Lucky in Love (2 page)

Her mouth dropped open. "My God, Lucky, you didn't." She fluttered down the steps to where Chance was still sitting, the front of the car car almost eclipsing his big, hard body. She covered her mouth with one shaking hand and I grabbed her elbow, thinking she was about to pass out. She did that sometimes. Especially around me.

"Deep breath, Mom, he's okay."

"Hey, Mama MacFarlane." Chance's smile was strained around the edges, but sincere. He acted legitimately glad to see her, but I knew better. He'd had plenty of time to write or call if he really missed us. Or Mom, rather.

Mom crouched down to enfold him in a careful hug. "Oh, Chance, it's so good to see you."

"Lucky, Addy is going to kill you," she whispered, looking up at me, her bright blue eyes welling with tears.

Addy is my very best friend, who, for reasons unclear to the rest of the world, went temporarily brain dead and agreed to marry my evil twin. She's a curvaceous little brown-eyed blond who barely tops five feet, and the most patient, compassionate, kind-hearted person I've ever met. Pretty much Jack's polar opposite.

But once she started planning her own wedding, she became a stark raving bitch with psychotic tendencies. That was about the time I began to see the side of her that attracted my brother.

To call my future sister-in-law/long-time gal pal a neurotic bride-to-be would be putting too nice a face on it. Three months ago, Addy launched a vicious verbal attack on the cake decorator for questioning the fleur-de-lis pattern she'd chosen for her wedding cake. I've never seen a grown woman cry like that.
The cake decorator, not Addy.

Then, last month, it was the wedding dress. It was my job to pick it up from the bridal boutique, and me being me, I dropped the thing into a mud puddle in the parking lot. The protective covering was on it, but how do you get a pristine white wedding dress out of a mud-covered bag? In a moment of panicked inspiration, I took it to a dry cleaner. The dry cleaning man promised me that he could take care of it, and he did, but then managed to temporarily lose the dress.

I had to pay the dry cleaning man a lot extra not to press assault charges on Addy.

"Okay, on your feet." I helped him, tugging on the other arm this time. His skin had gone a sickly shade of pale under his tan by the time he was standing.

"Anything else hurt?" I asked briskly. When he shook his head, I started at the top, finger-combing his short, dark crew cut, licked my thumb and wiped a smudge off his smooth-shaven cheek, brushed the dirt off of his coat. Turning him around, I checked him for any visible stains or tears and finished by swiping a bit of gravel off his butt. And, oh, what a butt. The least he could have done was gained 75 pounds and grown a mullet, instead of that close-cropped, sexy, Daniel Craig-as-James Bond thing he had going, for Pete's sake. But no. Grown-up Chance was even hotter than the boy version I'd known so well. I sighed.

Turning him briskly around again,
I took a deep breath and began rattling off commands like a defensive line coordinator. "Okay, you're gonna go in there, suck it up, and be the best damned best man you can be. You are then going do the toast, dance with the maid of honor (oh crap, that's me), and stick around long enough for the first piece of cake to be cut. In return, I will give you a free ride to the hospital and hold your other hand while they pop your arm back in."

Chance shook his head, a glint of amusement temporarily cutting through the pained expression on his face. "Lucky, you haven't changed a goddamned bit, have you?
Still a bossy little brat."

"Hey, you're the one that can't cross a parking lot without getting hit."

He looked to my mother to get her take on the blame situation, but Mom just dug a flask out of her voluminous lavender purse and handed it to him with a tentative, "Schnapps?"

Smart enough to know when he was outmaneuvered, he saluted me with the flask and a wry grin, twisted off the top, and took a healthy swig. Together, the three of us marched through the doors of the church.

Chapter
3

"What was in that flask?" I demanded.

Chance was supposed to be dancing the traditional bridal party, first slow dance thing with me, but instead, he was doing this slack-jawed, squinty-eyed, leg-humping excuse for a bump and grind. I reached up to grab his chin, forcing him to look at me instead of my décolletage.

