The Groomsman: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Billionaires of Club Tempest)

by Sloane Hunter

  He disappeared into a door, leaving me with Henry and Mason. Mason was on his phone, texting someone, before slipping it back into his pocket. “I’ve got a work thing to handle,” he said. “Call with my dealer. I’ll join you later. Just let me know where you end up and if you move.”

  Henry nodded and Mason left as well.

  “You coming then?” Henry asked me.

  “What was that chick’s name?” I asked instead of answering.

  “Which one?”

  “The one who came up here with us.”

  His brow furrowed. “Mariana, I think,” he said at last.

  I nodded and he paused, opened his mouth, looked like he wanted to say something, and then shook his head. “You know what?” he said. “I don’t actually give a shit. Just don’t make this a problem for me. Or Sam,” he added as an afterthought. His face split in a grin. “Look at that. I’m actually not the most selfish fuck in the group for once.”

  “Just give it a minute,” I said.

  Henry checked his watch, ignoring me, and then jerked his head down the hall. “I’m getting changed. Come down with us. You’ll be able to see your girl again.”

  He left without waiting for a response, leaving me looking after him questioningly.

  What girl was he talking about? Mariana?

  Whatever. It didn’t matter. What bothered me more was the other thing he said, about me being selfish. Mason had said that too and it couldn’t be further from the truth. I was looking out for the brotherhood, Sam most of all.

  Well, I didn’t care if they had a stick up their asses about this week. All the warnings and ominous, distrusting bullshit was starting to get irritating. I got it coming from Mason — the guy expected disaster to strike around every corner. But Henry too? It was in Henry’s typical, round-about, I-don’t-really-give-a-fuck manner, but the fact he brought it up at all meant it was on his mind.

  I considered just calling Mariana up to my room to ‘answer a question’, screw her brains out, and prove that I could make decisions without the world imploding.

  But I decided against it. There would be plenty of time for that, and I didn’t want to risk the guys running into her in the hallway. I’d head down to the pool, meet these friends of Beck’s, and play the part they wanted from me — the shit friend going along with Sam’s delusions.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so fecking bad to screw everything up. Maybe it would knock some sense into the guy.

  I banished the thought and found my room, threw my luggage into a bedroom, changed into black swim trunks and a white t-shirt, and chugged a bottle of water. Then I went back into the hall just as Henry was leaving his room. Keegan was waiting by the elevator, his tall frame leaning against the wall as he played that basketball game on his phone that he was obsessed with.

  “Finally ready, ladies?” he asked, not looking up from his phone.

  Henry rolled his eyes. “It was ten minutes.”

  “I know. Were you curling your hair? Come on, we gotta take full advantage of this week. No time to waste.”

  Sam was waiting for us downstairs at the entrance to the VIP elevators. He clapped me on the back as I stepped out of the elevator and I forced a smile. Traitor.

  “You all set to swim?” he asked. The easy smile that was never far from his face these days lit his blue eyes. I wanted to smack it off him. What happened to the steely-eyed, ruthless businessman I used to know? What happened to the Sam that used to stay out until four in the morning with me, looking for out-of-towners to bring back to our crash pads? What happened to the guy that refused to sleep with the same girl twice? Hell, that guy didn’t even believe in love let alone marriage.

  That old question sprung to mind: At what point, in changing out parts of a car, do you end up with an entirely new vehicle? Well, at what point does someone change so much that they might as well be a completely different person?

  Did he think back to those nights running around Manhattan together fondly or had he pushed them from memory, content now to spend eternity in bliss with Beck feckin’ Harris?

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked.

  I realized I was standing there staring at him with zero expression on my face, trying very hard not to let any emotion spill. Breathe… relax… One… two… three… four….

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said, throwing one arm around his shoulders and steering him toward the entrance. “Ready to get this show on the road and a drink in my hand.”

  “Where’s Twain?” Sam asked, letting the weird moment pass and looking around for our unstable friend.

