The Groomsman: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Billionaires of Club Tempest)

by Sloane Hunter

  Mason nodded slowly. “Okay, Mac,” he said. “I want you to listen very closely to me. And retain this, for god’s sake.”

  I nodded absentmindedly. Mason always had a saying or a lesson or some shite.

  “Look at me, Mac,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes, but looked into his.

  “Do not, under any circumstances, fuck up this wedding. This week is not about whatever issue you’re dealing with. It’s about Sam. And he deserves to be happy.”

  I scoffed. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “I’m serious, Mac,” Mason said, standing. “Sam is happy. Beck is good for him. And I don’t know if it’s jealousy or if you just don’t like to share, but if you have any surprises, I’d leave them on this plane. For your own sake.”

  He walked back to the front of the plane where the rest of them were talking and laughing. I stayed where I was and glowered at his back.

  Who the hell did Mason think he was, telling me what to do like I was an impertinent child? I had no ‘plans’ for breaking up Sam and Beck.

  But at the same time, if your buddy was about to be run off the road, wouldn’t he want you to tell him? To make him see the error of his ways?

  I watched Sam drink and smile and slap Mason on the back once he joined them. Poor guy didn’t know what he was in for. Didn’t see that this life, these happy times with the Knights, were all coming to an end. This week might as well be the wake, funeral, and goddamn burial for our friend group. No, I wasn’t about to let that happen so easily.

  I pushed the issue away for later and, in its absence, Twain’s words nudged at my mind. I thought back to what he’d said right before I stood to tower over him. I thought you wanted to fuck her friend.

  I frowned. What the hell was he talking about?

  2

  Alice

  Alice: The flowers look horrible. Please tell me it’s not too late to fix them.

  * * *

  I pressed send and then stared at the screen, unblinking, willing Mariana to answer. Now.

  We’d just landed at the Tuzas International Airport, and I had beautiful, glorious cell service again. I’d made the mistake of opening my e-mail just before take off and then had to endure the last four hours hoping the terrible arrangements were fixable.

  Unfortunately, the wedding planner didn’t seem to be on her phone at the moment. Hopefully she was doing something important, but, just as likely, she was sitting by the pool, enjoying the resort before her boss showed up to make sure she was doing her job.

  Kylie’s light pink nails snapped in front of my eyes, jerking me from my concentration and back to reality.

  “Earth to Alice. You want to toast before the drive or not?”

  “Last call,” the attendant confirmed behind her.

  That being said, reality had slipped into a different filter than the one I usually existed in. Despite the last few months of working with Beck and Mariana on the extravagant wedding plans, I still somehow had a hard time wrapping my mind around the private jet we were currently sitting in.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, jumping up from my seat in the back of the plane.

  I joined Beck and the other bridesmaids at the front where she already had a glass poured for me.

  “Did you work the entire flight?” Beck asked me. “I barely saw you.”

  “Just fixing some things,” I said. I’d spent most of the ride on my computer, going over the seating plan. Three of Sam’s business contacts had RSVP’d last minute and the perfectly arranged banquet hall needed a complete overhaul. “Don’t worry about it. Everything’s perfect.”

  There was a look of concern in her blue eyes, but she nodded and passed me the glass.

  I raised it and was mirrored by our company. “To Beck,” I said. “And to the perfect ending to the perfect love story. Your wedding is going to be one for the ages.”

  “Here, here,” the three other girls echoed before downing the champagne.

  “If you could please take a seat, the pilot is going to taxi to where your car is waiting,” the flight attendant said.

  We sat and I checked my phone again, saw that Mariana had not responded yet. Damn it. Should I try calling?

  “Okay,” Beck said, setting her glass aside where it disappeared immediately in the hands of the attendant. “What’s first on the agenda once we get there?”

  “Find the guys,” Kylie said immediately.

