To my sister Nicole. You’re the most beautiful girl in Stratford.
Chapter One
Lacey Garrity—soon to be Thomas, once she got hitched next week—erased the last of the math problems from the chalkboard and turned to face the students.
“Okay, guys. If any of you need extra help before the test let me know. If not, focus on the last two chapters and do your sample tests, and I’m sure you’ll all be fine.”
A few of the kids shifted in their putty-colored chairs, like a heat of runners taking their marks. It was Friday, and this group had already gone the extra mile by staying almost two hours late—during summer school, no less—to get algebra help for next week’s final. She’d reached the end of their attention span, and she didn’t blame them one bit. She was on the same page. Galen would be home in an hour, and they were going to put some steaks on the grill. Then, if she was lucky…
She grinned. “I can see you guys itching to get out of here, so go.”
All twenty of the fourteen-year-olds stood at once and made a mass exodus toward the door—which was why it was so strange to see one of them fighting her way back in through the crowd, like a salmon heading upstream in a river surrounded by bears.
“’Scuse me. Pardon me.”
Ah, not a student at all, Lacey realized when she heard the exasperated voice. It was her best friend and sister-in-law to be, Cat.
“Jesus, watch the kicks, Junior. These are Jimmy Choo’s and cost more than a year’s supply of tater tots and chicken patties at this place.”
The kids ignored her, barreling out of the room like it was on fire, which was good. The less time they spent around Cat the better.
Lacey crossed her arms and gave her friend the stink eye.
“Damn, they’re making ‘em so much taller these days, huh?” Cat said, peering up at Lacey and blowing a chunk of copper hair from her eye.
“Yeah, it’s not that you’re freakishly short, it’s just that they’re mutant giants.”
Cat shot a finger-gun Lacey’s way and grinned. “Touché. I love when you get mouthy with me. Now, listen,” she leaned in and took a furtive glance behind her at the last of the kids exiting the room. “I know you said you didn’t want me to, but…I did something.”
Her gamine face scrunched like she expected—and deserved—a slap upside the head. Lacey’s Spidey senses started tingling. This was going to be bad. And if Cat thought it was bad? It was really bad.
She narrowed her eyes and leaned closer, hoping she looked as menacing as she felt on the inside. “What did you do?” she demanded.
Cat put her thumb and forefinger to her lips and twisted, making the universal sign for putting it in the vault and throwing away the key.
“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to call Shane and tell him you shrank his New York Giants jersey on purpose.”
Cat had the balls to look wounded, and Lacey wanted to chuckle, but if she showed any sign of lightening up, her friend would sense it and take that as her giving in, and she was so not on board with whatever scheme Cat was cooking up.
“Threaten me all you want,” Cat said. “I’ve already said more than I’d planned to. I did it because I love you. Remember that when things get weird and possibly a little scar—”
Lacey’s world went dark as something—a hat? A hood?—was thrown over her head. She yelped and clawed at the cloth with her fingers, heart slamming against her ribs as she wriggled to get loose.
“Damn, she’s stronger than she looks,” a soft voice muttered near her ear.
She stilled. “Courtney?” she whispered furiously.
“Noooo,” the voice responded, taking on a forced, ghost-like quality. “What makes you say that?”
Lacey shoved her away and tried to remove whatever was covering her eyes. “Lilac Dreams. I bought you that perfume for your birthday two months ago, remember?”
Wiry little arms came around her then, pinning hers to her sides, waist-high. Cat.
“Look, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way,” Cat grunted, “And I’m sure you know which I prefer, since I haven’t gotten a chance to kick your ass since eighth grade. But no matter what, you’re coming with us. A lot of people are going to be seriously disappointed if you don’t, so stop being a pain in the ass.”
Lacey ceased struggling and blew out a sigh. Way for her lifelong friend to play on her Catholic guilt. She hated letting anyone down, even if the alternative involved agreeing to her own assault, kidnapping, and several counts of borderline bad-touching.
Still… “Guys, I told you I didn’t want a bachelorette party, and I meant it. It’s just not my thing. Galen and I—”
“Are going to be chained together for the next seventy years. And if you and my blockhead brother don’t spend a little time apart now and then and give yourselves a chance to miss each other, then you’re going to be bored in ten.”
That was where she had it wrong. Lacey would never be bored of Galen. He was like a beam of light, and she was never more alive than when they were together. When he’d rescued her from her cheating groom just over a year ago at her first almost-wedding, she could never have imagined when she climbed onto the back of his motorcycle that they were going to end up on her honeymoon in Puerto Rico, and then falling in love, but that’s exactly what had happened. They’d been going strong ever since. Now they were getting married in eight days, and she’d never been happier. Maybe lately things had been strained, but it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed. And they would fix it. She just had to work up the nerve to tell him how she was feeling. Maybe tonight was a good night for that. Which meant trying to get out of whatever these two bozos had planned for her.
