Shotgun Wedding (Sidelined Book 4) by Ainslie Paton

Author:Ainslie Paton [Paton, Ainslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Supervised by Cats
Published: 2017-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

Zarley

Barefoot, Zarley paced her office. In fifteen minutes, she had to put her shoes on. In twenty, she had to brief the new permanent and temporary staff. In an hour’s time, the wedding guests would start arriving. By the end of the night Dev and Sarina would be married, Lucky’s would’ve been put through the paces of a soft opening and a new phase of her life would have begun.

“You’re going to wear a rut in that floor.”

She glanced at Reid, seated on her couch. He never thought about how he looked and it wasn’t often he wore a suit and she couldn’t afford the time to truly appreciate how incredibly fine he looked in it. No tie, but the shirt was crisp perfection, with French cuffs and silver cufflinks, and the charcoal pants did a great job of emphasizing his long legs, one of which he extended to stop her progress.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he said.

Fire, flood, electrocution, plague of locusts. Not enough alcohol, poorly briefed staff, stuff-ups in the kitchen, rubbery chicken, too fishy fish, wrong choice of music. An owner-manager who didn’t have any prior experience at this. The list was endless.

Reid reached for her. “Fuck him, Zarley.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’m not worried about that.” If Dad didn’t show, there was nothing she could do about it, and when Mom called to say she’d checked in to the hotel she didn’t mention Dad, so that was that. Fuck him.

“You don’t need him.”

Her father had checked out of her life a long time ago. It was fine by her if he didn’t want to check back in. “The only one I need is you.” And how was that going to go when Reid worked days and she worked nights, when her weekend was Monday. When was there going to be enough time for them?

“And I won’t get in Dalton’s face,” he said, the line of his lips telling her how much he disliked making that promise.

Her old sweetheart might get in Reid’s. “I didn’t think he’d come.” They’d meshed the wedding guest list with the original soft opening guest list and she’d hesitated to add Dalton, but now she was glad she’d done it. “It’s been so long.”

“I’ll be nice. It’s a wedding. Besides, my Mom will be here and she’ll hurt me if I misbehave tonight.”

Spats between the guests. That was another thing that could go wrong. She pulled away from Reid, but he stood and body-blocked her. He smelled wonderful, something warm and spicy that was new. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and stop the clock, prevent it from delivering her to the time when they’d be pulled so urgently in different directions. She was jittery and he felt it with hands curving over her hips to pull her into his chest.

“Flygirl, Is this stage fright?”

It was adrenaline. It was that hot, brain bright, too jangled moment before you went on stage, before you committed, when there was nothing more you could do but go for it.

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