realise that......."
"That  what?" Daenerys interupted him furiously, fighting to control the way her mouth started to tremble as she goaded Jon wildly. "Go on then, say it. Say what we both know you're just dying to say Jon. Or shall I say it for you....?
Her chin tilted proudly as she forced herself to look straight into his eyes without flinching. "When am I going to realise that Robb doesn't love me, that he will never love me.....that he loves Margaery.....? She said bravely.
She knew that her eyes were over bright with unshed tears, but she couldn't help it, her emotions were too strong for her, too over powering.
"Ofcourse I know that Robb won't be going to Kingslanding" she told Jon tiredly, turning away from him as the box at the heart of her small bonfire suddenly crackled fiercely and was engulfed by flames.
The pain inside her heart as she watched it burn was so sharp and driving that she had to force herself not to reach into the fire and retrieve the box, shaking it from the flames. Inside it was all her precious, cherished memories and souvenirs of her years of loving Robb: the present he jad given her for that momentous twelfth birthday and when she had first fallen in love with him.....the card he had sent her.....the other gifts he had given her over the years.
Quite mundane, perhaps, in many ways, and certainly not the gifts of a lover, no doubt in Jon, for instance, the small precious hoard that she had guarded so tenderly would only provoke derision and contempt, but to her....
Yes, she gad known Robb wouldn't be going to Kingslanding, but it had never occurred to her that Jon would be attending in his place. She had assumed that someone else from the sales team would be going instead. She frowned suddenly, something striking her.
"If you're going to Kingslanding, you won't need me there" she announced as she turned back to him to look at him. "You speak Valarian fluently."
"Valarian yes" Jon agreed coolly. "But this is an international conference, remember, and your knowledge of Dothraki is required. So if you were entertaining any idea of spending your time mooning around, day dreaming about Robb, I warn you that we are going to Kingslanding for work..."
"You don't have any right to warn me about anything" Daenerys challenged him dangerously, inward seething with resentment at the fact that he had called her professionalism into question.
"I know I'm going bro Kingslanding to work" Daenerys added pointedly now. "After all I'm not the one who....."
She paused, alarmed by the look in Jon's eyes which told her she had gone too far.
"Go on" he invited silkily, his voice suddenly softly dangerous.
"Well I'm not the one with a girlfriend in Kingslanding" Daenerys blustered, shrugging.
"Are you trying to say that I'm using the company to finance my own personal plans?" Jon suggested ominously.
"Well you aren't exactly involved in the sales side of things, are you? "Daenerys demanded aggressively. "The sales team..."
"As managing director and chairman of the company, I am involved in everything" Jon told her softly. "Everything...not so much as a paper clip disappears without my knowing about it, Daenerys, you maybe sure of that." he told her with a wintery look  that made her colour up hotly as she remembered the occasion on which she had "borrowed" company stationary.
"And as for the sales team.....On this occasion" he told her smoothly, "they won't be coming with us."
"With us?" Daenerys stared at him in disbelief. "You mean it will just be you and me....?" She couldn't keep the horror out of her voice.
"Just you and me" Jon confirmed.
"I'm not....I won't..." Daenerys began, but stopped suddenly as Jon smiled at her gently.....to gently, her instincts warned her as she wondered edgily if refusing to accompany him would be grounds for dismissal from her job. Jon was clever like that...sneaky enough, and she knew how much he resented the fact that she was working for the company.
"You're the boss" she told him, attempting a careless shrug, but suspecting from the narrow-eyed, glinting look of mockery that he was giving her that she hadn't really deceived him.
Four days in Kingslanding in with Jon.....she tried not to shudder. She couldn't think of anything that came closer to her idea of purgatory.
She winced as a cloud of acrid smoke from the bonfire was suddenly blown into her face, making her cough and choke. As she stumbled clear of it, she saw that Jon was studying the photograph that he had snatched from the wind, and she could feel the hot tide of embarrassed colour starting to burn her face.
It was not the fact that the photograph was of Robb that had bothered her, it was an old one, taken when she had been fourteen and he was seventeen. She had taken it herself, snapping it with her new camera at a family party, and had later, with great daring, had the original print blown up.
No, what was causing her whole body to burn with humiliating embarrassment was the fact that virtually the whole of Robb's face, but most specially his mouth, was covered in telltale lipstick kisses where she had deliberately......oh, shaming to remember now..... pressed her lips with passionate intensity against Robbs.
A wave of toe-curling, excruciatingly horrible embarrassment, more intense than self consciousness she had never suffered before , poured through her with scalding heat. Her body tensed in readiness for Jon's taunting laughter, but instead of laughing, Jon was simply looking from the photograph to her......to her mouth, she recognised with searing misery.....and then back again....
Unable to bear the nerve-stretching silence of Jon's cynical study of her anymore, Daenerys gave into temptation and did what she promised herself she was now mature enough not to do....she darted quickly towards him, reaching out her hand to snatch the photograph from him. But as she reached him, he realised what she was trying to do and grabbed hold of her with one hand, while retaining possession of her photograph with the other.
"Let me go" Daenerys demanded angrily. Overwhelmed by the humiliation-fuelled anger that gripped her, her fists started furiously hitting against Jon's chest as she writhed against him, struggling to break free.
She had no chance of doing so, of course. Her brain knew that, even if her body and emotions refused to accept it.
Jon was not a tall man, but he was a good head taller than her, add to that the fact that she knew perfectly well that he swam and ran regularly as well as practicing the art of aikido and it was no wonder that her furious attempts to break free were doing more to exhaust her strength than his.
