Page 11 of Some Kinda Romance

Asher gave me a serious look. “Emotional and mental abuse are real too, Dash.”

“I know that,” I said. “I’m not saying they’re not real. I’m just saying I don’t know if I buy into any of the rumors surrounding him doing it to her. The divorce is their business, though. It’s got nothing to do with us. What does have to do with us is this wedding and the fact that she doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing.”

“How do you know?” Corbin asked, lifting both of his dark eyebrows at me. “You’ve had one meeting with her. If it’s true that she’s been through all that, then maybe you should give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“Maybe you should give it to him instead,” I countered.

He snickered. “I’d really rather give it to her.”

I sighed, shoving a hand into my hair and my club back into my bag. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“Yeah, I do, but it’s so easy with you today, bro.” He laughed, shaking his head at me. “On a scale from one to ten, how hungover are you?”

“Why?”

“We need to know so we can replicate the effect,” Finn explained, grinning like he was the funniest guy in the world. “It’s fun to get to give you shit for once. You dish it out enough. You should be able to take it.”

“Oh, I can take it,” I told him. “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say a six. Headache. Nausea. Cotton mouth. The whole shebang, but I’m not dying.”

Asher chuckled. “What did Lance feed you last night?”

What he’d fed me hadn’t been as much of a problem as the binge I’d gone on after I’d gotten home, but I didn’t tell my brothers or my suspiciously quiet future stepfather about that. If I did, I’d probably wind up admitting that I’d drunk until I’d gotten Serenity’s eyes—and her tits—out of my head, which had only happened after I’d passed out.

Since I had no intention of ever admitting to anyone how attracted I was to that clumsy amateur, I was playing this one even closer to the chest than usual. Which meant I was more impenetrable than Fort Knox in its glory days.

It was unfortunate that she affected me in ways I didn’t care to think about. The tabloids made me out to be a playboy and that was fine by me, but reports of my sexcapades were greatly overexaggerated. There was a little bit of truth to them. I was no saint and I would never pretend to be one either, but I was hardly as active as they made me out to be.

That was what I was blaming this on anyway. She affected me so much because it’d been a long-ass time and she was built like the fifties pin-up girls I’d had on my wall as a teenager. Except that she was more voluptuous—and real instead of just some woman in a painting.

Blowing out a deep breath, I inhaled just as deeply and focused on slowing my rapidly increasing heartrate. Whenever I thought about her today, the hangover made me want her even more.

Lazy sex. Slow thrusts into⁠—

“Dash?”

“Yep?” I came crashing back to earth hard when I found all four of my brothers and Richard staring at me like I’d missed something.

Zachary pointed his club at my ball. “Are you going to hit that?”

No, but I really want to.

Instead of saying that though, I strode up to the ball and imagined it was this whole wedding fiasco. Not even that helped my swing today. I ended up playing the worst game of my life.

They kept hazing me, mentioning Serenity at any available opportunity until eventually, Richard glanced at me with sympathy shining in his eyes. “Maybe we should cut her some slack, huh? I don’t know much about her outside of what your mom has told me, but it seems the poor girl has had a rough go of it the past couple years. Besides, the wedding is going to be incredible no matter what goes wrong simply because of who I get to marry.”

I rolled my eyes internally. Gag.

Finn smacked me in the back of my knees with his club. “Seriously, Dash? Where the hell is your head today? It’s your turn. Again.”

The rest of the game was even more abysmal, with even Zachary joining in the banter with Richard and honestly seeming interested in getting to know the guy. When he turned to us after the game, a pile of rocks sank to the pit of my stomach.

“Does anyone want to head into the club and grab a beer? My treat.”

As I’d expected, everyone else said yes, but I declined. At least I had a handy excuse at the ready. “I have wedding business to attend to with Serenity.”

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what would be worse, beers with my soon-to-be stepdad or wedding planning with her, but wedding planning was what my mom had signed me up for. After shaking their hands and saying my goodbyes, I decided that I would simply be more closed off with her today than I had been before.

In order to survive the next couple months with her, I had to keep my eyes and hands to myself and my mind focused on the wedding instead of losing it to the gutter. If not, this inconvenient attraction was going to drive me crazy and I could never allow that to happen.

There was too much at stake.