Chapter One
Mike Worth leaned back against the bar and surveyed the Friday night crowd packed in the small, dimly lit room. He held a cold Lager in one hand, had his best buddies surrounding him—whose recreational basketball team had won yet another game earlier in the evening—and a full night of open possibilities in the great city of Vegas ahead of him. What more could a guy ask for?
Well, maybe a hot woman with no attachment issues or dreams of a white wedding dress…but he could also be fine just the way he was.
Not that he had anything against marriage, per se. The institution was interesting, and he liked to study the general notion of fidelity from afar. But for him? Nah. He got bored when he ate the same meal two nights in a row—how the hell was he supposed to be satisfied with waking up next to the same person every day for the rest of his life?
Madness. Pure madness.
Of course, the fact that his best friend, Garrett, was about to marry Mike’s little sister, Kiersten, wasn’t madness. It made perfect sense. His sister deserved every happiness in the world, and if she wanted to wake up to his dumbass of a best friend staring at her every day, then so be it.
To each his own. Or her own.
Garrett better damn well take excellent care of her or else he’d forget the whole “friend” thing and come down on him harder than an anvil on Wile E. Coyote. And Garrett damn well knew it, too.
The devil himself slid into the barstool next to him and slapped him on the back a little bit harder than necessary. “So, you ready to be my best man? Or are you going to stay true to character and try to help me escape the wedding, instead of stay in it?”
“If you were marrying anyone but my sister, I’d do my bro-duty and toss you out of the rectory window, screaming at you to run for it before you make the biggest mistake of your life.” Mike lifted the beer to his lips and took a long draught. “But, since you had to be a dumbass and pick my sister out of all the women in the world to fall in love with, you’re getting married whether you have frozen feet or not.”
Garrett held up his feet. “My toes are fine.”
“Good. Or I’d burn them the fuck off, then carry your crippled self down the aisle to say ‘I do.’” Mike shuddered. “Shit. Even saying that hypothetically makes me want to gag.”
Garrett cracked up. “You just wait. One of these days you’ll meet a girl who makes you forget everything you wanted out of life and show you how much you were missing.”
Mike groaned and scooted away from Garrett. “You sound like such a girl right now. Just so you know.”
“That might be true, but I’m in love.” Garrett shrugged and ignored the woman across the bar eyeing them both as if she couldn’t decide which one to hit on.
Though Mike would normally help her make the right decision—AKA him—he ignored her, too. Tonight wasn’t about picking up women. It was about Garrett’s bachelor party.
“Please. You’re ruining the perfectly good buzz I’ve got going on here.”
His friend raised a dark brow. “Funny. I didn’t hear you argue about my prediction.”
“Did I argue with the Mayans who said the world would end in 2012?”
“How could you? They’re dead.”
“Exactly.” He grinned. “And I would be too before I ever made the mistake of getting tied down. Death before marriage, I say.” He held his beer high and used a thick Scottish brogue to say, “They’ll never take my freedom!”
“Oh God.” Their buddy Stephen approached and rolled his hazel eyes. “Please tell me you guys aren’t arguing about which parts of Braveheart weren’t true to history again. Last time you guys got started, I fell asleep in a strip club. During a fucking lap dance.”
Alistair, their team’s point guard, chuckled and scooted closer. His green eyes shined with laughter. “That was pretty damn funny. It was even funnier when the stripper slapped you and stormed off.”
“Hilarious,” Stephen drawled.
Mike held his hands up. “We’re not talking about history tonight. We were actually discussing marriage…and why I’ll never do it.”
Alistair pinched his lips together. “Never is a hell of a long time.”
“Not long enough when you’re talking marriage.” Mike took another drink. “I’ll stay in the green zone, thank you.”
“Green zone?” Garrett asked, his brow wrinkled.
Alistair grinned and moved closer. “Is this that ‘stoplight theory’ you were babbling about the other night?”
“Yep. Ready to hear about it?”
“Hell yeah,” Alistair said. “This should be good.”
Stephen held his hand up. “Wait. If it’s going to be as long as I think, then come sit in the booth Riley’s saving over there. Some hot chick just left it empty and we snagged it before someone else could.”
Booths in this bar were hard to come by, so none of them wasted time getting off their asses. As they walked, Mike turned to Alistair and pointed a finger in his face. “And don’t mock me for caring about accuracy in historical movies. My fucking job as a history teacher is to know history, so obviously I’m going to slam something that’s not one hundred percent accurate. It’s a well-known fact that when the English—”
Alistair threw his hands up. “I know, I know. I heard you the first million times. So calm the fuck down.”
Mike slid into the booth. “It’s your fault for being the only one of us who isn’t a teacher. Why a cop would want to hang out with a bunch of middle school teachers is beyond me.”
“I’m beginning to wonder the same thing myself,” Alistair said, sliding into the booth opposite Mike. His red hair and green eyes screamed of his Irish heritage—as did the smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. “I wanted a break from the hard-asses I spend all day with but I didn’t mean to go quite so far to the extreme as I did with you fucks.”
“Yeah, whatever. Everyone knows math is the best,” Garrett, a math teacher himself, said as he approached the booth. “If you didn’t want to hear about variables and Pythagorean Theorem—”
Mike cut in with, “No one wants to hear about that shit, Garrett.”
“Oh, and history is so much more enthralling?” Garrett asked, sliding next to Mike and slamming his elbow into Mike’s ribs in the process. “Hearing about
how dead guys died and the mistakes they made before those deaths?”
“Hell yeah it is. For one, you could—”
“Oh, both of you shut up. Science is the best,” Stephen said, not even cracking a smile. “I’m the only one here who knows how to make a noxious gas so odorless that it could kill everyone in this room, and they wouldn’t even know what hit them.”
Alistair groaned and held his head. “Fucking nerds. Seriously guys. Stop. Just stop.”