She squinted hard, straining to see through the thin black material, ready to beg if she had to. Was there anyone else in the room? She’d only heard the two sets of footsteps and two voices. If she wanted, she could knock shrimpy Cat out of the way and make a run for it. Courtney was the newest addition to their crew of friends and probably wouldn’t even chase her down. Although, tearing ass out of her place of work with a hood over her face and two crazy friends hot on her heels wasn’t something she was really willing to risk either. That had disciplinary action written all over it, and she’d just landed this job.
“Please just go along with us. For me,” Cat added softly.
After twenty years of friendship, which basically consisted of her letting Cat boss her around, it was tough to say no. Especially when she was asking so nicely.
If you didn’t count the hood and the half-nelson.
She blew out a defeated sigh. “Fine.” It was one night. She could put up with just about anything for one night, couldn’t she? “But can we take this thing off?”
A duet of “no” from her “friends” re-affirmed that, wherever they were headed, it wasn’t going to be something she would have agreed to, like hitting Sully’s for a couple margaritas. That could only mean one thing.
Strippers.
Thirty minutes later, the hood had been replaced with a more reasonable, narrow strip of cloth as a blindfold, and the three of them sat in the back of a rented limo that smelled like new car and betrayal. The unseen driver was apparently named William, and her friends seemed to love him.
“Can you hook this up and put on the ‘Lacey’s Last Stand’ playlist, William,” Cat said, jostling Lacey’s arm as she leaned forward, presumably to hand him her iPhone.
“Sure thing, missy,” he said.
A chilled, narrow glass was shoved into her hand, and she closed her fingers over the stem.
“To Lacey,” Courtney cheered.
Cat echoed her, just as the strains of “Two Princes” thumped through the car. Lacey held the glass to her lips and took a long sip. C
risp, icy, sweet-tart champagne slid down her throat and tickled her nose.
“This is going to be the best night of your life!” Cat yelled, and started singing along to their favorite karaoke song.
The music and Cat’s infectious, party-time enthusiasm was rubbing off on her a little. Maybe it would be fun. Friends, good booze, great music. How bad could it be?
…
Bad.
Lacey stared up from the vinyl chair she’d been deposited into, blinking blearily as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. It was really, seriously, super bad. A mammoth of a man stood holding the blindfold he’d taken off her and grinned. His teeth were perfect, white Chiclets against leathery tanned skin that was oiled like a Christmas turkey. She tried to keep her focus on his smiling blue eyes because if she let them drift down…
“I’m Thor,” he boomed, treating her to a wink.
“I bet when he’th done with them, all the ladyth are thor, am I right, gang?” Cat deadpanned.
Courtney gave her a high five, and, to his credit, Thor laughed out loud. Lacey, however, ignored them. She looked around, trying to get her bearings. There was a lot of chatter, but she couldn’t determine where it was coming from because it seemed like just the four of them were in the room. Not room, she corrected mentally as she took in the wide, red velvet curtain in front of her. Part of a room? She looked to her right and gasped. Stage and lighting equipment, a DJ booth fitted out with said DJ to the back right. Holy crap on a stick, they were backstage somewhere. Panic threatened, and Lacey bit her lip and forced a smile.
“Hi Thor. Um, listen, I think we may have a little problem here.” She started to stand, but Cat stopped her with a hand.
“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” Cat said, shaking her head in disgust. She broke eye contact with Lacey and then nodded. That couldn’t be good. Before Lacey could react, her arms were wrenched behind her back, and she felt something close around her wrists.
“Jesus, did you seriously just handcuff me?” she asked, craning her head to get a look at her assailant.
“I did, ma’am,” a low male voice purred. “Because you’re under arrest, and I’m taking you…in.” A second giant oily man in a policeman’s cap and a holster seemingly only held in place by his enormous, banana hammock-covered man-meat leaned over her and did a shimmy.
Surely they were kidding right? There was no way they’d really do this to her.
“Clear out, girls.” Thor waved Cat and Courtney toward the narrow set of stairs heading off stage.
“No! No, get back here, you bitches,” Lacey called, but no one heard her over the thumping bass of the R. Kelly song the DJ started spinning.
The chattering from behind the curtains amped up to a roar and Lacey froze as the curtain slowly parted. The stage lights hit her in the face, and she was temporarily blind again. Perfect. Now if only she was deaf to the music and excited chatter, she could pretend she was just standing in front of a firing squad instead of here. Doing this.
