Hell, even the colors were all wrong.
Gold and purple sure as hell wouldn’t have been Lia’s preference. Had she gotten any say in her own damn wedding?
Son of a bitch! There wasn’t one familiar thing in this whole place that stamped this event as Lia’s, so I wasn’t about to get the reassurance I needed to settle my ass down.
My gut already hurt, so I had no idea how I was going to get through watching Lia say her vows to the man she insisted she loved enough to marry. A guy who wasn’t…me.
I’d run into Stuart enough times to know that he was a pompous asshole with a trust fund who didn’t have a genuine bone in his body. We’d pretty much had a hate/hate relationship from our very first meeting.
Yeah, I’d told myself the feeling that Lia and Stuart just didn’t fit was coming from a place of jealousy, but was it, really? I knew Lia as well as I knew myself. What if the lack of respect toward Lia I always sensed in Stuart wasn’t my overactive imagination?
I squirmed on the uncomfortable bench seat. The necktie that matched my custom suit felt way too tight, but it wasn’t a suit or tie that I’d never worn before. More than likely, it wasn’t the damn tie that was choking me…
It was all my regrets that were strangling me to death.
I lifted my arm and looked at my watch frantically.
“Shit! It’s eleven fifty-eight!” I cursed as I jerked on my tie and jumped to my feet. “And there’s no fucking way I’m going to be able to hold my peace.”
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
“You can quit that shit, now,” I grumbled. “I got it.”
Hell, maybe I was slow, but I recognized that sound for exactly what it was meant to be now.
It was a goddamn warning to listen to my instincts that Lia was in trouble, and to move my ass because the window of opportunity I had to help her was closing fast.
In my gut, all jealousy aside, I just fucking knew that marrying Stuart wasn’t going to make Lia happy.
Shit! Her happiness was everything to me, but it wasn’t my only concern. For some reason, I also knew she was in some kind of…danger.
My heart was racing from the adrenaline coursing through my body, adding to the crazy sense that I had to save Lia.
I felt a few more droplets of sweat hitting my forehead as I vaulted over one of Lia’s friends to get to the aisle. “Excuse me,” I rumbled automatically, but didn’t wait for a response.
I didn’t care if my timing sucked, and it didn’t matter that Lia would never see me as a possible love interest. As long as she didn’t marry…him.
Hell, if necessary, I’d toss her beautiful ass over my shoulder and get her the hell out of here before she made the biggest mistake of her life.
Once I’d shoved my way through the closed double doors that led to the hallway outside the chapel, I stopped abruptly when I saw Lia. We were separated by the rest of the large wedding party, but my eyes instantly became laser-focused on her, like all those other people didn’t even exist.
Fuck! Something’s wrong!
Lia was crying, which instantly made something in my gut twist painfully.
We’d been friends for way too long for me to even briefly consider that it was a happy cry. It wasn’t. I knew her, and her sorrow flowed from her to me in a heartbeat, just like it always did.
I pushed through the crowd around her until she saw me, and relief flooded through my body when she promptly flung herself into my arms.
Lia
OhmyGod! OhmyGod! OhmyGod! Stuart isn’t here. He’s not coming to the ceremony. It’s over!
I was still standing in the hallway of the church, my feet feeling like they were rooted to the floor, and watching the retreating figure of my fiancé’s brother as he exited the building.
I hadn’t said a word when he’d told me that my husband-to-be had found a woman who was more suitable for him, and that Stuart was backing out of the wedding.
My entire body was trembling, and I could feel the tears of confusion and relief falling down my cheeks.
I’d woken up this morning with a very heavy, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I’d tried to ignore for way too long, but it wasn’t until I’d pulled on my wedding dress in the changing room that I’d realized I couldn’t get married.
What had started as an inkling months ago had turned into a gut instinct that had started to scream at me this morning.
I’d been in a full-fledged panic by the time my dress was on.
I’d been on my way to find Stuart to cancel the wedding when I’d bumped into his brother instead.
I couldn’t say it wasn’t painful to be totally rejected and left at the altar. The entire wedding party had been listening when Stuart’s brother had calmly broken the news, and then retreated, looking like he was grateful that he’d completed a very distasteful errand.
I heard the murmured expressions of apologies from the wedding party surrounding me, but I couldn’t decide exactly how I should respond.
Tears were pouring down my face, but how was I supposed to explain that the primary emotion driving all of my emotional turmoil was…relief?
Okay, there was a whole lot of confusion, anger, and sadness mixed in there somewhere, too, but I was far from heartbroken.
How could I even respect a man who had sent his brother to do his dirty work instead of giving me the courtesy of calling off the wedding face-to-face?
I’d just pulled the ridiculous, heavy veil that Stuart’s mother had insisted on from my head when my eyes met a familiar stare.
Zeke.
His startling blue-eyed gaze never left mine as he bulldozed his way through all of the people still muttering their apologies. Mentally exhausted and broken, I vaulted into the arms of the one person who had always been there for me, sobbing out all my bewilderment and relief on his muscular, powerful shoulder as his arms wrapped around me protectively.
God, how I’d needed this man right now.
“What happened?” Zeke’s gentle voice queried as my breakdown started to subside.
“Stuart is marrying somebody else,” I said tearfully. “His brother just told me a few minutes ago.”
And I’m perfectly fine with that.
Granted, it was humiliating to know that everybody would be talking about how Stuart had dumped the second-class woman he’d planned on marrying in favor of someone…more suitable. But those feelings were already fading away, and did I really give a damn what Stuart’s friends were talking about? They’d never been my friends, too.