Bridal Boot Camp

by Meg Cabot

  This brought a round of good-natured laughter from the deputies. I joined in . . . until I felt something cold and wet between my thighs. Then I jumped about a mile high, pushing the cold wet thing away and encountering fur and slobber with my fingers.

  “Chrissie!” Ryan yelled. Looking down, I saw a beautiful, bright-eyed German shepherd panting up at me, her tongue lolling comically from one side of her mouth.

  “Sorry,” Ryan said, tugging on his partner’s bright red leather collar. “That’s how Chrissie says hello.”

  “It means she likes you,” his jokey fellow deputy added with a beer-goggled smirk.

  I tried to laugh along with them, but mostly all I could do was try to wrap my mind around the fact that Chrissie, Ryan’s “partner,” was not an ubertall skinny blonde female super cop—or even a human being.

  “Your partner is a dog?” I heard myself blurt.

  “Yeah. I thought I told you. We’ve been together two years now. She’s a great dog. The best, really.”

  “I can see that,” I said, numbly, as I looked down into Chrissie’s bright, laughing brown eyes.

  “Can I get you something?” Ryan asked. “A beer?”

  “Uh . . .” My mind was moving at a snail’s pace. Chrissie was a dog. A great big slobbery dog.

  “Rob?” Bree, the sad-eyed waitress, was standing behind the bar, looking at me questioningly. “Ryan asked if he could get you a drink. You want your usual?”

  I could only nod, still trying to recover from my shock. Thanks to my parents, I generally avoid alcohol, so my “usual” is iced tea.

  “Wait,” I said to Ryan, as Bree slid a cool, tall glass into my hand. “Does this mean that you pulled your Taser on—?”

  Jokester looked delighted. “He didn’t tell her the whole story.” He elbowed the guy next to him. “She hasn’t heard the whole story!”

  “Frickin’ great,” said the guy next to him, grinning ear to ear. “We get to hear the story again!”

  Ryan glared at them sourly, but good-naturedly. To me, he said, “See what I have to put up with? But, yeah, so I left Chrissie in the squad car for a minute while I ran inside the Circle K to grab a cup of coffee—”

  “Circle K!” Jokester cried. “That’s where Rookie gets his coffee! Not even Island Coffee Queen!”

  Ryan said, “Ignore these clowns. And I’m not a rookie. Well, I am, but only because I was the last guy hired, and that was three years ago, so to them that makes me a rookie. Anyway, I was on night shift, and Circle K was the only place open to get coffee. Obviously I left the windows in my ride up, but the engine was running with the air on so my girl would be comfortable. But the new cars we’ve been assigned by the county are all hybrids, so you can’t hear that the engine’s running. So some guy comes along who sees Chrissie inside and is concerned I’ve left my dog in a hot vehicle, and being an animal lover, he tries to open the doors to let her out—”

  “And then Rookie here comes out and almost tases him!” Jokester cried, delighted with the story. “You shoulda seen Hartwell’s face when he saw the security footage! I thought he was gonna have a stroke.”

  I glanced at Ryan, who didn’t look nearly as amused as his fellow coworkers. The memory of the incident was still too raw.

  He’d dropped his arm from my shoulders, so I reached out to touch his fingers.

  “You thought the guy was trying to break into your car to hurt Chrissie, didn’t you?” I asked, softly.

  Ryan nodded. “It never—not even for a moment—occurred to me that he might be trying to help her.”

  I squeezed his hand. “I bet you meet a lot of jerks in your line of work.”

  “I do,” he said, squeezing back. “But thanks to your class, I’m starting to remember that I meet a lot more really great people who only want to help.”

  His hazel-eyed gaze on mine was so intense that for a second or two, I forgot we were standing inside a dockside diner decorated with mermaid Barbie dolls, surrounded by other people. It felt as if it were just the two of us . . . and Chrissie, who’d thrust her cold wet nose between our hands, her hot tongue on our fingers, her tail thumping against one of my bare thighs.

