Page 7 of Inappropriately Matched

Chapter Five

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Clementine

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“Okay, what is goingon?” Tierney Vaughn asks, perplexed, as she walks into my office atLeashed to Love. Tierney is freshly married, and I’m surprised her husbands, Colter, Nolan, and Jace, let her out of their honeymoon bed to come to work. They’ve been married for three months already.

So silly me for thinking it was a Sunday. After my episode with the construction workers, I had to shower, dress, and come into the office myself.

“Clem?” Haley questions, equally confused, and I can’t help but worry about the worry in her eyes. While Tierney glows more brightly than the rocks on her finger, Haley and I are still facing marriage dilemmas.

Except Haley’s feels more serious. She has to marry to save her family from financial ruin while I’m getting married,temporarily,to prove a point to my father. In the end, I truly believe we’ll both be fine.

Both my friends are in my office after I sent out our signature:I have news, I’m in trouble,Bring ice cream,Bring tampons, fire emoji.

“Ta da, I’m getting married,” I say. I swear Honeypot gives me a look that undeniably says, ‘I told you to have sex with them, not marry them.’But whatever.

I wait for the bomb to explode. There’s a moment of complete silence, in which I wonder whether my best friends would ever speak again. Nope, I had nothing to worry about.

Their flabbergasted screams and confused squeals and frantic questions sail into the ether around me.

“Okay, okay,” I say, holding up my hands. “I’ll start at the beginning.”

I give them a recap of my weekend. The showdown with my father, him bullying me into marrying someone of his choosing, threatening to take my gran’s ring away and giving it to my cousin if I don’t do as he says, me angry-painting, losing an entire day in the process, berating three construction workers for making a racket on a Sunday morning, only it was Monday—see losing an entire day.

I take a breath and carry on to the part where Honeypot lets me know there’s sexual chemistry with all three guys—my fur baby’s hypothesis fully supported by the funny business in my panties and then me asking one of them to marry me so I can stick it to my father.

“Do you know anything about him?” Tierney cries, still shocked and now worried about my state of mind.

“What if he’s a serial killer?” Haley shouts. “You can’t do things like this, Clem.”

“What ifthey’reserialkillers?” I say, emphasizing the plurals.

“Wait, what?” They both yell at the same time.

“Well, clearly I have reverse harem on my brain thanks to you, Tierney, and your billionaire ranchers, so when one of them said they come as a package of three, all of them or none of them, I said I’ll take the lot, verbatim.”

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