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

by Sloane Hunter

  “Okay, I’ll give you that,” he said. “But when I started drinking, none of us had anything to be confident about other than the shit we poured down our throats.”

  Mac was actually, for the first time, acting like a normal person and not a complete jackass. Removed from the resort and the constant presence of the rest of our friends, he seemed to visibly relax, lounging in his chair with the glass of whiskey like a pauper prince.

  The stress of the wedding did seem to be hanging heavily on him, though for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine why. He’d made it very clear that he didn’t agree with marriage, but it wasn’t like he was being forced to the altar himself. I wanted to ask him, but also didn’t want this nicer, funner Mac to disappear back behind a scowl.

  “Who were ‘we’?” I asked instead.

  “Ah.” A wistful look flashed across his face. “Just my old childhood friends in Ireland. Good boys, the lot of them. My first friends, long before the Knights were ever a thing.”

  I nodded. “What happened to them?”

  He shrugged and the casual look faded slightly. “Life,” was all he said.

  I hurried the conversation on somewhere else. It seemed like, with marriage, this was another topic not to broach. “So did you always want to be a liquor tycoon?”

  The easy grin returned. “Not at all. That was something I fell into. No, when I was a kid, I—” He paused, like he regretted starting the sentence.

  “You what?” I probed.

  “Nothing,” he said gruffly.

  “Oh come on,” I pleaded. “What did little Mac want to be?”

  The cocked grin slid back up his face and he said, “All right. I wanted to be a singer.”

  My eyes widened. “What? No way.”

  He waved me off. “Don’t make fun of me now.”

  “So you can sing?” I asked.

  “I haven’t in years,” he said.

  “Will you sing for me?”

  “No.”

  I pulled a face and he laughed. “I don’t sing anymore, love. Now I’m a full-time business man. We have to keep up appearances.”

  I sat back and crossed my arms. “We’re going to revisit this, but tell me, how did that come around, the business and the billions?”

  “Trial and lots and lots of error. I had to leave Dublin for… legal reasons and found myself in the countryside. Needed work so I wound up at a brewery. I don’t know how I didn’t put two and two together sooner. I was made for the business. Got my feet wet there and then worked for their offices in the States. But I wanted to be my own boss, never cared much for taking orders. So I went out on my own. Spun the Mac Walsh line well in marketing and made a solid product. A decade later and the business has never slowed down.”

  “Wow,” I said, impressed. “That must have been a lot of work.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, love,” he said. “But I was an energetic kid. And looking back, I’m glad I had the smarts and the talent for business, otherwise I would have continued down the wrong path. Probably be dead or in jail by now.”

  “And instead you’re rich and famous,” I finished.

  “I’m successful,” he corrected. “Honestly, the fame sucks and the money is only good for having fun with my mates.” He finished his drink and I noticed that mine had somehow gone empty while we talked.

  “Want to move on?” he asked. I nodded. There was a hell of a lot more to see and I had a feeling the night was only just beginning.

  I’d been correct. From the rooftop bar, the night exploded from one back alley haunt to the next. Mac led me through Wonderland like the White Rabbit, seemingly possessing a preternatural knowledge of where and how to find the most interesting and exciting spots for debauchery and deviance.

  We popped from bar to bar, talking with backpackers from Europe and locals who’d lived on the Mexican coast their entire lives. I made Mac try a fruity cocktail (that he grudgingly admitted to enjoying) in a watering hole converted from a sixteenth century church. From the whispered advice of a one-legged, pockmarked local, we found an unmarked door and knocked only to be welcomed into a full-on rave somehow muted by what must have been solid steel walls. I’d wanted to leave until Mac grabbed my hand and pulled me into the fray and we jumped and screamed with the others until falling back out dripping with sweat and laughing.

  Another suggestion ended up being a three-story, neon-hued strip club that looked suspiciously like it doubled as a brothel. That one I dragged Mac out of immediately even as he insisted we should ‘just give it a chance’.