  But just as I was mustering up the courage to ask if he maybe wanted to skip the class for the night and go to my place, Bree came bounding up to the microphone on the café’s mini-stage.

  “Okay, players, are we ready to get this show on the road?” she asked.

  Ryan tore his gaze—and hand—from mine.

  “Damn,” he said. “I’m up. Excuse me a minute, okay?”

  Then he grabbed a ukulele and rushed onto the stage, taking the mic from Bree.

  “Hey, kids,” he said, with a sweetly impish smile. “What’s it time for?”

  The reply from the children in the audience was as shrill as it was enthusiastic: “It’s ukulele time!”

  I felt an almost overwhelming urge to flee. I had, after all, fulfilled my part of the bargain I’d made with Jen. I’d showed up, hadn’t I? Surely I didn’t have to stay for the actual ukulele playing. I honestly had better things to do. My Netflix queue was full of rom-coms I’d been wanting to watch. There was a new recipe for cauliflower crust pizza Jenna had sent me that I’d been dying to try.

  And if this hurricane Ryan had mentioned was actually heading in our direction, I needed to get some laundry done. A girl couldn’t evacuate without clean underwear.

  But just as I was slinking for the exit, Ryan and the kids broke into the song he said they’d been practicing all month.

  I froze.

  The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

  Really? It had to be that song. Of all songs.

  Never mind that it’s way overplayed, and has basically been a cliché on the ukulele circuit ever since that Hawaiian guy sang it and everyone went wild for it, and then the Hawaiian guy died, and the song became even more popular.

  Never mind that the lyrics are complete lies, and have led perfectly innocent people—such as myself, for instance, way back when I was an impressionable teenager—to believe that there’s a better world out there, only to have us poor saps find out—the hard way—that this information is incorrect: there is no place over the rainbow. Rainbows are actually optical illusions created by raindrops being hit by sunlight at just the right angle. You can’t travel to an optical illusion.

  And even if you tried to find a place you felt might approximate one where happy little bluebirds might fly around all the time—like Little Bridge Island, for instance—and you saved all your money and moved there, you might be surprised to find out that it has its fair share of problems and heartache, too.

  But that’s not even the worst part. No, the worst, most irritating thing of all, is that the song always reminds me of people like my grandmother, who, when I asked her where rainbows come from, informed me that each one is a promise from God that He’ll never again destroy the Earth by a devastating flood.

  But even as a kid, I knew this was total bull, since floods regularly destroyed whole communities all over the world all the time. Even Little Bridge Island gets destroyed—well, not entirely, but sometimes devastatingly—by flooding almost every hurricane season.

  But here were these sweet, childish voices—along with Ryan’s surprisingly in-tune mellow baritone—assuring me that somewhere, over the rainbow, I was going to find happiness—which I knew was a bold-faced lie.

  Yet somehow their singing, along with the plinking notes of their really, really not very good ukulele playing, was making me feel—

  Well, like I believed it. I did! For the first time since I was teenager, as I stood in that tacky dockside diner, watching that full-grown, handsome cop play that dumb, tiny instrument, surrounded by so many kids, with his beautiful dog sitting at his feet, gazing up at him worshipfully, I found myself not only actually liking “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but actually believing that there might be something to those stupid, overhyped, clichéd words.

  And gettin
g choked up about it. As I looked around, I could see that no else in the café felt the same way. Everyone else was smiling and humming along—even Bree, whose eyes, for once, didn’t look sad at all.

  So why was I the only one getting emotional (which I never do, except, as Jenna had mentioned, at weddings or the occasional really good made-for-TV romantic comedy)? My nose was suddenly stuffy, and my eyes were beginning to sting.

  What was happening to me? Was I going to cry?

  No. Oh, hell no. It wasn’t possible. Not here. Not now, in my sexiest bra, in front of Ryan.

  I had to get out of there. I had to get out of there right now, before any of my clients—and especially Ryan—noticed.

  So I threw a few bucks onto the counter for Bree, then hurtled my way out of the diner to safety.

