Page 20 of Her Wedding Night

“Stopping you from making a terrible mistake. Lucy, go up the stairs.”

“No!” Ethan swings the gun toward her.

In an instant, I’m between them. “Let the girl go, son.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Ethan, I?—”

“You’re not my dad! Stop pretending that you are!”

“I know I wasn’t there when you?—”

“Wait, is he really your dad?” Lucy only got as far as the stairs before turning around.

God. Damn. It.

Ethan swings around to look at her. “What did you say?”

Her eyes go wide. “Nothing.”

“Why do you want to know if he’s really my dad?”

“It’s just very confusing,” she says with a dumb trill.

And that’s enough cover for me to snap my body into the air and kick the gun from his hands.

It arcs into the air, then comes down on the railing, bouncing once before sliding overboard and disappearing into the ocean.

“Fuck,” he screams. “You fucking asshole.”

“Takes one to know one,” I snarl, shoving him further away from Lucy. “Don’t. Play. With. Guns.”

“You broke my hand.”

“Turns out if you kidnap a girl, you end up having a bad night. Life lesson for you, kid. Now sit the fuck down with your meathead friends.”

“Wow,” one of the girls says in awe. “Is your dad a commando?”

Lucy’s attention flies to my face. Time slows as her gaze locks on my mouth.

The mouth that kissed her up on the bridge.

She only kissed me because she didn’t believe that I was Ethan’s father. She thought I was…well, I’m not sure. But she was sure I was lying about the situation.

And I took advantage of that. I told her the truth, and then I let her do with that information what she wanted, even though I knew she wanted to pretend it wasn’t true.

I am not a good man.

Now her alarm is palpable. It’s clear that she wouldn’t have kissed me if she knew there was an actual real connection between me and my son. The boy who invited her here tonight. The boy she now knows has a sick and twisted obsession with her—just like his father.

As Ethan slumps down, not with the two assholes I tied up, but the mostly naked girls wrapped in gauzy fabric, I take stock of the situation again.

His two remaining friends are looking at us from the poker table still. It’s hard to read them, but I can grab Lucy and take her up to the bridge. Barricade us in there until the Coast Guard arrives.

She moves away from the stairs, though. Drifting closer to me, but?—

“I’ve met your parents,” she says, the silly dumb girl voice back in full effect. “So like, do you have two dads or what?”

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