Page 60 of Just One of the Groomsmen
Admitting it aloud might bring some kind of blowback on her that she wouldn’t be able to deal with.
But if it made Lexi feel better about having her in the wedding party…?
Addie carefully picked through her feelings and words, trying to dance around the many landmines. “Tucker is one of the most important people in my life, and he has been for as long as I can remember. Our friendship means too much to me.”
Lexi scrunched up her face. “I get that, but maybe—table this conversation for later. Will and Ford are coming back.” Keeping her arm draped around Addie’s shoulders, Lexi turned to greet the guys. “Yes, things are good between us again, and I’m happy to announce that Addie’s still one of my bridesmaids.”
This time, Addie didn’t bother correcting her. When in wedding-obsessed Rome, right?
Then Lexi went and added words that sucked some of the air out of her celebratory sails. “And tomorrow, we get to go try on our dresses and do the fittings!”
Chapter Fourteen
After handing Addie’s beer over to Ford for delivery, Tucker held Easton back at the bar with him. Things seemed to be good between the two women, and he hoped they were, but he suspected Easton had already sensed something was going on, and he needed some peace of mind.
“What’s up?” Easton asked.
“What do you know about the dentist? And could you maybe use your access to certain records to do a background check? I can get in touch with one of my contacts, but—”
“Already done.” Easton set his beer on the bar and leaned a hip against the polished wood. “I like to know who’s moving into town, but admittedly, I put a rush on it when I saw the way he looked at Addie.”
“You know she’d kill us just for having this conversation,” Tucker said with a laugh. “For daring to try to protect her from anything.”
“That’s why I only planned on telling her if something bad came back.”
“And he was clean?” Tucker didn’t want her to be dating a psychopath, but he would’ve liked something he could point at to convince her he wasn’t the good guy she thought he was.
“Clean.”
“Damn.”
“My turn for questions. What’s goin’ on with you and Addie?”
Tucker took a large swig of the water he’d ordered. Adding beer to the mess of thoughts rushing through his head screamed disaster, as nice as drowning them in alcohol might be.
Again he thought of the group dynamic, but Easton was too observant to buy any attempt to downplay it, and he needed to talk to someone.
The guy was a vault, too.
“Honestly, I don’t rightly know. I drive into town and see a pair of sexy legs sticking out from underneath a truck, only to discover they belong to Addie. As soon as I realized it was her, I tried to shut down those thoughts, but it’s more than the legs.”
Or the flashing incident.
He swore and dragged a hand through his hair. “I can’t stop thinking about her. The more time I spend around her, the stronger the urge to cross lines is.”
Easton sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. Don’t you remember when Ford and Shep went for that same coed freshman year, and it almost tore apart the group?”
He slowly nodded. “I remember.” It was right after his parents’ divorce, and like them, his friends were constantly bickering and wanting everyone to pick sides. Poker nights turned tense at the drop of a hat and resulted in heated arguments, and they’d canceled it altogether for a while.
It was a shitty couple of months.
“And after that mess, we all swore that we’d never let anything get between us ever again. Bros above hos and all that, and it goes without saying that Addie’s on the bro side of that line.”
“Does that make me the ho in this situation?”
“Hey, if the street corner fits…” Easton chuckled at his own joke and formed circles of water on the bar with the condensation from his bottle. “Haven’t you ever heard the saying don’t shit where you eat?”
Tucker assumed that was rhetorical—of coursehe’d heard the saying.
