Page 4 of Luck of the Draw

Why am I suddenly terrified?

It’s perfectly legal,she said,and I promise it will meet the requirements of your challenge.

I knew I should question her further, but I still had no plan and a rapidly approaching deadline, and I was too mentally exhausted to think of anything.

Fine.

Yay! Now that that is settled, I’ll let you get back to TV’s hottest twins.

I rolled my eyes, because of course she’d known what I was doing, and set my phone on my nightstand. I was terrified what Sam had cooked up, but I was more terrified of losing the Bad Luck Club.

Bring it, Sam.

Chapter Two

Dylan

“Okay,”River said, glancing from me to Daniel. “You both know what to do if any of Aunt Dottie’s friends show up uninvited, right?”

“Let’s be real, you’re talking about Lurch and Josie,” Daniel said. I’d never met either of them, but it was impossible to work at Buchanan Brewery without hearing the stories. Lurch, aka Luke Dotson, had pissed in one of the kettles of brewing beer, and they’d had to throw all of them out because he couldn’t remember which one. The brewery had been closed for three months after that.

Daniel had told me that story during my second day on the job. I’d thought he was taking the piss, so to speak, but no. That actually happened.

Only in Asheville,my sister, Tina, would say. Which was her response to pretty much everything I told her. Really, she should revise her catchphrase toOnly at Buchanan Brewery, because I’d quickly come to realize I’d found myself in a special subset of strange.

My brother would probably have said the same. If he weren’t several states away and currently not talking to me.

River spread a few headshots out on the table, as if this were a war room rather than a private office in the exhibit center at the NC Arboretum. It was River’s wedding day. Shouldn’t he be hanging out with his groomsmen, drinking whiskey or Buchanan beer, not giving his bartenders a pep talk about strong-arming wedding crashers?

Plenty of strange things had happened when I was enlisted. One guy had been messing around, pretending to shoot himself in the foot, when he accidentally did it. Another guy ate something so spicy from a market that he literally lost his sense of taste. Still hadn’t come back, to this day. My family wasn’t exactly normal either. They were so up in each other’s business that my sister had known my brother’s wife was pregnant before he did, and my grandmother had started doing the rosary for my sister every night since she found out she was on birth control. She was still doing it, seven years later. But somehow this was more bizarre.

“Um, River, what are we supposed to do if someonedoescrash the wedding?” Daniel asked. He glanced at me. “I mean, maybe Dylan could physically remove them, but I’m not even sure I could carry Josie across the gardens. Lurch? That’s all Dylan.”

While his faith in me was touching, I doubted my knee could stand up to bodily carrying a grown man across a wedding reception.

I said as much.

River sighed and ran a hand through his hair, which he probably wasn’t supposed to do given it looked like it had some kind of spray or pomade in it. Not his usual look. Then again, it wasn’t every day a guy got married.

I should know.

The thought shouldn’t bother me anymore, but it did. It wasn’t my ex-wife I missed, because I’d long since realized we were all wrong for each other and too young and stupid to know it, but I do regret the future I’d thought I was going to have. Because I literally couldn’t.

And that was how I’d ended up here, in this place that seemed to collect lost people. Broken people. And downright strange people.

Like most people in Buchanan Brewery’s periphery, I was brought here by Dottie Hendrickson, River’s great-aunt.

I’d come to Asheville a couple of months ago on vacation with one of my buddies from the Marines. He’d suggested that my life would instantly seem less constricting once I left the orbit of my family. The plan was to let off steam. Have some beers. Hike in the mountains.

And somehow we found ourselves in Buchanan’s tasting room when a fight broke out between two guys. A girl was caught up in the middle of it, trying to stop them from beating on each other, although she only managed to catch a hit herself. I didn’t stop to ask what was happening—I stepped in and put a stop to it. The guys were bruised up pretty good, and the girl had a bloody nose, but at least no one ended up in the hospital.

Turned out the guy who’d started it was a bartender. Something to do with an open relationship, which completely defied my understanding. Why bother having a relationship if you were going to invite other people into it?

An Asheville thing,Tina would say.

To which my brother, Matteo, would probably reply,Only a masochist would leave their family and a perfectly good job to become a bartender in a city of swingers.

Either way, the bartender had found himself out of a job, and the tasting room manager, Dottie, had asked to speak to me.

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