  Outside, dusk was falling, the sun sinking slowly into the Gulf, turning the puffy clouds that hung over the glassy sea pink and purple and smoky gray. As usual, there was a crowd gathered to appreciate the sunset, as there was every night, both on the dock and in boats gliding on the water’s surface before it.

  I hurried as far as I could get from them—and the sound of that infernal song—until I found myself way out on the farthest point of the pier, beside a diesel gas pump where boats low on fuel came for refills. It wasn’t the most romantic place to be—the smell of diesel was almost as strong as the fragrance of the sea—but I was glad. I wasn’t there for romance. I was there to get my head together. I just needed to be alone for a few minutes to figure out what was wrong with me.

  And I was alone, except for a few three-foot tarpons rolling around in the clear water beneath my feet, looking for their evening meal, their shiny silver gills flashing in the evening light.

  What was wrong with me? I wondered as I sat down on the edge of the dock, the wood worn smooth from the sun and surf and seagull crap. How could a song—and a dumb dog—have turned me so inside out? How could a guy have done this, after all the careful armor I’d built around my heart?

  Because a part of me, deep down inside, knew it hadn’t been “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or Chrissie that had made me feel so emotional.

  It had been Ryan Martinez.

  Who knows how long I would have sat out there by myself if it hadn’t been for the fact that there was no cell phone service whatsoever, so I couldn’t even text Jenna to tell her what a weird night I was having, and how mad I was at her, and how I wanted my Wednesday yoga nights back.

  I was getting up to go when I heard footsteps approaching. Looking up, I saw Ryan coming toward me, the wind catching at his unruly dark curls and the edges of his guayabera. Chrissie trotted obediently at his heels, her tail wagging.

  Crap.

  Chapter Four

  “What are you doing all the way out here?” he asked.

  “Uh.” Long experience had taught me that when in doubt, it was best to go on the defensive. “What are you doing all the way out here? Don’t you have a class to teach?”

  “The guys said they saw you leave.” He didn’t stop walking until there was only a foot or so of space between us. Chrissie trotted all the way to the end of the pier and stood looking out to sea, sniffing the salty air, her brown-eyed gaze on the tarpons, her fur blowing gently in the breeze, her pink tongue lolling. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just got—I got a little—”

  And then, to my utter mortification, and before I could stop them, the tears came, accompanied by big, ridiculous baby sobs. I was standing at the end of the pier, crying, like an idiot. Or a rom-com character.

  I’d never been more mortified in my life.

  Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Martinez put both hands on my shoulders and pulled me toward him.

  “Hey,” he said, shushing me. “Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. It’s all good. What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Did someone hurt you?”

  “No,” I cried, halfway between a laugh and a sob. “No one hurt me. It’s just . . . it’s just that I hate that stupid song!”

  “What song?”

  “That stupid rainbow song.”

  “Oh, jeez.” He pulled me away from him so he could look down into my weepy face. “I’m sorry. Were we that bad?”

  “No,” I said, laughing again, and reaching up to brush away my tears, along with the strands of hair that were now sticking to my face, thanks to the wind and my snot. “I loved your version of it. It’s just that that song—you know it’s not true, right? There’s nowhere over the rainbow. It’s not scientifically possible.”

  He hugged me to him, chuckling gently. “Oh, Roberta. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that that’s not what that song is really about? It’s not about a place. It’s about hope . . . having hope that things will get better. That’s what rainbows symbolize. Hope.”

  “Oh, please,” I said, fiercely, and pushed him away—fortunately not over the side of the dock, though we both knew I was strong enough to have done so. “Do you even know why I became a trainer, Ryan? Because both my parents—both of them—died of alcoholism before I was twenty. Alcoholism complicated by cancer and diabetes. Neither of them would take care of themselves, no matter what my brothers and I or the doctors said. It was like they didn’t care enough about their own kids to stop their self-destructive behavior before it killed them.”