"Sssschnapps," he slurred. His gorgeous green eyes were at half-mast and his smile was blurry around the edges. "Hey Lucky, wanna find a coat closet?" he breathed in my ear, almost choking me with alcohol fumes.

"I could get Lucky!" He laughed loudly, causing several heads to turn in our direction.

Schnapps, my butt. When my mother felt like drinking, she brought out the big guns and always called it Schnapps. Plus, I had seen her reload his flask. During the ceremony, I thought Chance had just been swaying in time to the Wedding March. Thankfully, he'd held it together and only stumbled over a few words during the toast to the radiant (but slightly manic) bride and the handsome (but still evil) groom.

Suddenly, I spotted a cloud of white taffeta and lace drifting purposefully in our direction. Chance slung his good arm around my shoulders and I steered him behind a potted fern. Cupping his face in my hands, I tried to enunciate slowly and clearly:

"We need to get out of here."

"We sure do," he enunciated back and slapped his big hand right down on my breast. Ignoring the jolt of sensation that sent shivery tingles through me (left over high-school infatuation, I told myself)
, I removed it and tried again.

"Addy is coming this way.
We can skip the rest of the reception and get you to the hospital."

"I don't need a hospital, I need a toilet," he murmured, before turning and puking in the potted palm.

Sighing and blaming my rotten karma, I patted his back as he heaved again. I suppose this was sort of my fault since he wouldn't be drunk if I hadn't run him over. As soon as he was finished, I fished him out two pieces of gum from the stash in my clutch purse, grabbed his good arm and dragged him around the other side of the plant. Suddenly, I detected a rose-scented, frigid breeze of Arctic air, and instinctively knew it was Addy. She'd found us.

Chocolate brown eyes lit from within with an unholy fire, she hissed at me: "What is going on? Why is Jack's best man puking in the fern? And why did your grandma just tell your mother that she saw Chance grab your boob?"

Despite the fact that imminent annihilation loomed large, I couldn't help snickering. "Grammy said 'boob'?"

French-manicured nails dug into my arm and I winced. I could not wait until she left for her honeymoon. Hopefully Freaky Psycho Bride would get on that plane to Seattle and Addy would leave her there.

"Get him out of here," she spat in a furious whisper. "I want him gone!"

Pasting her happy newlywed smile back on, she glided away in the direction of Jack, who was standing on the other side of the room with some of his buddies, gulping beer like it was Gatorade and he'd just run a 5K.

"Wow," came a voice from toward the floor beside me. "I don't remember Addy being like that." Chance had slid down the wall and was half-leaning on my leg. As I looked down, he lifted the hem of my bridesmaid dress and tried to peek underneath. I slapped at his hand, and could have kicked myself for being glad I wore a sexy black thong instead of the grayish granny panties with the unraveling elastic I'd had on yesterday.

Grabbing his good arm, I hefted him to his feet. I slipped my arm around his waist, mentally stifling the picture we made, leaving the wedding early and draped all over each other. Grammy shot me a knowing look that included raised eyebrows and a lascivious wink and Addy's annoying cousin Freddie gave a piercing wolf whistle. Then, like a bullhorn, I heard Jack's voice boom out from across the room. All heads swiveled in his direction.

"Hey Chance, why are you running off so early? Gonna get Lucky?" I had finally figured out why Chance and Jack were such good friends: they were both missing the vital parts of their brains in charge of rational thought.

"Just driving Chance home, Jack.
He's had a few too many." Heads swiveled back to me. Addy's eyes were transmitting a malicious message loud and clear:
Get out!

Unfortunately, when I turned to do so, I felt a cool draft that had nothing to do with her glare. Chance had been busy. The hem of my skirt was tucked into the waistband of my sexy thongs, displaying everything from the waist down to the riveted wedding guests, including his hand on my ass.