  Henry snorted. “Where do you think? He disappeared the moment the wedding planner took an eye off him.”

  Sam rolled his eyes and shook his head. “He better not miss the wedding. Or the rehearsal.”

  “I wouldn’t keep my hopes up for the rehearsal,” Keegan said behind us, “but I think even Twain knows the real reason he’s here isn’t to get messed up.”

  “And if he does disappear, I’m pretty sure Mason had a tracking chip put in his head so he shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Henry added.

  “And speaking of Mason, where the hell is he?” Sam asked.

  “Phone call,” I said. “Something with his dealer. He said he’d meet us down there.” (That would be art dealer, by the way. Mason’s vices, as far as I knew, were entirely legal.)

  We left through the locked door and joined the rest of the world on the main floor of the resort. The halls and rooms were starting to fill up as more and more guests came down from their afternoon naps to start on the second half of the day. We walked with the crowd down a long, gleaming white-floored hall lined with shops and stores. The walls hung with potted greenery — ferns and tropical flowers in beautiful reds, pinks, and yellows — and an outlining of dark wood set off the palm frond decorations. We followed the signs until we were outside in the warm, midday sun.

  Here, the paths diverged in multiple directions with signs pointing toward the stables, the dock, the pools. There were quite a few options to choose from and the four of us stood, examining the signs — Sunset Lounge Pool — ADULTS ONLY, Little Whales Fun and Family, Surfs Up: Tides and Tequila, The Lucid Lagoon.

  “The Sunset Lounge, maybe?” Keegan asked.

  “Tides and Tequila probably has a swim-up bar,” Sam noted. “That’d be good for us. And if I know Beck’s friends…” He trailed off as if he and Beck didn’t meet at a bar in the first place. Seriously, who the hell marries their one-night stand? It astounded me that Sam was able to build a multi-billion dollar real estate company with that kind of head on him.

  “We could split up, see which is better,” Keegan suggested.

  “Sure,” Sam said, shrugging. “Not like we’re in a hurry.”

  So we split up. Sam and Henry going one way, toward Tides and Tequila, and Keegan and myself to The Sunset Lounge. The path twisted into the palm trees and toward the ocean, where the pool probably lived up to its promise with a view of the setting sun.

  We weren’t walking long when I heard a deep voice call my name and then Keegan’s. I turned and saw a vaguely familiar face striding down the path toward us.

  “Who the hell is that?” I muttered to Keegan.

  He looked at me like I had beetles coming out of my nose. “Uh, Edgar Lorne?”

  “Who?” The man was getting closer and looked very much like he expected me to know him.

  “The guy who owns this place, idiot. He’s a club member at the Tempest. We played poker with him like three weeks ago.”

  I didn’t have time to answer Keegan, but at least now I had a name to work with. “Edgar!” I said heartily, holding out my hand.

  Edgar Lorne was a rich man, a billionaire as well, but one of the older generation. The other tycoons at the Tempest typically looked down their noses at the Knights, jealous probably that we hit the big B decades before they did. But Lorne apparently didn’t feel that way (as long as we were spending some of it at his resort). He was a
large man, bald on top with a silver crown around the dome and a prominent nose that looked like a hard-boiled egg. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that stretched around his stomach. Lorne’s casual look was offset by the presence of four massive bodyguards following in his wake.

  “Mac,” he said again, shaking my hand firmly and doing likewise with Keegan. “I heard that you would be staying the week here.”

  “Yeah,” Keegan said, “we just got in.”

  “Well I hope you’re getting settled comfortably. Now what are these rumors I’m hearing about you quitting the team?” he asked Keegan. “You’re in your prime! And I always get great returns from my bookie on you.”

  Keegan laughed though I could tell the question wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. “Just rumors for now, Edgar,” he said deflecting.

  “Quite a procession you’ve got there,” I said, nodding at the guys behind him. They stared stonily back.

