by Julie Kriss
Bad Wedding
Julie Kriss
Contents
Bad Wedding
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
A Note From Julie
I hate Jason Carsleigh. Gorgeous, sexy, perfect Jason Carsleigh. He was the golden boy in high school - the one every girl dreamed about. Except me. I have my reasons.
He owes me big, so I’m calling in a favor. I need Jason as my date for my ex’s wedding. Simple - wear a suit, look hot, and pretend he likes me. That’s it. Then I’m done with him forever.
I’m not going to tell him my secrets. I’m not going to see the not-so-golden side no one else gets to see. I’m not going to fall for him. And I’m definitely not going to rip that sexy suit off him and do every dirty thing imaginable.
But every time I get close to Jason Carsleigh, I get in trouble.
One wedding. How bad can it be?
Note: Bad Wedding features some of the same characters as Bad Boyfriend, but can be read entirely as a standalone, with no cliffhanger, no cheating, and an HEA.
Copyright © 2016 by Julie Kriss
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Join Julie’s new release newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/bGNEwz
Also by Julie Kriss:
Bad Boyfriend: A Bad Boy Romance
Break Me: A Stepbrother Romance
Play Hard: A Stepbrother Romance
One
Jason
Saturday night at Zoot Bar was the night all the dicks came out.
Rich dicks. Overdressed dicks. Dicks with gelled hair. Dicks with backward baseball caps. Dicks with expensive football jerseys and loud voices. Dicks with carefully distressed jeans. Dicks hanging out with other dicks, looking to score. Dicks who have girlfriends, looking to cheat on them. Dicks on their own, somehow thinking they’re going to clean up. Eden Hills, Michigan, had basically one nightclub, and on Saturday night, it attracted every dick in town.
Ask me how I know.
“This is a bad week,” the guy next to me said, looking over the dance floor, which was just getting started. He called himself Shark—though I happened to know his name was really Tom Stuckey, and he graduated from Eden High five years before I did—and he was fucking huge. Massive shoulders, massive arms, a thick neck leading up to his beefy head, crowned with a thin crop of buzzed hair. I was taller than Shark—I’d been a football player, then a Marine—but the guy still had forty pounds on me. He was born to be a bouncer, Shark was.
“You think it’s bad?” I asked him. This was only my third Saturday bouncing at Zoot. It was a second job I’d taken on, since I needed the money. I figured with my day job at the bank, adding the bouncer gig wouldn’t be a problem.
It was exhausting, working all day and then bouncing on evenings and weekends. But the faster I earned money, the faster I could leave my mother’s basement, where I’d ended up when I broke up with my fiancée and moved out of her apartment.
Yeah, this year wasn’t going well for me. Not well at all.
“It’s the vibe, man,” Shark explained. Shark had been a bouncer ever since he turned twenty-one, which made him my mentor. My bouncer mentor. “You feel it? It’s only ten, and everyone’s piss drunk already. The school year just started. We’re gonna be busy tonight.”
I nodded sagely, as if I were a pro. Eden Hills was small and suburban, but we had a community college, and every September the college kids did a lot of stupid shit. I had no idea why, since I’d never been to college. I’d gone into the Marines at twenty and spent four years deployed. I’d been back for three months now, and my life was in a spin. I’d returned to the bank job I hated, because I wasn’t trained to do anything else. I’d proposed to my longtime girlfriend, which just made our relationship self-destruct, and we broke up a few weeks later. I was broke, I was homeless, I had no career, no college education, and I spent my nights at a cheesy nightclub, wiping people off the floor.
Oh, and my best friend, Dean, had hooked up with my little sister, Holly. Like, seriously hooked up. It had freaked me out at first, and now it just made me uncomfortable. Because of all people, my screwed-up best friend and my sweet little sister had turned out to be actually happy together. She’d even moved in with him. I tried not to think about it.
Shark and I made our way through the dark press of bodies toward the bar. We were big guys, and we both wore black zip-up warmup jackets with the word SECURITY across the back, but no one made way for us. I’d learned my first shift here that you just needed to elbow your way through people in this place.
The bartender, Edie, was working fast, whipping up drinks and filling orders with lightning speed. Still, she turned and gave us a quick smile, which I thought maybe she directed especially at me. Edie was a big part of the bouncing duties at Zoot; she was, not to put too fine a point on it, smoking hot, which meant every dick who came through the door tried to have a shot at her. She was a tough girl who could handle her own, but the bouncers were her backup. Anyone who made Edie uncomfortable got thrown out the door.
We gave her a nod—the music was pumping too loud to say anything—and Shark turned to me. “I’ll take the back,” he said in my ear. “Puke Patrol. Relieve me in one hour.”
I leaned an elbow on the bar and gave him a salute. He disappeared, his huge arms elbowing his way through the crowd.
