Page 9 of Bridal Boot Camp

I could only nod, still trying to recover from my shock. Thanks to my parents, I generally avoid alcohol, so my “usual” is iced tea.

“Wait,” I said to Ryan, as Bree slid a cool, tall glass into my hand. “Does this mean that you pulled your Taser on—?”

Jokester looked delighted. “He didn’t tell her the whole story.” He elbowed the guy next to him. “She hasn’t heard the whole story!”

“Frickin’ great,” said the guy next to him, grinning ear to ear. “We get to hear the story again!”

Ryan glared at them sourly, but good-naturedly. To me, he said, “See what I have to put up with? But, yeah, so I left Chrissie in the squad car for a minute while I ran inside the Circle K to grab a cup of coffee—”

“Circle K!” Jokester cried. “That’s where Rookie gets his coffee! Not even Island Coffee Queen!”

Ryan said, “Ignore these clowns. And I’m not a rookie. Well, I am, but only because I was the last guy hired, and that was three years ago, so to them that makes me a rookie. Anyway, I was on night shift, and Circle K was the only place open to get coffee. Obviously I left the windows in my ride up, but the engine was running with the air on so my girl would be comfortable. But the new cars we’ve been assigned by the county are all hybrids, so you can’t hear that the engine’s running. So some guy comes along who sees Chrissie inside and is concerned I’ve left my dog in a hot vehicle, and being an animal lover, he tries to open the doors to let her out—”

“And then Rookie here comes out and almost tases him!” Jokester cried, delighted with the story. “You shoulda seen Hartwell’s face when he saw the security footage! I thought he was gonna have a stroke.”

I glanced at Ryan, who didn’t look nearly as amused as his fellow coworkers. The memory of the incident was still too raw.

He’d dropped his arm from my shoulders, so I reached out to touch his fingers.

“You thought the guy was trying to break into your car to hurt Chrissie, didn’t you?” I asked, softly.

Ryan nodded. “It never—not even for a moment—occurred to me that he might be trying to help her.”

I squeezed his hand. “I bet you meet a lot of jerks in your line of work.”

“I do,” he said, squeezing back. “But thanks to your class, I’m starting to remember that I meet a lot more really great people who only want to help.”

His hazel-eyed gaze on mine was so intense that for a second or two, I forgot we were standing inside a dockside diner decorated with mermaid Barbie dolls, surrounded by other people. It felt as if it were just the two of us... and Chrissie, who’d thrust her cold wet nose between our hands, her hot tongue on our fingers, her tail thumping against one of my bare thighs.

But just as I was mustering up the courage to ask if he maybe wanted to skip the class for the night and go to my place, Bree came bounding up to the microphone on the café’s mini-stage.

“Okay, players, are we ready to get this show on the road?” she asked.

Ryan tore his gaze—and hand—from mine.

“Damn,” he said. “I’m up. Excuse me a minute, okay?”

Then he grabbed a ukulele and rushed onto the stage, taking the mic from Bree.

“Hey, kids,” he said, with a sweetly impish smile. “What’s it time for?”

The reply from the children in the audience was as shrill as it was enthusiastic: “It’s ukulele time!”

I felt an almost overwhelming urge to flee. I had, after all, fulfilled my part of the bargain I’d made with Jen. I’d showed up, hadn’t I? Surely I didn’t have to stay for the actual ukulele playing. I honestly had better things to do. My Netflix queue was full of rom-coms I’d been wanting to watch. There was a new recipe for cauliflower crust pizza Jenna had sent me that I’d been dying to try.

And if this hurricane Ryan had mentioned was actually heading in our direction, I needed to get some laundry done. A girl couldn’t evacuate without clean underwear.

But just as I was slinking for the exit, Ryan and the kids broke into the song he said they’d been practicing all month.

I froze.

The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Really? It had to bethatsong. Of all songs.

Never mind that it’s way overplayed, and has basically been a cliché on the ukulele circuit ever since that Hawaiian guy sang it and everyone went wild for it, and then the Hawaiian guy died, and the song became even more popular.

Never mind that the lyrics are complete lies, and have led perfectly innocent people—such as myself, for instance, way back when I was an impressionable teenager—to believe that there’s a better world out there, only to have us poor saps find out—the hard way—that this information is incorrect: there is no place over the rainbow. Rainbows are actually optical illusions created by raindrops being hit by sunlight at just the right angle. You can’t travel to an optical illusion.