  Lorne turned to look and then laughed. “Ah, don’t worry about them. I just keep them around because I occasionally get threats from gangs in the city. They aren’t a fan of the resort.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes at this fat cat needing professional guards while he hid in the walls of a luxury compound. “Anything we should be scared about?” I asked, faking ultimate concern. Keegan stifled a grin and tried to adopt a similarly solemn expression.

  Lorne didn’t seem to realize we were making fun of him. “Oh, you boys have nothing to worry about. As long as you stay on the grounds, you’ll be fine. I wouldn’t go wandering around the city though.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “Can’t go mixing with the locals.”

  He shook his head gravely. “I’m afraid you can’t. Beautiful country, but—”

  Before he could finish a sentence that promised to be incredibly racist, one of the bodyguards came forward and whispered something in his ear. Lorne’s face fell.

  “I’m sorry, boys,” he said. “But I have something to attend to. Have a good stay and make sure you let me know if the staff isn’t catering to your every need.”

  Edgar Lorne left as quickly as he’d come and we watched him walk purposefully away, protection on all sides.

  “What do ya want to bet those guys are trained to whisper into his ear to get him out of boring conversations?” I asked.

  “I’d bet, but I probably wouldn’t get ‘great returns’ on it,” Keegan said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, let’s find that pool.”

  As we continued down the path, he rubbed his hands together. “Man, I’m getting hammered tonight.”

  “Is your girl going to be fine with that?” I asked. Keegan and Jules had started going out five or six months ago, but I’d only ever heard her name. What kind of dynamic they had together was yet to be seen.

  He waved me off. “Man, Jules is cool. She parties. And she’s hot. Just wait ‘til you see her.”

  I could already imagine. Keegan’s type tended to be unbelievably gorgeous yet also completely unbearable. But typically he ditched them after a few weeks, a month at the most. Sam’s disease was spreading.

  “Can’t wait,” I muttered.

  “Besides,” he continued, “we aren’t going that hard this week.”

  “Hey, you don’t know how it’s gonna go. They didn’t expect to go that hard in The Hangover.”

  Keegan snorted. “Didn’t Zach Galifianakis drug them though? I think we’re good.” He glanced at me. “Unless you got plans you want to let me in on?”

  “Nah, nothing like that. All my drugging is consensual.”

  “Creepy, but okay.”

  “Feck off. You know what I mean.”

  “I actually don’t.”

  “Anyway, none of you better pussy out on the bachelor party. We have that at least.” It came out a little more surly that I’d wanted it to, but screw it. I was never one to keep my opinions bottled up.

  I wasn’t looking at Keegan as we walked, but I could hear the frown in his voice when he said, “When have you known any of us to pussy out?”

  And, because once I started, I always had a hard time stopping, I heard myself say, “Sam seems to be pussying out of the Knights.”

  Keegan didn’t answer as he tried to work out what I meant. For a genius merchandiser, he sure could be dense. “Wait, you don’t mean because he’s getting married do you?” he asked like it was some kind of revelation.

  I snorted. “What the hell do you think I mean?”

  Keegan shook his head. “That’s ridiculous. He can still have friends once he gets married.”

  Goddamn. How could some people be so clueless?

  “Right,” I said, hearing myself getting heated but not really caring. “That’s what they always feckin’ say. And then it turns into ‘Sorry mate, but we’re staying in tonight’ and ‘Dude, we just had a kid’ and then that bullshit morphs into ‘Why don’t you get a girl?’, acting like I’m the crazy one when I’ve stayed the same and they’ve lost their damn mind. And then, then, they got the gall to be shocked when she fucks their brother and jacks their Harley.”

  Keegan was silent for two beats. “Is this a personal story?” he asked.

  Shit.

  “No,” I said flatly. “It’s a prediction for the goddamn future. Nothing good is going to come out of this wedding, and as far as I’m concerned we’re shite friends for letting it happen.”

  He considered my words. Then asked, “I have a girlfriend. Does that mean I’m pussying out too?” There was a challenge in his words and I could tell he didn’t agree with my views on Sam and Beck. But whatever. Screw him too. They’d all see I was right in the end.