The back of the bar, where the bathrooms were, was universally the worst part of being a bouncer. Shark had given me the rundown the first night. “You gotta patrol those back corridors, man,” he’d said. Then he’d started counting off things on his fingers, each one more horrifying than the last. “Anyone puking—gone. Anyone snorting or injecting anything—gone. Anyone bleeding—gone, assuming they can walk and they don’t need an ambulance. If they’re making out, just break it up, unless he’s being too aggressive. You learn to get a vibe. No fingering, sucking, blowing, or eating out. Definitely no fucking. No pussies or dicks. If her tits are out, cover them up and call her a cab. If her panties are down, instruct her to pull them up, but don’t do it yourself or we’ll have a lawsuit. You got all that?”
I’d thought he was joking. I really had.
That first night, I’d poured two drunk girls into cabs after they’d puked, and yeah, one of them had her panties down. I did not pull them up for her.
In the nights since then, I’d called the cops once—the guy was so wasted he was scaring the fuck out of everyone, and he refused to leave—and chased a guy who didn’t pay his very high bar bill across the parking lot and down the street. I’d bounced at least three guys who were giving Edie the creeps and broken up a lot of makeout sessions. I’d seen a lot of puke. I’d covered up seve
ral sets of tits.
What the hell, I wondered, was I doing?
This wasn’t what I’d pictured myself doing even six months ago, let alone in high school. In high school, I’d been the golden kid—football player, good grades, no problems. The teachers had loved me and the girls had followed me through the halls. That was when I was eighteen. Now I was twenty-four, and—what the fuck was this?
I was never this guy. The big guy who loomed over everyone else, making sure you knew just how big he was. The guy who picked fights and bloodied noses and scared people. The guy who flexed his muscles and tried to be a badass. I was big and strong—the Marines is not a fucking cakewalk, let me tell you—but I was always Jason Carsleigh, the good guy. I held open doors for people and said hi to my teachers in the halls. I knew who my neighbors were. I mowed the lawn for the old lady on the corner. I was nice to my mother and my little sister. I played fair on the football field and I took girls on proper dates. I was fucking nice.
I didn’t know where that guy had gone. I didn’t feel nice these days. I didn’t feel much of anything.
It wasn’t the breakup. Charlotte and I had been together for four years, and most of that time I’d been deployed. I’d gotten home and realized I barely knew her. So of course I had proposed, like an idiot. I’d felt a freaked-out nausea when I did it, but I’d pushed the feeling away, just like I’d pushed away everything that made me uneasy. Since the breakup I’d been coasting along, wondering what was next. Wondering if it was this.
I ran a hand through my hair and watched the college kids writhing on the dance floor. Something touched my elbow where it rested on the bar, and I looked down to see Edie passing me a shot. She gave me a smile. She had ink-black hair cut in straight bangs across her forehead and falling glossy down her back, and a nose ring. Big hazel eyes with dark eyelashes. Guys came on to her nonstop because she looked like the kind of girl who liked it, but the fact was it pissed her off. She was here to pour drinks and make tips, and that was it.
I gave her a smile and picked up the shot. Edie appreciated it when I stationed myself at the bar, I knew, because she had less trouble. I wafted the shot under my nose. Tequila. There were technically rules against drinking on the job, but as of yet I hadn’t seen a single person following them. When you were bound for Puke Patrol at the back of the bar, a shot of tequila seemed like a fair deal.
I tossed it back, wincing, and then I noticed a guy and a girl arguing on the dance floor. He was in her face; she had her arms crossed over her chest and she kept moving back, away from him. She looked pissed, but she didn’t want to get close. One of her girlfriends moved up and touched her elbow, looking concerned.
Yeah, no. I put down the shot glass and walked into the crowd, letting the guy see me coming with my black security jacket. He just gave me a shitty glare and looked back at the girl again.
So it was going to be like that, then. I was okay with that.
The old Jason would have been uncomfortable right now. I could rush a guy on the football field, or do hill sprints for three hours like they made us do in the Marines, but straight-up hand-to-hand combat wasn’t my specialty. I was never the guy on the field who knocked the other guy out or tackled his ass to the ground. After all, my mother was usually in the stands somewhere, or my sister, or my teachers. Or my friends.
Jason, the nice guy, never did that shit.
I got between the guy and the girl and didn’t even look at the guy, which I knew would make him mad. Instead, I bent low to the girl so she could hear me over the pounding hip-hop music. “Is he bothering you?” I asked her.
She looked up at me, a worried look in her angry eyes, but her friend answered for her. “Yes,” she said to me. “This guy is bothering my friend.”
I looked at the girl again. She looked like a freshman, maybe five years younger than me. She was sober. Tough, angry, and backed up by a good friend. For a second I pictured my sister Holly in her place, stranded in some dark dance club while a douchebag bothered her, and that gave me a nice head of steam. Holly wasn’t this girl’s age, but she had been once. While I had been away, deployed, unable to get her out of situations like this.
I didn’t think Holly had been in situations like this. But how the fuck would I know?
I turned to the guy behind my shoulder. “Time to leave,” I said to him.