“How are all you sexy ladies feeling tonight?” Thor shouted into the mic. The sexy ladies—what sounded like a hundred of them or more—whistled and stomped.
She briefly considered running, chair and all, off stage, but with her work shoes still on, that was a recipe for a broken ankle for sure. She could barely run in sneakers, never mind two-inch heels. If she made it through this without literally dying of embarrassment, she was going to ring Mary Catherine Thomas’s neck with her bare hands.
“Tonight, we have a special lady here. Meat Market ladies, give a warm welcome to Lacey!” Shouts, screams, and wolf whistles rent the air. “Little Lacey is getting married next week. You know what that means, right?”
Apparently they did, because the whole room went ape-shit.
“We’ve got to make sure that tonight, all her Meaty dreams come true.”
Lacey opened her mouth to correct him and explain that she wasn’t really the “Meaty dreams” type, but a semi-hysterical burst of laughter came out instead. Officer—she peered at the sticker of a star stuck directly to his chest—Steele leaned in and gave her a wicked, toothy grin. This was happening, and there wasn’t one damn thing she could do about it.
“Hit it!” he called to the DJ. The music changed to the “Bad Boys” theme from Cops, which was apparently his jam, because he started gyrating his face off.
What to do now? Dimly, she heard Cat scream her name, “Come on Lace, don’t be a party pooper!”
Party pooper indeed. Easy for her to say when she hadn’t been accosted at work and kidnapped like some sort of international spy. Still, maybe it was the glass and a half of champagne. Maybe it was the enthusiasm of the crowd. Maybe it was a release of the stress that had been ever-present the past few months, but she managed to not leap to her feet and run out of the place screaming, even when the poor man’s Magic Mike came at her and wrapped his arms around her hips, lifting her in the air. His face was pressed against her stomach as he carried her like a prize pig around the stage. Cat’s screams had amped up to an ear shattering level, and the whole place was electric with energy. It wasn’t fun, exactly, and there were about ten million places she’d rather be…like purgatory or the dentist maybe, but even she could see the humor of the situation. Sort of.
By the time the song was over and she was deposited back into her chair, she was smiling. Okay, so the part where he’d flopped his man business in her face hadn’t been all that great, but the crowd reaction was fun, and if she could wriggle out of these cuffs and get her hands on another glass of champagne, this night might not be a total bust. A few seconds later, two beefy guys dressed as Roman gladiators came and lifted her, chair and all, to carry her off stage.
Officer Steele strutted over, grinning. “Did you have fun?”
Yes, I truly appreciate having your man-junk in my face in celebration of my upcoming nuptials, sir. “Yes, thank you.” She grimaced at the schoolmarm tone and gave herself a mental eye-roll. What a nerd. He took it in stride, though, and laughed as he unlocked her and then pointed her in the direction of her friends. She kept her gaze trained on the walls as she went, focusing on the photos of beefcake past plastered all over them, in hopes of avoiding eye contact with any of the patrons who’d just witnessed her humiliation. That lasted all of ten seconds as a group of ladies came over shouting their congratulations and patting her back. She’d barely managed to escape them and their bawdy jokes about her wedding night when Courtney walked up, with a tentative smile and a full flute of bubbly. “Here. Peace offering.”
Lacey took it and fanned her boiling cheeks before swallowing a big sip.
“I think you’re going to have to keep it coming if you want to me to get over this one.”
“You know this wasn’t my idea, right?” Courtney’s heart-shaped face was scrunched with worry as they weaved their way to the round lacquer table where Cat had been sitting a second before. A couple ladies patted her back and wished her luck as she passed, and she smiled and waved.
Lacey gestured to a chair, and Courtney sat. “Listen, Cat and I have been friends for twenty years. She’s been dragging me into her crazy our whole lives, so I know exactly who the mastermind was.”
Courtney‘s face collapsed with relief. “I was afraid you’d be mad, but Cat said you’d forgive us. Plus, she said it was on your bucket list to come to one of these clubs.”
Lacey narrowed her eyes. “Wait. I don’t have a bucket list. Cat is the one who—”
“I made you one,” Cat said as she bustled across the checkered faux tiles with three shot glasses full of pink liquid. “Like four years ago. You’ve already crossed eighteen things off it.” She set the glasses down and held her hand up for a high five. Lacey skipped the high five, glaring at her instead.
“You made me a bucket list?”
“Yep.” She sat down and chair danced, not even having the grace to look contrite.
“You realize that a bucket list is a list of things a person wants t
o do before they die, right? It’s not supposed to be a list of things Cat thinks you should do before you die.”
Cat shrugged her slim shoulders. “Six of one, half dozen of the other.”
