Seven Groomsmen from Hell (Love by Numbers 6)

“Lord, give me strength,” I said aloud to myself as I stood at the entrance to a popular restaurant in downtown Austin.

Inside the restaurant were eight men, only one of whom didn’t make me feel like jumping head first into a wood chipper. Kent was the fiancé of my best friend, Anna, and he wasn’t a terrible guy, though I could certainly judge him for the company he kept. The other seven men inside the restaurant were his groomsmen. Seven loud, annoying, yet undeniably sexy assholes with a penchant for making me consider becoming a serial killer. There was something about them; they were each like fingernails on a chalkboard in their own, annoying way, but they also could have me hot and bothered inside of five minutes. It was infuriating. Why did seven such beautiful men on the outside have to be horrendous brutes on the inside?

I took a deep breath as I looked myself over in the reflection of the restaurant windows. I thought I looked okay. I was a thicker girl, with full thighs, a pert peach ass, and a DD rack. In my youth I considered myself ‘chubby,’ daresay even ‘the fat girl,’ but as I got older, I learned that men preferred having a little more meat on the bones. I worked hard to keep my stomach relatively toned, but made no attempts to be some skinny mini like a magazine barbie doll. I was full figured, and I liked it. Still, the groomsmen—the best man in particular—knew how to press my buttons, and my size was the biggest one. So I wore a long sleeve t-shirt, jean capri pants with design-intended rips, and had my brown hair falling in waves on either side of my face, to mask some of the chub to my cheeks.

I pushed open the door and made my way in, already preparing myself for the worst. They were all staring back at me, waiting to pounce the second they saw me.

There was David Jackson; all the guys called him ‘Doc.’ From what I’d gathered in the time I’d spent with them, there was no basis for the nickname, they called him it just to mess with him. That said, he was the health conscious one of the group, and had a physical education degree to boot. He was a tall, solid-build running back with dark, short cut hair, caramel skin, dark brown eyes, and a clean canvas; no facial hair, no tatts. He was as good-looking as they came for a blemish-free guy. I preferred the rugged look, but I certainly wouldn’t kick Doc outta bed. Well, I would, but it wouldn’t be because of his looks, it would be because of his near-incessant tendency to try and convert everyone around him to veganism, complete with judgmental looks at every bit of an egg or burger.

Next to him was Brett Townsend. Dark chocolate skin was a perfect frame for his dimpled smile, short beard, and light hazel eyes. His hair fell in short, wild dreads across his head, ticking the poorly retouched tattoo of a former lover’s name scrawled across his neck. Of the groomsmen, he was probably the friendliest, but he was as stubborn as a mule. He refused to be one-upped, which meant if all the guys were participating in making my life miserable, he was falling in line if not trying to top the troop.

Christian Hill was the linebacker of the same team Brett and David played for, the Hellraisers. He was a thrill seeker who took great joy in anything that made his heart beat a little faster. He had tan skin, bright green eyes, feathery, dirty blond hair and a smile that could kill. He was incredibly tall, and liked to use that height to tower over me and make me feel small, though I couldn’t keep myself from imagining myself all over his massive size.

Mason Lee was called “Old Man”, though he was only a year or two older than the rest of them. His nickname was given to him more because of his appearance than his age, and because he’d already been married and divorced once. He was tall too, but was a stockier build and had sea blue eyes that were hypnotic if stared into for too long. He was a ‘friendly chat you up until you can’t escape’ kind of guy, with ruddy cheeks and undeniable charm. He was ‘dad’ until he was ‘daddy.’

Dr. Cody Williams was not a football player like Kent and the others, but was actually a doctor. I didn’t actually have any idea why one of Kent’s groomsmen was a doctor as opposed to more of his football buddies. In the beginning when I was trying a ‘kill ‘em with kindness’ approach to relating to the men, I tried to ask, but Dr. Cody had a terrible habit of making me feel like an idiot. I stopped trying to speak with him after the third time he used pandering sarcasm to explain something to me. Unfortunately for me, he was one of the best looking of the group, standing at just under 6 feet, with a lithe but muscular body. He had a square face and green eyes with short, dark russet hair, and almond skin. He was a stone cold stunner. If he hadn’t gone for medical school, he could have been a model, not that I would ever tell him that.