  I’d introduced Beck to a lot of my friends in the city when she’d moved there, but Kylie was the one she’d most connected with. Kylie was short and slender with large blue eyes and dark brown hair that fell almost to her waist. I’d met her in a two-hour line to buy a cronut shortly after I first moved to the city. We’d bonded as we mourned the loss of our morning to a pastry and compared our tiny hometowns.

  “Knowing Keegan, he’ll be by the pool.” That was Jules and I was surprised to hear her speak. She’d been almost as quiet as me on the plane ride, face buried in her phone as the others talked.

  Jules was the girlfriend of Keegan Thompson, one of Sam’s friends. She was model-gorgeous because, well, she was a model.

  Beck hadn’t been overly thrilled at first about inviting her to be a bridesmaid. None of us knew her very well and she seemed to have a rather chilly personality. But it made sense. As Keegan’s girlfriend, she’d be along for the trip anyway, and Beck only had three bridesmaids to Sam’s five groomsman. She just evened out the procession and the pictures. It wasn’t that hard to convince Beck that it was a good idea; she said she didn’t care too much about who was in the wedding pictures anyway.

  “I’d like to go to the pool,” Sarah said. While Jules was chic and cosmopolitan, Sarah leaned the opposite way. A blonde beauty from Beck’s hometown of Gainesville, the two had been friends since elementary school. The quiet country girl seemed a little intimidated by the rest of us, but she seemed to be loosening up the longer we spent together.

  “Then the pool it is,” Beck confirmed. “I can’t wait to see Sam!”

  I grinned at the delight on Beck’s face. She acted like she hadn’t seen Sam in weeks, instead of just since this morning. He had flown out with his friends shortly before we left. Speaking of which…

  I turned to Kylie who was lounging on the couch, sketching in her notebook. “Are you nervous about seeing Henry again?” She and Black T-shirt had hooked up that disastrous night at the Black Shade.

  Kylie shrugged, casually erasing a misplaced line. “Not really. I ran into him at that fund raiser thing in June. Remember? When Sam proposed?” (Of course I did. Who forgets when their best friend gets engaged to a billionaire?)

  “Was it awkward?”

  She laughed. “Not at all. We both knew it was a one time deal. We actually just reminisced over everything that happened earlier that night. Remember Mac Walsh? How he punched out Daniel and got us all kicked out of the bar?”

  Kylie must have thought I’d had a traumatic brain injury I forgot to mention. “Vaguely,” I lied. “Daniel was pissed for a while about that.” I couldn’t help but chuckle at the memory. “He wanted to sue him.”

  “What for? Injured pride?” Beck quipped beside me.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Speaking of nerves… You gonna give Mac a piece of your mind when you see him?” Kylie asked, glancing playfully at me from the corner of her eye.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I barely remember him.”

  “Sure, sure,” Beck said with a grin.

  I just rolled my eyes. While my intuitions at the Black Shade about Beck and Sam had turned out to be completely on point, Beck was obviously not even close.

  On the subject of Mac Walsh, I’d known from first leer that he was an irritating, abrasive idiot who drank too much and had a temper that sat directly on the line between bad-boy sexy and maybe-we-should-call-the-cops. Sure, he was gorgeous and successful, but the guy obviously had issues and that was more th
an enough to keep me far, far away.

  That and I was currently single and happy about it. The idiot better not even look at me the wrong way or he was going to have my foot so far up his ass that my heel would pierce his tongue.

  That being said, a part of me was a little nervous about seeing him again. I hadn’t seen a glimpse of Mac since that night at the Black Shade. Even though our best friends were dating, over the past year, we always seemed to be just missing each other. He was always ‘coming later’ or he’d ‘just left’. And though I wasn’t wishing for it, at all, I found it odd that our paths had never crossed a single time.

  The fact that he might be purposefully avoiding me had crossed my mind. At first I thought it might be because he was embarrassed about his antics that night, but Beck, who had spent time around him and, more importantly, had heard all the stories Sam had to tell, made it pretty clear that Mac didn’t have an ashamed bone in his entire body.