  We eventually found that hulking motorcycle group on the street corner and Mac talked to them in terrible broken Spanish until he had them doubled over in laughter describing how I’d walked in on him and the wedding planner in the woman’s bathroom. Then somehow Mac convinced me to jump on the back of a Harley while he argued with another to let him drive (the man didn’t cave). They drove us to another part of the neighborhood and we did shots and sang loudly and badly to Mexican music that I could only guess the words of.

  Eventually, the motorcyclists spun out to a different part of town, leaving Mac and me to switch bars yet again, this time to a much quieter place where Mac started up a game of pool with a kid who looked to be in his late teens and who displayed an impressive sleeve of homemade tattoos.

  I sat on a barstool, sipping my signature fruity cocktail while Mac and the kid circled the table, stabbing at balls and exchanging friendly insults.

  “Where’d you learn to shoot, kid?” Mac asked as he sunk the eight ball to win the game. It hadn’t been a long one. The kid looked drunk, making sweeping declarations and tripping over his stick.

  “Wa-Wan more game,” he slurred to Mac.

  “Nah, man,” he said. “This is too easy. Play one of your friends.” He nodded to a table set back a bit where a motley collection of guys ranging from the kid’s age to early twenties watched them play.

  “Play me,” he insisted. The kid shuffled in his pocket and brought out a wad of cash. My brow furrowed at the sight. I wasn’t sure what the conversion of pesos to dollars was, but it looked like a hell of a lot of money.

  Now he had Mac’s attention. His eyes lingered on the money and then flicked up to meet the kid’s.

  I expected him to take him up on the challenge, but Mac did the exact opposite. “I think my friend’s tired,” he said, nodding at me.

  “Come on!” one of the kid’s friends shouted from the table. “Don’t pussy out, man.” He accentuated his point by slamming his bottle on the table.

  It looked for a moment like Mac was going to refuse, but then he smiled and nodded. “All right, boys,” he said. He pulled his own wallet out and threw a stack of notes on the table. “Let’s do this.”

  “Put in all of it.” That was one of the friends again. He had stood and walked behind Mac, looking over his shoulder into his wallet. Mac hesitated again, but then nodded. The rest of his bills joined the pile on the table.

  It became apparent, quickly, that the first game was a fluke. The moment the money hit the table, the kid sobered, chalked up, and broke the cluster with professional precision. Mac’s jaw hardened and I clutched my drink. He was being hustled. The question was, could he win?

  The kid sunk three balls before Mac even got a turn, but when he did step up to the plate, I saw immediately that he had been holding back during the first game as well.

  He banked a solid off the wall to push in his stripe, shot the cue ball straight down the length of the table to a corner pocket, and then hopped it over a solid to push a stripe into the opposite corner.

  The kids at the table jeered at both Mac and their friend, who glared at them and went to work once Mac missed his next shot.

  The game was fast and dirty, each of them only taking three turns apiece until it was just the cue and the eight ball on the table.

  “Where’d you learn to play?” the kid asked Mac.

  “I shoot with my friend, Twain. He could p
robably play professional if he didn’t have his head stuck up his ass. After a couple years, I can still barely put up a fight.”

  At Twain’s name, the kid looked at his friends with a strange expression on his face, but nothing more was said about the sixth Knight because Mac leaned down, nodded at the right side pocket and spun the eight ball expertly in.

  I cheered as the kid reluctantly shook Mac’s hand.

  “Ya know,” Mac said, grabbing his stack off the table, “I didn’t much want to bet anyway. You keep yours.”

  Awfully nice of him. I would have assumed Mac would take any chance to gloat over a competitor.

  Strangely though, the kid didn’t make a move to take his money back. “No,” he said. “You earned it.”

  “But—”

  “Take it.” His tone was hard, his eyes like flint. I shivered slightly.

  Mac nodded and scooped up the money. Then he turned to me and said, “How about moving to the next one?”

  “But we just got here,” I said. Then I noticed the look in his eyes. They said, Get your ass in gear. Now.