"Nice tattoo, Lucky," Jack guffawed.

Ignoring the familiar sounds of titillated chatter making the rounds at light speed (probably focused more on the hand on my cheek than my tasteful Celtic knot tattoo), I calmly untucked my skirt, gathered up my dignity, and hauled a semi-comatose Chance out to the parking lot, tossing a breezy "Congratulations, guys—see you after the honeymoon!" over my shoulder. There was no way I was going near enough to Addy to give her a goodbye hug. She'd decapitate me.

"No puking in the Roadmaster," I ordered firmly, stumbling a little bit under Chance's deadweight in the wet parking lot.

"Sure," he replied cheerfully, reeling back against my car and reaching again for my breast. I jumped backward.

"Get it together, Chance," I yelled, smacking his hand away before it could connect.

Opening the back door, while keeping one eye out for a final attack from the mini-
Bridezilla, I poured him in. Chance lay stretched out across the pinstriped backseat, all 6'1" of him, and grinned at me. Two familiar and devastating dimples carved deeply into his right cheek, and I suddenly felt prickly all over.

Flashback time.
I had seen that same long, hard body stretched out in my backseat a lot of years ago, but that time, it had been naked. Past and present blurred for a second as Chance crooked his finger, his smile broadening, and I felt heat pool way down low in my belly. The urge to hike up my bridesmaid dress and climb in and pick right up where we left off was crazy strong until I reined myself in.

Oh, no way. This was not going to happen again. Narrowing my eyes, I slammed the door hard.

Right on his foot.

Chapter 4

The doctor glared at me as if Chance's condition were my fault. They had taken one look at him in the reception area and rushed him back to a room before I could even write his name on the first form. Now he was hooked up to an IV and we were waiting for him to sober up so they could dope him on morphine and pop his arm back into place

With the splint on his sore ankle, his arm in a sling, a white bandage wrapped around his head and a cut on his puffy lower lip (the last two were not my fault, as he'd chosen to introduce his face to the pavement when I opened his door), Chance looked like I had run him over repeatedly instead of just nudging him with a bumper. He could have starred in one of those daytime TV commercials that offered to sue the skirt off your 98 year-old neighbor whose chronic back pain and cataracts prevented her from shoveling her sidewalk, causing you to fall and bust your fat butt on a run to the
Munchie Mart for Doritos.

"Now, explain to me again," questioned the handsome young doctor in a heavy Indian accent. "Why you did not bring Mr. Chance in for medical attention immediately after he was struck by your vehicle?"

I wished they would quit asking me that. Damned if I wasn't starting to kind of feel bad. "Like I told you before, my new sister-in-law would have killed me for ruining her wedding."

"And so you coerced Mr. Chance into performing his best man duties while in extreme pain from a dislocated shoulder and bruised ankle?" He made notes in a small notebook. That note-taking thing was making my nerves twitchy, too. I expected the men in blue to come in and cuff me anytime now.

"No, I already told you—the ankle thing happened when I shut his foot in the door. On accident," I added quickly.

Damn Chance. If he hadn't passed out like a
wuss when the nurse whipped out the IV needle, he could have helped me explain everything. Finally, the doc walked to the door. "I will be back in a few minutes." He shot me a suspicious look, as if I planned on smothering Chance with a pillow the moment he walked out. "The nurses' station is just outside the door."

That sounded more like a warning than a friendly reminder to me.

Not two seconds after the doctor left the room, I noticed a flash of green out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to look, Chance had his eyes squinched shut.

"Faker," I accused.

He opened one eye.

"I didn't feel up to dealing with doctor questions. Besides, Lucky, you're the one who put me in the hospital. I haven't been this tore up since I ran over an IED."

IED?
I thought.
Wasn't that a birth control thing?

He was trying to distract me. That was it.

"Hey, only half your injuries were my fault. If you weren't still buzzed on whatever my mom gave you to take the edge off—."