Page 35 of Just One of the Groomsmen
“Sounds like someone’s scared.” Since she didn’t have anything anyway, Addie folded, and when she noticed Easton’s anxious tell of curving his hand around the bill of his hat, she nudged Lexi under the table.
Lexi raised, and after he matched what she’d thrown in, they laid down their cards. The high-pitched squeal that came from Lexi when she won made Addie flinch, but it also made her smile.
The girl was so dang happy about winning a hand.
Then she surprised Addie with a tackle hug, and if Tucker hadn’t shot out his arm, her chair would’ve toppled over and she probably would’ve experienced her second wardrobe malfunction of the night.
As it was, everyone was examining them a hair too closely, eyes glazing over, the kind of look dudes gave when two girls were squished together.
“Really, guys?” Addie scolded as Lexi retreated to her own chair, and the girl’s eyebrows drew together.
“What?” Clearly she hadn’t hung around guys in the “just friends” setting, or she’d know that anytime girls so much as hugged, most hot-blooded males got images of experimenting females who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Glad to know she qualified as a girl inthattype of situation.
“Never mind,” Shep said. Then he cleared his throat and the guys straightened in their seats and refocused on the center of the table as the cards were shuffled and re-dealt.
At the end of the next round, Shep prematurely folded and gave the pot to his fiancée, even though she was clearly bluffing.
She bounced in her seat, a satisfied smile on her face. “That was way more fun than I expected it to be. Winning probably helped.” She squeezed Addie’s hand. “Thanks again for teaching me so I could come play tonight.”
“Happy to help,” Addie said, and more than that, it was true.
“Admittedly, when Will first introduced me to you, I didn’t understand how one of his closest friends was a girl.”
“Apparently I’m not a girl.” Addie fired a glare over the table at Ford.
“But you’re very pretty, regardless of your preferred hobbies. I’m surprised that none of you ever dated.”
Everyone froze, panic slowly bleeding from face to face. Their expressions were so gonna get them busted, just like their smug ones always had after they’d pulled off a prank.
Addie had taken a swig of beer but couldn’t seem to swallow, and Shep squirmed in his seat. Then he cleared his throat and they were done for.
Lexie turned to him, her forehead all scrunched up. “Will?”
“Well, technically, at one time, Addie and I…” He left that hanging, as if not mentioning the fact that he and Addie had been boyfriend and girlfriend a lifetime ago would undo it.
Lexie’s shoulders tightened, and her fingers wrapped around her glass, the cheery pink of her nails at odds with the violent squeeze. “Are you telling me that one of my bridesmaids is your ex-girlfriend?”
“Groomsmen,” Addie ever so helpfully added without thinking. Her blood pressure skyrocketed as she worked to fix it. “What we did could hardly even be called dating. I mean, it was the beginning of high school, and neither of us could even drive yet.”
“How. Long?” Lexi asked, her voice a few degrees icier than usual.
“It was also during football season, which hardly counts because we rarely saw each other,” Shep said, digging their grave a little deeper.
Addie grabbed a shovel and got to digging, too. “Right. He was the new guy in town, so I didn’t really know him that well before we went on a date to the movies, and it was our one and only official date. Then I introduced him to the guys, who naturally thought he was awesome, and we ended up doing all group things.”
“Then Shep couldn’t handle that she was the dude in the relationship, which made him all insecure and shit,” Easton said, and sniggers went around the table.
They were yucking it up, but Lexi still looked legitimately upset, all of their connecting coming undone.
Addie’s stomach bottomed out, desperation filling the suddenly empty space, and she grasped for a way to fix it. “It was more that we realized it’d been a while since we’d held hands or kis—” At the wild gleam that entered Lexi’s eye, Addie decided to forgo mentioning their kissing and quickly revised it to, “Hugged. Along the way we’d become friends instead, and we found we preferred that to dating. We work really well as friends, and in a lot of ways he’s more of a brother than anything.”
Shep grabbed his fiancée’s hand, his eyes imploring hers. “Honestly, babe. The main reason I even asked her out when I first moved into town was because we had so much in common. Like football and cars, and like I’ve always told you, she’s just one of the guys.”
“He didn’t know any better,” Tucker said. “He’d never played T-ball with her. I still have flashbacks of the day she got so mad at me that she picked up the nearby bat and chucked it at my head.”
He raised a hand to the side of his face, like he might need to block her now, and he wasn’t totally off base.