  “No, but you’re toeing the line,” I said, stopping on the path and turning to him. “Here’s my advice. Get the most outta her pussy and throw her to the side. The minute she brainwashes you into putting a rock on her finger is the day you might as well shoot yourself in the head.”

  “You’re a real dick, you know that, Mac?” Keegan was angry and towered over me with his fists clenched by his sides. “If you’re so against this wedding, why the hell did you come here in the first place?”

  “Still hoping someone is gonna listen to me,” I said. I turned back the way we’d come. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’m going to find a bar.”

  “Yeah, maybe you should have gone with Twain,” Keegan said after me as I walked away. I could see from the look on his face that this conversation was going to find its way back to Mason. But whatever. That pansy couldn’t touch me.

  I tried to swallow the anger I felt toward Sam and Keegan and really the whole lot of them. A drink would be good. Or, even better, a fuck.

  “Better yet, a drink and a fuck,” I reasoned out loud, earning a glare from a passing couple with their kids. I must have looked insane, standing there alone talking to myself. Maybe I was. Or, more likely, maybe the entire world was going fecking crazy.

  When you paid top dollar for the top resort in the top location, any need you wanted satisfied was never much further than a discrete phone call to the right person. Drugs, girls, a orangutan on a unicycle juggling pies — if you wanted it, you could get it and be given it with a smile on the face of whatever poor sap had to clean up all the pie when you were through.

  I wasn’t one for girls you had to pay for. (Only in the strictest sense, of course. I’d definitely shelled out way more than necessary on bottle service for chicks and their friends.) There was a convenience in hookers, I’d been told by some guys around the Tempest. Call a number, get laid. But I could do that with a list I kept on my phone and have a girl that actually wanted to be there and (probably) wasn’t going to give me crabs. I didn’t care what anyone said — everyone’s performance declines when it’s their job, no matter what the profession. It just takes all the fun outta shit.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t fly any girls in on this short notice so I had two options, seduce an available random or find that wedding chick and get to work.

  Option one was more wor
k than I was willing to do at the moment, so option two it would have to be.

  I dialed the number she gave me, and she picked up on the first ring.

  “Hello?” Her voice was honey-smooth.

  “It’s Mac Walsh. I have a problem that I need you to assist me with.”

  “Where are you?”

  I told her.

  “There’s an out-of-the-way bathroom near the Surf’s Up pool. Can you find your way there?”

  I told her I’d find it and hung up. An out-of-the-way bathroom, huh? Not what I’d expected, but I supposed it was quicker than going all the way back to the room.

  I figured I had time for a quick drink and ducked into a nearby tiki bar.

  I ordered quickly. As I was waiting for my drink, I made eye contact with a pair of bright blue eyes in the mirror behind the bottles. I turned to look down the bar and saw, sitting alone at the end, the most striking blonde woman I’d ever seen.

  I raised an eyebrow at her and she smiled coyly back before taking a sip of her martini.

  Damn. Maybe I’d abandoned option one too quickly. This wedding might be a disaster on wheels, but I might want to just live full time at the resort. (Well, only if I didn’t have to worry about running into Edgar Lorne all the time.)

  I considered going over to talk to her, but the bartender had already put my whiskey in front of me. I shot it, sent a wink toward the blonde, and headed for the door. I’d look for her later. Right now I had a brunette to meet.

  The Surf’s Up pool. It was the one that Sam and Henry had gone toward and I kept a careful eye out for them. I passed the bathroom twice before I noticed it, tucked away in the hedges. I went toward the men’s side, but as I was passing the other door, it cracked and a surprisingly firm grip pulled me into the women’s.

  There wasn’t much foreplay and I barely had a chance to twist the lock before her mouth was on mine, eagerly kissing me, stripping off my clothes and groping for my length. I wasn’t sure if she was in a hurry (probably had ‘important’ wedding shit to take care of) but whatever the case, I was fine with it. In and out, thank you and goodbye. That was the way it should be.