  But really none of that mattered in the slightest. After four months of hectic planning, we were finally heading to the resort. I needed to be on my A game so that Beck could enjoy herself before the guests started to arrive on Friday. We were arriving early for four full days of unwinding under the warm Mexican sun.

  As Maid of Honor, I was taking this as seriously as I possibly could. There would be no hiccups, small or otherwise, and the big day was going to go off without a hitch. Beck deserved that.

  As the plane kicked into gear and started off across the tarmac to our waiting car, I made a promise to myself and to Beck. I’d keep it all under control. And anyone who got in the way of peaceful wedding bliss had better watch out.

  I spent the first ten minutes of the ride with my nose pressed to the tinted window. To my right, the city of Tuzas stretched into the distance, to my left, leafy green paradise with a shining coastline as far as the eye could see. And ahead? Tropical luxury in the form of the Tuzas Suns Resort and Retreat, a sprawling complex whose website boasted so many amenities and activities I couldn’t see how it could be any smaller than the entirety of Brooklyn.

  Kylie had the limo violently blaring pop music and was trying to teach Sarah how to dance, singing along terribly but proudly. The ceiling was too low for them to stand straight so they moved in a jerky cross between a drunken conga line and that scene from The Exorcist where she scuttles backwards down the stairs.

  Kylie pretended to slap Sarah’s ass which made Beck laugh so hard champagne came out her nose. “Come on, Beck! Get in here,” Kylie cried as they reached the back of the limo and had to turn around, taking baby steps to make the most of the space.

  “No!” Beck gasped, wiping away tears and champagne. “There’s not enough room in here for that!”

  “Yeah, there really isn’t,” Kylie agreed, reluctantly collapsing back into her seat. She turned the music down a bit and reached for her glass. “Make sure you tell Sam to get us a party bus next time. The limo might be classy as shit, but I need room to get my moves out.”

  “I think the world might be better off if you kept them inside,” Beck mused.

  Kylie pulled an incensed face and tossed her long hair over her shoulder. “Screw the world. I must dance.”

  “You should get that on a t-shirt,” I said, laughing before suppressing a yawn. At three glasses of champagne before two o’clock, this might as well have been a normal brunch for the girls and me, but the early wake-up and lack of food was combining with the alcohol to make me a little sleepy.

  “Hey, hey, none of that now,” Kylie said, pointing a warning finger at me. “You better drink some coffee because tonight’s going to get wild.”

  “Wild?” Sarah asked. She looked breathless from the dancing and a little nervous.

  Kylie gave her a big smile. “Trust me,” she said. “It’s going to be the best night of your life. Now what is your opinion on clubbing?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been,” she admitted. Jules snorted, but looked away when I cast a curious glance. I hoped nobody heard, most of all Sarah. We were going to get the quiet girl to have a good time. There was no room for judgment with this crowd.

  “Not a problem,” Kylie said. “All you have to do is shake your ass and then—”

  The two of them put their heads together as Kylie walked her through the game plan and I turned away to evaluate Beck with a knowing eye. She was looking out the window, suddenly removed from the party, a questioning look on her face. I moved over so I was by her side.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” I asked.

  Her eyes flicked to mine and she blushed as if I’d caught her thinking something she shouldn’t. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. She paused. “I’m just thinking about how lucky I am.”

  “Well, you deserve it,” I said, grabbing her hand. She nodded softly and didn’t comment so I continued. “This is going to be a fantastic week, ending with a wedding straight from the story books. Trust me, as Maid of Honor, a position I take very seriously mind you, this is all going to go off without a hitch. Just sit back and relax and let me guide you down the river of love.”

  She gave a breathy laugh. “I’m sorry, what? The river of love?”

  I shrugged. “I think I’m like a riverboat captain in this scenario? But come on, I don’t know what I’m saying. Just roll with it please.”

  Beck grinned. “I will. And I trust you. It’s going to be fantastic. I can’t wait to see the resort.”

  “I can’t wait to see your pictures from Italy. Tell me again what you have planned?”

