Page 59 of Catch and Release Groom

It didn’t preclude you from experiencing emotions. Not when you and your wife were dealing with fertility struggles, and not when your fiancée up and left you at the altar.

Still, as they stepped onto the deck and inhaled that familiar, muggy swamp air, every feeling they might or might not be having didn’t seem as heavy.

“Wanna talk about it?” Easton asked Shep, clearing his throat to maintain an even keel.

“Fuck no.” Shep leaned a hip against the railing. “All I’ve been doing for hours is talking about it. And tomorrow, we’ll pick ourselves back up and figure it out, but tonight, I want to wallow a minute or twoand thenforget.”

“Got it.” Crawford passed Shep another beer. “You wannanottalk about it, then?”

“Literally anything else.”

They lined up in the same order they used to in high school, elbows propped on the railing, necks of bottles dangling from fingers as they peered out at the dark water.

“Not that I’m asking for pity while goin’ through a huge life crisis,” Shep said, “but I feel like it’d help if Easton spilled the beer on what he’s doin’ here with Imogen.”

Easton took a long pull, not spilling a single solitary drop, and then said, “She’s attending the weddin’ with me tomorrow. We had an arrangement, is all.”

“Denial?” Shep leaned forward to ask Tucker, “Counselor, would you advise that with so much evidence stacked against him?”

“That depends.” Tucker narrowed his gaze on Easton. “Would you be willing to submit to a polygraph test?”

Easton frowned at his friends, opened his mouth to argue, and opted for swigging the last of his beer to help the truth go down. Or was it coming up? Neither sounded good, and the consequences for both were equally grim. “Fine. It might’ve turned into a little more along the way. But it doesn’t matter.” Damn it, his throat was closing up again. “Because tomorrow night she’ll be flying back home.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Imogen primarily just nodded along with the words of validation, commiseration, and support as the rest of the ladies consoled their friend.

While the temperature on the shoreline of the tiny, swampy river was sticky and humid enough to bead her skin with sweat, once the cool breeze wafted over her, she fought a shiver. She rubbed her hands over her bare arms, trying to send warmth into her limbs.

Then she saw it. Something that sent an entirely different type of cold through her.

Bumpy, ridged skin, protruding eyes, and a long snout with jagged teeth.

“Um, um.” Imogen backed into Addie and promptly apologized. But then the alligator bobbed out of the water, uncorking the scream she’d been fighting all along.

The dogs formed a barking, howling choir, confirming her fears about the danger.

“Alligator, alligator,” she spluttered, and Addie leaped about a foot in the air and shrieked as well.

Heavy footsteps thundered through the echoing, amplified seconds, and then Easton’s profile appeared like a literal beacon in the night. Without an ounce of hesitation, he catapulted over the railing of the deck, easily clearing the swamp water gap between the houseboat and the mossy shore.

He raced toward her in a half-crouched position, and the instant he reached her, he boomeranged her behind him. Taking a protective stance against the danger, he withdrew and clicked on a flashlight, sweeping the beam in an arc.

To the right and the left, and then along the shoreline and—

“There,”Imogen breathed more than said, banding herself around one of Easton’s large arms as she flung out a finger. “It’s right…”

Wait. Was that a…branch?

Knotted wood created the optical illusion of raised eyes, and the snout turned out to be the broken, dried-up end of a stump. As reality set in, Imogen’s heart took a nosedive. She’d mucked up any chance at making a good impression by letting her imagination run wild.

While everyone else had been consoling their friend nonetheless.

In her defense, she hadn’t a clue what to say to help. She didn’t know anyone well enough to gamble on what they’d find comforting. Certainly nothing about risk factors and overblown statistics that might be skewed based on who reported them.

That was how she’d wanted to reply to Lexi’s sobbed statistics about in vitro fertilization. But she’d adhered to the safer social norms, logical to a fault, up until her paranoia had transformed a tottering log into a reptile. “I’m so sorr—”

Laughter burst from Lexi, veering into cackling territory as she wheezed an unsuccessful explanation of what she found so funny. One person after another got the giggles, and soon, they were all doubled over.

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