“No. No, not really,” Lacey began and then thought better of it. What difference did it make? This was the last week of her single life and their lives together as single besties. If Cat wanted to spend it with her in a kitschy strip club, she was going to make the best of it. The hard part was over. She’d taken her lickings—albeit under duress—and now she could sit back, have a few drinks, talk with her friends, and ignore the gyrating men on stage. Then tomorrow, when she’d slept off her hangover, she could talk to Galen about the issue she’d been putting off for so long now. The only thing that would have been left on her real bucket list, if she’d had one.
She shook off the sudden melancholy and pasted on a smile. “These shots aren’t going to drink themselves.”
Courtney and Cat both whooped and grabbed their glasses. “Down the hatch,” Lacey said, and they drank. That shot was the first of many, and by the time the dancers had packed away their oil and g-strings, Lacey was well and truly drunk.
“So who else is coming?” she asked idly, counting the glasses in front of her. She’d drunk more than her fair share, but kept losing track.
“No one, why?”
She leveled Cat with a frown. “You said I’d be letting people down if I didn’t come along, remember?”
Cat shifted in her seat and nodded, motioning to the strangers milling around. “Yeah. All these nice ladies were waiting on you. Not to mention old Officer Steele and Thor.”
She reapplied her lip gloss casually, and Lacey tried to muster the will to strangle her, but it never came. Heck, who cared? She’d gotten through it, and now she was pleasantly buzzed and having a great time with her friends. She gave up with a snort and slumped back, her attention caught by the black hood on the corner of the table.
She picked it up and shook it out to see it more clearly. “Wow, this thing is pretty fancy for a gag. What’s that made of, velvet?”
Cat shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Where did you even get it?”
“Rafe let me borrow it. He was there when we were telling Shane about our plans. We were just going to go to the dollar store to get a cheap mask, and he offered to let us use his stuff.” Cat scooted in closer and looked around before whispering so loud, anyone who wanted to listen would have heard her anyway. “He came back with all kinds of stuff. Restraints, a hood, the blindfold, you should’ve seen it all.”
Rafe was a friend of Galen and Cat’s boyfriend, Shane. He was a detective at their local Police Department, so the cuffs made sense. But the hood?
“Why would he have all that stuff?”
“Rafe has…interesting taste,” Cat said, her green eyes going comically wide.
“What does that mean?” Courtney asked, dragging her bar stool closer, curiosity lighting her face.
“Well,” Cat gave a furtive glance around before continuing. “I guess he likes it rough and wild.”
Lacey mulled that over for a second then shrugged. Probably a well-placed tie around the eyes and some spanking. That wasn’t so wild. Heck, she was a notorious prude, and she and Galen had done that plenty of times, the old slap—
“With cat-o-nine-tails and public sex.”
Oh, snap. Well that was different.
“He wouldn’t give me all the details—and believe me”—Cat rolled her eyes—“it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
Courtney sat back with a thud, her cheeks highlighted with twin flags of red. “For real? I thought that kind of stuff was just in books and movies.”
“Nope. And apparently, it’s not just a preference.” Her friend let that sit for a second before delivering the knockout, pounding her fist on the table for dramatic effect. “It’s a requirement.”
“What is?” Courtney asked, her face a mask of shock.
Lacey didn’t know whether to give her earmuffs or a cigarette. She weaved on her seat a little, forgot what they’d been talking about, and idly wondered if they served French fries. Pink shots and bubbly were a surprisingly potent mix.
“Submission.” Again with the Hitchcock drama, and Lacey found herself grinning like a fool.
Courtney let out a squeak. “Like,” she glanced around and dropped her voice low enough that Lacey had to close one eye and try to lip read. “Fifty Shades?”
Right. Rafe. Kinky. Check. She wondered about those fries again and then reluctantly focused back in on the conversation. It was a pretty juicy bit of gossip.
“I didn’t read that book,” Cat said, “But I’ve been around him and various girlfriends before—”
“Me too,” Lacey cut in. “And he never seemed like he’d be into that or anything. He’s just…regular.” Then again, how would she know what he did in bed? She was pretty sure he didn’t know some of the freaky stuff she and Galen did. She paused to wave at the waitress and flag down another round. If she couldn’t have fries, at least maybe she could get one more little drink—
“Well, well, well,” a low voice whispered in her ear. “I hear you’re getting married, but maybe one last fling with a stranger would be—”
Her heart stuttered at the feel of a hand on her thigh. Lacey whipped around and popped the handsy stranger right in the gut.
“Jesus, squirt, what’s up with that?” Galen growled, rubbing his stomach. “I thought you’d be happy to see me, and instead I get one to the bread basket. How’s that for a welcome?”