  Beck lost the far-away look and launched into an explanation of villas and wineries, small sea-side towns and the giant, ancient mecca that was Rome. Sam was going all-out on their honeymoon just as he was with their wedding.

  As we passed through the gates and the limo drove up the mile-long drive to the Tuzas Suns Welcoming Center, all fears for the week melted away. I believed my own words. This wedding was going to go off without a hitch.

  There wasn’t much more time for worries or promises though. The moment the limo pulled up in front of the gorgeous, glass-walled reception center, we were in a flurry of commotion. Attendants came for our bags, whisking them away to our rooms, while a familiar face emerged from the vestibule, arms held wide in welcome.

  Mariana was a straight-backed, gorgeous woman with dark hair and a bleached-white power suit that I’d never seen her without. I had to hand it to her — the woman knew what looked good on her and I was pretty sure she had a dozen of the exact same suit in varying shades of ivory, pearl, and bone. How she never got a speck of dirt on any of them was beyond me and added to her mystique as the wedding planner to the rich and famous of NYC.

  “The future Mrs. Sam Callahan,” she exclaimed as she approached us. “Tuzas Suns Resort welcomes you all. I’ve just been checking on your rooms. Everything is in order. Why don’t we get you girls settled in?”

  “Did you see my text?” I asked her, ignoring the sugary words. Mariana and I had spent a lot of time together as I managed the wedding plans and we were well past meaningless pleasantries.

  Her smile dipped a bit, but then straightened into an aggressive brightness. “I did, Alice. I’ve been waiting on the resort for confirmation about the change.”

  “Well next time, could you acknowledge that you got it so I’m not wonder—”

  Beck put a hand on my arm. “It’s okay, Mariana.” To me she said, “Stop it, Alice! Let the woman do her job. This week is about relaxing. Not thinking about the wedding.”

  Mariana’s smile tiptoed toward smug as Beck tried to keep me from doing my job. But I nodded.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Yes. Fun. Should we head up to the rooms then?”

  Beck turned to wrangle the girls and I mouthed to Mariana, Let me know about the flowers, before grabbing my bag and heading after my friends to the reception area.

  We didn’t have to wait in line. Mariana had come that morning to prepare everything for us. She walked straight past the reception desk and d
own a glass hallway that looked out over the resort.

  As we walked, she dived straight into what we needed to know about Tuzas Suns. There were two main guest towers, the north and the south, and they were joined by the longer, shorter building that we were currently walking in. To the front was check-in, but the further you went, there were all the amenities of a world-class resort — multiple restaurants and dining options, bars, a three-story spa, a gym, a movie theater, a casino, rock-climbing, and an auditorium.

  But the real highlights of a stay at Tuzas Suns, she told us, would always be outside. Between the guest towers and the ocean were multiple pools spread out across the property. They varied from “fun for the whole family” to complete with a fully-outfitted swim-up bar. Beyond the swimming, there were tennis courts and a golf course and acres of gardens and pathways to walk and admire the scenic coastline. They offered horseback-riding on the beach, sailing and scuba classes, diving in a shipwreck just off the coast, snorkeling in the coves—

  The list continued, Mariana barely pausing for breath. I wondered how much of a kickback she got from the resort for recommending the place to her clients. But she’d promised the best, and, at least in pure volume of activities, she’d definitely delivered. I felt like I should be taking notes or I was going to miss everything the place had to offer. Hopefully the others grasped some of it, but they all shared the same glassy-eyed look that I was sure was on my face too.

  Mariana led us to the south guest tower and bypassed the elevators for the typical guests, using a keycard to swipe us into a nondescript door. It opened to reveal a luxury waiting room, spotlessly clean, with a long row of elevators.

  “This is the room access for premium guests,” she said. We each received sleek, black keycards with a floor and room number stamped in white.

  “Mr. Callahan and his friends have rented out all the suites on the floor. The five of you will share the largest. Now if you need—”