Even so, she still persisted, demanding through gritted teeth. "Let me go.......Jon......and give me back my photograph....."
"Your photograph" now he did laugh, a harsh contemptuous sound, that made her long to clasp her hand over her ears to protect herself. "I suppose this is the nearest you have ever come to kissing a man with passion, isn't it Daenerys? After all......"
"No, ofcourse it isn't " Daenerys lied hotly. She was damned if she would let Jon guess that she had never touched another man.
"No? " Jon queried silkily, his eyes narrowing cynically, as Daenerys inadvertently looked up at him. "So, who was he then? It certainly wasn't Robb, and yet according to you, he's the only man you've ever loved.....the only man you could ever love."
Daenerys's face flushed red with anger as she realised that Jon was quoting back at her the impassioned words that her sixteen year old self had declared to him when he had asked her tauntingly if she had grown out of her crush on his older brother yet.
"No one you know" Daenerys shot back at him furiously. "In fact......"
"No one anyone knows, including you, is more like it"Jon contradicted her drily.
"That's not true" Daenerys lied hotly.
"No?" Jon taunted her. "Well, let's just put it to the test, shall we.....?"
Before she knew what he intended to do, somehow he had shifted his weight and hers, so that she was momentarily off balance and forced instinctively to reach out and cling to him for support, while he took advantage of her vulnerability to tighten his hold on her, using just not one but both arms this time to imprison her against him, holding her so close that she could actually feel the hard, firmly muscled length of his thigh against her and equally firm thud of his heart. "Jon" she began, automatically tilting her head back so that she could look at him and show him how angry she was, but her complaint died away in her throat as she saw the way he was looking her.......at her mouth..... and her own breath began to trip frantically in a series of far too fast, shallow little beats that made her breathing quicken and her muscles tense, her lips parting as she tried to draw extra air into her suddenly oxygen-deprived lungs.
A small sound.....a protest, a soft moan; even she wasn't quite sure which...... gasped her way past the locked muscles of her throat and was lost, stifled by the slow, deliberate pressure of Jon's mouth against her own.
This couldn't be happening, Daenerys thought, her mind reeling with shock and disbelief. Jon's mouth against hers, covering it, caressing it, possessing it....
Frantically she tried to turn her head out of the way, panic flooding her body with a trembling agitation and desperate need to break free, but Jon forestalled her, one hand still binding her firmly to his body, whilst his other hand grasped a handful of her hair, twisting it through his fingers, and then cupped her jaw, imprisoning her beneath her growing pressure of a kiss that was making her feel increasingly vulnerable.
She could feel the strength in his fingers where they rested against her skin, their touch cool in marked contrast to the burning heat of her own flushed face, just as the steady thud of his heartbeat underlined the wretchedly fast race of her own.
She knew shamingly l, that she was trembling from head to foot, and she knew that Jon must know it too. She could feel his fingers sliding along her throat, stroking her skin gently.... gently.....Jon.
Tears blurred her vision, burning behind her eyelids she refused to close, as she glared her enmity into the cool clear grey of Jon's unreadable eyes.
All these years of dreaming of Robb kissing her, Robb holding her, Robb's mouth caressing and possessing hers, and now it had to be Jon who was turning what should have been one of the most treasured moments of ger life into a mocking parody of everything that her first kiss of real passion should have been.
Was it really for this that she had refused dates and explorative teenage snogging sessions? Was it for this that she had held aloof from her sexual freedom that University could have afforded her? Was it for this that she had spent her nights and some of her days dreaming and  yearning for? So that Jon could mock her and destroy her cherished fantasies with a cruel kiss that could only be designed to taunt her....a kiss that....?
Daenerys stiffened as her brain belatedly recognised something that her traitorous senses had shamingly already seemed to acknowledge...... namely that if it hadn't been Jon, her loathing next door neighbour, whose mouth was caressing hers, she might almost.... could almost.
Daenerys gave an outraged gasp as she realised just why her lips, her mouth seemed to be softening, yielding, almost enjoying the sensual contact with Jon's, her eyes snapping fire, when she registered the sudden heart stopping gleam darkening Jon's as he finally lifted his mouth from hers.
Her legs felt oddly weak as she stepped back from him, Daenerys recognised dizzily....and not just her legs either.
"Well, whoever he was,if indeed actually he did exist" she heard Jon saying to her. "He wasn't a very good teacher. Either that or.....?"
"Or what" Daenerys recovered just enough to challenge him. "I wasn't a very good pupil...?"
"Oh I wouldn't say that."
Daenerys stared at him, caught between disbelief and suspicion, waiting for the taunting barb that she was sure to come, but he simply stood there whilst her gaze dropped helplessly from his eyes to his mouth..... infact it might have been jerked there on strings which he controlled, so little ability did she have to stop it's betraying movement.
"Yes?" She heard Jon murmur invitingly.
"Give me back my photograph" Daenerys protested chokily. "That....."
"What else did you intend to do with it?" Jon asked her. "It's over Daenerys. Robb is married now. Accept it. He never loved you and he never will." He told her cruelly.
"How dare you....." She began.
But he stopped her, continuing bluntly, "And it's time you grew up and accepted the truth instead of living in an adolescent fantasy world."
He started to walk away from her, to Daenerys relief. Seeing him tear up her precious photograph and consign it to the bonfire had brought back all her earlier misery and despair and she knew that tears weren't far away. She had humiliated herself enough without Jon seeing her cry.
He paused and she tensed as he turned around to look at her.

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This is a new idea I got for a fic.. please let me know if you guys like it and if I should continue with it.