Best Man...with Benefits

“I always knew I’d get married, have some kids—it’s what a man does. But now that it’s here, I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe you’re getting married, either.” Everything was going to change. The beers after work, the weekly squash games, the poker games that lasted all night, the Sunday afternoons spent tossing a football around in the park, the snap decisions to fly across the country to watch a hockey or a football game. All that would be over.

“Nothing’s going to change,” Seth said, sounding almost desperate.

“Of course, nothing will change,” Jackson assured him, knowing that nothing would ever be the same.

“Amy’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” Seth announced. He’d taken to gushing sentiments like this, and Jackson never knew what the correct response was. Usually he said something like, “That’s great.”

“That’s great,” he said now.

Seth stooped to pick up a smooth, round pebble. He turned and tried to skim it across the waves, but the pebble bounced once and sank.

“I just wish you and Lauren could get along.”

“Probably never going to happen.”

“What’s the deal with you two, anyway? She’s gorgeous, smart, funny.”

“I don’t know. Some kind of weird chemistry thing.” He’d thought gorgeous, smart and funny, too, the first time he’d met Lauren. But from that first conversation on, they’d pretty much disagreed on everything. She seemed to spare no effort to get up his nose. And, being a scrapper with a lot of Irish in him, he gave it right back to her.

Desperate to change the subject, he said, “But Amy’s great.”

That got them off the tricky subject of Lauren and they passed the rest of their time talking about Amy and Seth’s plans for the future. Seth had gone to work for his family’s real estate firm and Amy came from money, so it wasn’t as if their future was uncertain.

Not like his. With his brains and his education in software design, he’d been recruited by all the big firms, but he’d chosen to throw in his lot with a start-up. He’d liked that they were involved in clean energy, harvesting wind and wave power. Jackson didn’t have any money. His grandparents had spent what little money his folks had left on that boarding school and given him what was left to pay for university. With no money to invest, he relied on his own hard work. Going for the start-up over the sure thing was the Irish in him asserting itself again, he thought. He preferred the gamble, where he could seriously make a difference to a company’s future, to being just another software engineer at a global social networking company.

He and Seth returned to the hotel with barely enough time to shower and change.

The bride and groom had opted for a garden wedding with a ballroom booked as a bad weather backup, but one look at the sky told Jackson that no backup plan would be needed. Seth and Amy were probably the luckiest couple he’d ever known. Nothing ever went wrong for either of them. They were loved, pampered, rich and nauseatingly happy with each other. Of course there wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky on their wedding day.

Jackson took a final glance in the full-length mirror in his hotel room before heading out. His tie was straight, fly done up. Rings in one pocket, speech in another. He was good to go.

His room was on the third floor where most of the bridal party and a few of the guests were staying. The bride and groom were spending their wedding night in the penthouse bridal suite and the remainder of the guests were scattered throughout the hotel.

Seth knocked on his door and he opened it. “Ready to do this thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” And they strode off down the hall.

The wedding planner had given them a staging area in the lobby, and they showed up with a minute or two to spare. The woman standing there with a headset and a clipboard wasn’t the main planner. She was some kind of assistant. She checked them out, stepped forward and straightened Seth’s tie. “You have the rings?” she asked Jackson, and he nodded.

She spoke into a headset. “I have the groom and best man ready to go.”

They stood around for a few minutes like soldiers waiting to go into battle. It would have been less nerve-racking if there were more guys in the platoon than just him and Seth. But for all that she’d wanted a fancy wedding, Amy had insisted she only wanted Lauren to stand up for her. Which meant Seth only got a best man. No groomsmen.

The assistant pulled out two florist’s boxes, and he was forced to stand there while she attached a white rose boutonniere to his jacket. The smell of roses always reminded him of the only funeral he’d ever attended. He hated that smell.

“And you’re cleared to go,” the young woman said to them, as though they were a pair of jets on a runway.

“Good luck, buddy,” he said.

Seth turned and gave him an awkward hug. They slapped each other on the back, and then they made their way out to the wedding venue.

The garden looked like something out of a cheesy movie he would never watch. Something with Hugh Grant in it and a load of English accents. There were flowers everywhere—on a rose arbor that he and Seth had to walk under, on the chairs lined up precisely on the lawn where the guests were already seated, and all over the gazebo where the ceremony would take place. A harp was playing softly.

The guests were dressed so well, some of the women in hats, that he barely recognized anyone.

He trod down the aisle and paused, as they’d rehearsed, in front of the minister, who consulted a book so earnestly it looked as though he was refreshing himself on the words of the marriage ceremony.

Behind him, he heard shuffling and low conversation. Somebody was sniffling. Crying already? Or allergies? he wondered idly.

After a minute or two, the intro to “Here Comes the Bride” started up. He knew the piece had a real name, but he only ever heard it played at weddings.

He and Seth both turned, as did every person in the audience.

Lauren started walking up the aisle.

He might find spending time with her as fun as, say, stumbling into a hive of hornets and escaping only to land in a field of poison ivy, but he had to admit she looked good.

Gorgeous, even.

Her dress was a pale green that left her shoulders bare. He’d never really noticed what nice curves the woman had or that her legs were spectacular.

She wore her dark hair piled high and whoever had done her makeup had highlighted her big, dark eyes and colored her lips so they looked plump and kissable.

As though she felt his gaze on her, Lauren looked his way and he felt sucker punched.

Quickly, he averted his gaze but not before he’d seen her eyes widen and felt a completely unexpected and absolutely unwanted stab of lust.

That was the trouble with weddings, he’d always thought. They made a person act like a fool. People were forever hooking up at weddings with girls they wouldn’t be caught dead with normally.

He wasn’t going there.

Even as his breath caught in his throat, he assured himself he wasn’t going there.

2 (#u70e52d70-5ecb-5f24-b738-b5f29d402830)

LAUREN WENT THROUGH the motions of being the perfect maid of honor. She took the bouquet from Amy when it was time for her and Seth to exchange rings. Helped her adjust her dress after she and Seth had kissed and they were officially married, then fell in behind the beaming bride and groom with Jackson by her side.

There was an invisible force field between her and the best man. They couldn’t stand each other, so what had that strange moment been about when he’d stared at her as though he’d never seen her before and she’d felt for a second as though she couldn’t breathe?

No doubt he’d seen as much crazy hooking up at weddings as she had. Or maybe he was one of those guys who thought bridesmaids always wanted sex.

She’d rather have sex with—well, she couldn’t think of anybody she’d rather have sex with right at the moment, but the point was she didn’t want to have sex with Jackson Monaghan.

Although, looking around the crowd at the number of women checking him out, she seemed to be the only single woman who didn’t.