Of the guys, Bram Russel was my favorite, in the least of all evils kind of way. He wasn’t a complete ass, and was smart, so he didn’t often get sucked into the ribbing and teasing most of the guys hit me with. That said, he was impatient and didn’t often stick around for antics. I couldn’t count the number of times I looked up needing Bram for one thing or another and he’d just left. He had cocoa skin, a little bit of height too him, and boasted impressive muscles for an accountant. With his dark gray eyes, near buzz-cut black hair, and fresh, tattoo free skin, he had a mysterious, bad boy kind of look.
Last, but certainly not least, Luke fucking Heath. The resident ass-in-chief. If the groomsmen were an army of jerks, Luke was their idiot general. He was Kent’s best friend and was the quarterback of the football team aka the star and he wanted everyone to know it. I went to high school with him and he was just as much of a punk back then. He had made it his personal mission to make my every waking second a hell on earth, finding creative, annoying ways to destroy everything he touched. Sure, he was sexy, if you could get past the incessant irritation. He was tall, had naturally tan skin, crystal blue eyes, and the biceps of a guy on the cover of a romance novel. He had dark hair in a buzz cut and a barely there goatee, and had a tribal tattoo sleeve covering his left arm. If I could expel any of these men from the earth, he’d be the one. I could navigate Mason’s manipulative conversations, Dr. Cody’s ‘I’m smarter than you’ snobbery, or David’s ‘holier than thou’ health shtick, but if I never had to see Luke again, it would be too soon.
I stared at them all, trying to convince myself that I’d made it this far, it made no sense to go back now. “‘I’ll handle the men,’” I mocked myself. “Boy was I wrong.”
2
Luke
I was surrounded by my closest friends at a steakhouse restaurant in downtown Austin, but their absent chatters could not be further from my mind. I had my eyes trained on the doorway. On the other side, forming a tantalizing silhouette through the frosted glass, was Kent and Anna’s wedding planner, Khloe. That’s who she was currently, but I’d known her since high school. I could say that back then wasn’t different from now. I still loved to tease her the second she arrived anywhere around me, but unlike back then, when I did it now, it was because I couldn’t control how attracted to her I was. She’d been their wedding planner for months, and with just weeks to go until the wedding, I could damn near say I could take the world record for longest, unsatiated hard-on.
The door opened, Khloe finally walked in, and I didn’t even wait a second to respond. I cupped my hands on either side of my mouth and shouted, “Shut up, guys, our personal slave driver is here.”
“Really dude?” Kent said, with genuine irritation in his voice. “Slave driver? She’s planning my wedding.”
“Is ‘slave driver’ the best you can do?” Khloe barked, her eyes narrowed at me with contempt. “And here I actually thought I had to be worried today.”
My eyes lowered as well, but mine were animalistic, and hungry. The only person around for miles who didn’t know I wanted Khloe, was the woman herself. Maybe she was just blind to the obvious, maybe it was the fact that I was hiding my attraction behind playful teasing, but either way, all of the other groomsmen and even Kent were in the know. The groom-to-be had already threatened me on more than one occasion to completely dismember me if I didn’t keep my hands to myself. I promised him I would be good, but I may have had my fingers crossed behind my back when I did.
I leaned towards her. “Would you prefer ‘Madame Sade’ instead?”
“Luke,” Kent hissed a warning. “Be nice. Quit giving her shit. You already ran her through the ringer trying on every suit but yours at the fitting last week.”
I grinned remembering myself trying to squeeze myself into Brett’s too small suit. I purposely did so outside of the dressing room to flash my package towards Khloe as best I could. She had to be at the fitting because all of the arrangements were in her name, and I was hellbent on making that process as much of a headache for her as I could.
“What do you want from me?” I retorted. “They all looked like the same monkey suit to me.”
“Well after next week, you’ll never have to wear that monkey suit again,” Kent snipped back.