  A twitch of unease started in my stomach. I left my drink on the bar and Mac threw some of the cash next to it. He took my hand and hurried me out the side door.

  We walked a couple blocks over, Mac constantly looking over his shoulder.

  “Do you think they’re going to follow us?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Mac said. “Should have known I was getting hustled before we even started playing. Those guys hate to part with their money, especially to a tourist.”

  “I think we’re fine,” I said once we were a safe distance away. The street was empty and dark, full of shops closed for the evening. In the distance I could hear the echo of the livelier parts of town.

  “You could have lost,” I reminded him as he looked once again behind us.

  “Nah, then I wouldn’t have any money to pay a cab. I didn’t bring my cards. We’d have been stuck here until one of the Knights came and picked us up. Not something I wanted to do.”

  We were in the clear now and Mac relaxed and looked sideways at me. I’d been overly aware that he hadn’t let go of my hand since the bar, but he seemed to just notice it himself.

  He let it go quickly.

  “Sorry,” he said gruffly.

  “It’s fine,” I said. And it was, although I wasn’t entirely sure why. I’d started this evening so annoyed at Mac, I would have punched him if I’d gotten the chance. But something had changed, shifted, as we’d hopped from bar to club to late night haunt.

  He had been in his element all night. I felt like I was finally seeing the real Mac, the one that wasn’t stuffed into suits and made to eat with silverware. Here was a guy who belonged with a group of hoodlums hanging out in an alleyway, who somehow managed to make it to the other end of the social spectrum.

  “I get you,” I said, examining his face.

  Mac glanced, amused, at me as we walked together. “What?”

  “I get you,” I repeated, looking up at the sky. It was mostly blocked by the buildings, leaning over the street in cramped fellowship, but it was there, shining and dark and speckled with stars. “You’re not like the others.”

  “The Knights?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “The Daniel’s.”

  The corner of his mouth lifted in a scruffy smile and he stopped walking suddenly. I stopped too.

  He looked up at the sky and then again at me. “I didn’t know,” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “About Margot. Thought she was just some woman. Even if you hadn’t of followed me here, I wouldn’t have slept with her.”

  I didn’t know what to say. But with his confession, Mac seemed to be done talking. He took another step closer to me, testing, seeing if I’d turn away.

  Though he’d been by my side all evening, he seemed closer than he’d ever been. I could smell him over the powerful scent of the city, a musky mix of some kind of pine-scented shampoo and the wild smell of sex and danger. His green eyes studied mine, entrancing me and pulling me in, leaving me wanting when they looked away to my lips.

  He walked closer and, in his shadow, his tall, wide form towering over me, I took an automatic step back, bumping against the brick wall behind me. But I didn’t look away. There was a new dare in his eyes and I’d be damned if I backed down.

  He took my eye contact as a sign to move closer until we were only inches apart. He leaned forward. His lips approached mine, brushing so lightly against them, so close and yet not close enough. I wanted him to pull me in, to capture my mouth in his, but I was paralyzed, waiting for his move. The eyes smiled, and just as the tension had reached its peak and I knew it couldn’t go on any longer before it snapped, just as he was about to press them to mine—

  “Hey asshole!”

  Mac snapped back away from me and turned quickly, his entire frame poised and tense, blocking me from sight.

  My emotions did a complete one-eighty as I went from entranced to terrified in an instant. The intensity of his eyes had sobered me and suddenly I was aware that we weren’t in the tourist district anymore. We were on a random street in this strange city. And the people looking for us had caught up.

  “I think you’ve got something of mine.”

  It was the guys from the bar — Mac’s opponent plus his friends from the table. The extent of their drunkenness was apparent now; they stumbled as they walked toward us, sleeveless shirts revealing toned arms. I noticed one held a baseball bat and my heart seized in my chest.

  They circled around us, watching Mac, eyes darting toward me. It was like watching a pack of hyenas circle a lion, snapping, growling, looking for the better angle on their larger opponent. This wasn’t good. Not at all.