  “That’s really terrible,” Ryan said, his dark eyebrows lowered with distress. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “I had hope,” I insisted. “I had plenty of hope, and it still wasn’t enough.”

  “But look at you now,” he said, spreading his hands wide. “You’re taking all that pain you felt and helping so many other people to lead better lives because of it. People like me.”

  I eyed him like he was a crazy person. “What? What are you even talking about?”

  “Seriously. All those brides—they don’t come to that class because you’re helping them to look good in their wedding dresses, or whatever. They come because you make them feel good. You tell them it’s okay to eat beans. You give them hope.”

  I stared at him. “Now you’ve lost it, buddy.”

  “It’s true. I get it. That’s why I do the ukulele thing—to try to give kids something positive in their lives, like music, so they can escape from whatever is going on at home for a little while. Some of those kids probably have parents like you had when you were little. It’s important to give them hope that there are other kinds of adults out there—adults who care.”

  I shoved at my hair again, since the wind was whipping it into my eyes. At least that’s the excuse I gave myself for why they were watering once more.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s cool. I really like that you do that.”

  “Thanks. I had kind of crappy parents, too,” he said, grinning a little. “But I was lucky enough to have an uncle who taught me to play. So I thought I’d pass it on the way he passed it on to me.”

  “I like that,” I said. And since that felt inadequate, I added, feeling suddenly shy, “And I like you.”

  His grin broadened. “I like you, too. So why are you so pissed at me?”

  “I’m not pissed at you,” I said. “I’m pissed at myself.”

  “What for?”

  “For not doing this sooner.”

  I reached out and grabbed him by the collar of his guayabera, then pulled him roughly toward me, pressing my mouth against his.

  He didn’t resist, though he seemed surprised, cartwheeling his hands through the air for a second or two before finding his balance and planting his fingers on my hips.

  Then he pulled me closer, seemingly as eager as I was to get this thing started—whatever it was that was going on between us.

  It hadn’t been my imagination. He’d felt it, too.

  “Mmmm,” he moaned against my lips, like he’d tasted something he liked—something sweet, or maybe something a little spicy. “Mmmm.”

  Then he was parting my lips with his tongue, gently exploring the inside of my mou
th, while his hands moved from my hips to the small of my back and upward, pressing me even more firmly against his rock-hard body. He was holding me close enough that I could feel that all of him was rock hard. His erection pressed urgently through the faded cotton of his chinos. It had been a long time since I’d felt anything as good . . .

  . . . or so I thought, until one of his hands slid up my rib cage, then beneath the side of my dress to cup one of my breasts through the lace of my bra.

  Now it was my turn to moan.

  “Are you trying to drive me crazy?” I tore my lips away from his to ask.

  The hand stayed where it was, though now he dipped his thumb beneath the lace of my bra to lightly stroke my already highly alert nipple. The action sent shivers of desire slamming through me.

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” he said, grinning.

  “Woo-hoo!” shouted some smart-aleck kid from a Jet Ski that was passing by. “Get a room, you two!”

  I was quick to extend the kid the middle-finger salute in response, but Ryan shoved my arm down.

  “Hey, hey,” he said, laughing. “I’m on probation, remember? Let’s not get me into a new altercation with the public. And that kid’s not wrong. I wouldn’t mind getting a room. What do you think?”

  I stared up at his handsome face, still feeling the proof of his statement pressed up against me, hard as ever.

  I grabbed his hand. “I live on Washington and Roosevelt.” All the streets on Little Bridge Island had the distinction of being named after US presidents. “That’s only two blocks away.”

  “Yeah?” he said, grinning down at me delightedly. “Well, I live on Lincoln and Truman. That’s—”

  “Much closer,” I interrupted. “Let’s go.”

  I won’t lie. It was hard to walk the short distance to his place with the crotch of my panties basically already soaked from how hot I was for him. It had been so long since I’d been this attracted to anyone, I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.

  Good. Good was how it felt.

  I all but dragged him to his place, Chrissie trotting along ahead of us, sniffing everything in sight.