He rolled his eyes at me. He had longish sandy hair and a half-assed attempt at a scraggly beard. A backwards baseball cap completed the look. Dancers were crowding around us, the dance floor filling in as a popular song started. “Cool it,” he said. “She’s my ex-girlfriend.”
I shook my head. “Time to go.”
“We were just talking.”
“You want to leave on your own, or you want me to escort you out? Because I will.”
“Go away, man. This is none of your business.”
That made it easy.
I stepped behind him, yanked his elbows behind his back, and frog-marched him straight off the dance floor.
I learned that move in the Marines. I always knew it would be useful someday.
The guy was half drunk, and he yelled as I hauled him off. Dancers stopped to look. He kept yelling—something about calling the cops and pressing charges—as I marched him past the front vestibule, where the latecomers were paying their cover fee and a huge guy named Nate checked ID’s. Nate just looked up at me and nodded, then went back to checking ID’s again. He knew the drill.
I could have hauled Half-Assed Beard out a side door, or out the back to the parking lot. That would have been more private. But I wasn’t in the mood for that. Instead I dragged him straight out the front door, where at least fifty other college kids were congregated, standing in line, waiting to get in. Every conversation went silent as they watched us.
I gave Half-Assed Beard a good, hard shove toward the curb, where cabs were going by. “Here’s your advice for the night,” I said in a loud, clear voice. “Don’t bother chicks when you come to a club. If she wants you to fuck off, you just fuck off.”
He regained his balance after I let him go and turned as if he was about to come at me. Then he saw how big I was—I’m six four—and the crowd of onlookers ranged behind me.
“We gonna have a problem?” I asked him.
“Fuck you, man!” he spat in frustration.
I’d engineered it for maximum humiliation, and I could see I’d gotten it. “You won’t be let back in,” I said in my loud, clear voice again. “Not tonight, and not ever. We know what you look like, dude. Go home.” I turned and looked at the crowd. “Show’s over, folks.” Then I strode through them and walked back inside.
I kept my face grim. This was not the Jason Carsleigh everyone knew. This was not the Jason Carsleigh I knew. I didn’t recognize this guy at all. But I kept my face straight and hoped Edie would pour me another shot of tequila, because now I had a secret.
That had been fucking fun.
Two
Megan
“No, no, no.”
I turned the key in the ignition again, listening to the engine puff helplessly. This car. This goddamned car. My goddamned car. It wasn’t going to start again.
I was in the back alley behind my apartment, in the tiny parking space I was allotted, at ten forty-five on Sunday morning. I was due at work at eleven.
I scrambled for my purse on the passenger seat and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed as I got out of the car, giving the driver’s door an extra kick. I had a fifty-fifty chance that my dad would answer; his schedule was unpredictable. But this time, he answered on the third ring.
“Dad,” I said, rounding my building and heading for the sidewalk, “can I borrow your car?”
“I would, honey,” my dad said, “but I lent it to Mrs. Feely so she could go to the doctor’s.”
I stopped on the sidewalk and looked down the street. My dad rented an old house only a block away, and I could see his driveway from where I stood. It was empty. “When, exactly, di
d you lend your car to Mrs. Feely?” I asked him.
“Oh, Jeez,” Dad said. “Two or three weeks ago, I guess.”
“Dad—”
“I know, I know,” Dad said. “I should get it back. I lost track.”
I gritted my teeth. My father rarely used his car, because he worked around the corner from his place at the little shop he owned, selling patchouli, incense, mood stones, imported African masks—a sort of yuppie/hippie combo. Which pretty much described my father. Hence the fact that he hadn’t noticed his car was missing for weeks. “Dad,” I said to him, “I could have used it. I have to get to work.”
“It’s Sunday morning,” my dad said, offended. He wasn’t religious, he just liked to sleep in. “Who the heck works on Sunday morning?”
“Well, when you need to go to the drugstore on Sunday morning, someone has to be there to take your money.”
“That’s inhumane.”
I sighed. The drugstore was just the latest in my long, long series of jobs, most of which I’d been fired from. That was Dad’s influence: No one owns you, he’d always taught me. If you don’t like a situation, you just walk away. I’d walked away from more crappy jobs than I could count. And I’d been fired. Often. If I didn’t get to work, I would be fired again today.
You’re twenty-three, Megan, a voice inside my head said, and what are you doing with your life?
Shut up, I told it.
“Okay,” I said to my father. “I have to go. I’m calling a cab.”
“Get one of those Uber things,” my dad said. “Fight the Man.”
I hung up, gritting my teeth. I didn’t want to fight the Man today, I just wanted to get to work on time. Why, though? The job as a clerk at Drug-Rite was as boring and dead-end as every other job I’d had. Why did it matter if I got fired from this one?
I got an Uber—fuck it, it was faster—and got to Drug-Rite at two minutes to eleven, hurrying through the door and pulling my clerk’s apron from my bag. “I’m here, I’m here,” I said.