  “This?” Mac asked. He pulled out the wad of cash he’d won at the table. He sounded calm, despite everything. But his eyes were hard as steel, and his voice was rough and two tones deeper than normal, a growl deep in his throat. He crossed his arms, forearms bulging, biceps straining in his t-shirt. He was much bigger than these kids, older too. None of them were as built as Mac, but they had numbers on their side.

  “Yeah that’s it, big man. Now why don’t you hand it over? If you don’t want any trouble.”

  Mac’s jaw hardened. Somehow, despite everything, I was struck by the sudden thought of just how attractive he was. NOT THE TIME, I internally shouted at myself. But still, Mac standing there taut and simmering was one of the hottest sights I’d ever seen and as I came to accept that I might be dying here, I was pretty glad it would be one of the last things I’d see in this life.

  He looked back at me, just for a moment, and I got the distinct impression that, if I wasn’t here, Mac would try to take them all on himself. But the thought came and went and he threw the wad of cash down on the street.

  “Take it,” he spat.

  The leader pocketed the money. Then he turned to his friends. There was a look on their faces that I didn’t like, goading grins that suggested they were far from done with us.

  “Ya know,” the leader said, “after you cheat me at pool, I don’t feel much like playing.”

  Mac was silent, waiting for the rest.

  “No pool means we need some new entertainment,” the kid continued. He looked behind him, found the eye of his friend with the baseball bat. He came forward and passed the weapon to the kid.

  “And what does that mean?” Mac asked, breaking the silence.

  “It means you’re going to be our entertainment tonight, tourists.” The kid spit on the ground and advanced on Mac.

  I couldn’t help myself; I cried out as the kid swung the steel bat at Mac’s head.

  But then something unexpected happened. Mac leaned back, and instead of cracking his skull, the bat whistled by. Mac struck like a viper, grabbing the kid’s arms and yanking them up. He grabbed the bat out of the kid’s hands and punched him in the face with a solid fist, knocking him to the ground before standing over him brandi
shing the kid’s own weapon against him.

  It all happened so quickly that the kid’s friends didn’t even have a chance to react. Now Mac stood holding the bat like a home run swinger as the kid picked himself up off the ground, clutching a bleeding nose.

  “Fuck you,” he spat. He said something in Spanish to the group. The friends gathered around us, looking dangerous.

  Mac shielded me with his body, trying to keep an eye on all of them and our backs to the wall. But they were a pack and closing in, murder in their eyes. Mac was big and a fighter, but there was no way he’d be able to fight them all off. He was going to try though and I hoped I would get some hits in too.

  And as I stared into the gnashing teeth and glaring eyes of the pack, another startling clear thought came into focus: This was going to fucking ruin the wedding.

  Noise cut the air, strange noise, louder than the sounds of the bar a couple streets over, louder than the traffic on the nearby highway.

  All of us — Mac, the gang, me — stilled, listening and trying to attach the noise to the situation. Because it was clearly opera. Loud, blaring, Italian opera, and it seemed to be getting closer.

  “What the fuck…” the kid said, turning as the sound of screeching tires rounded the corner of the street and we were all bathed in blinding headlights and deafened by the sound of a rising crescendo.

  It was only for a moment though because the car didn’t stop. It barreled down the street at fifty miles an hour and drove into our attackers with the force of a bowling ball against pins. Three of them went flying, two managing to get out of the way.

  Mac pressed me to the wall with one hand, bat raised at this new attacker.

  It was a Jeep with the top off and behind the wheel was a young guy with sandy-brown hair, shirtless, a black bandanna tied around his hair and red-tinted sunglass over his eyes, clutching a fifth in one hand and a cigarette between his teeth. He was good-looking in an utterly insane way and also, oddly, vaguely familiar.

  “Get the fuck in!” he shouted to us.

  I looked to Mac for direction. Did we trust this crazy guy to not immediately kill us? Mac was looking at the guy like he couldn’t quite believe his eyes.