Wedding Game: He Picked My Best Friend I Walked Down the Aisle with His Enemy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Card Game
At the bachelor party Tucker swears he rigged the keycard game, then pairs Addie with his best man and himself with her best friend. She steps out and meets his enemy at the bar.
Tucker's best man climbed onto the arm of the sofa and shook a glass bowl of hotel keycards over his head.
"Everybody listen up!" he yelled over the music.
"New game! You draw a card, and tonight you're with whoever's name is on it!"
Forty people cheered.
This was the party Tucker had insisted on, nine days before our wedding.
He'd wanted one big send-off for both of us, with no strippers and no separate nights, just friends.
The suite was on the fourteenth floor of a lakefront hotel.
It had an open bar and a wall of windows over the lake.
My chest went tight.
Mallory slid an arm through mine.
She had her overnight bag on her shoulder, and she smelled like the vanilla lotion she'd worn since fourth grade.
"You're white as paper," she said. "Breathe. It's Tucker. It's all jokes."
"The last time he ran a game, somebody lost a tooth."
"Then I'll stand next to you and guard your teeth."
I laughed, and my shoulders came down a little.
Mallory had been doing that for me for nineteen years.
Tucker came up behind me and put his mouth right next to my ear.
"Hey," he said, with the cocky smile that had gotten me to say yes. "Relax, okay? I fixed it earlier. You're getting me. I promise."
He kissed my temple and walked off toward the bowl.
My shoulders came down.
Tucker had his faults, but he never broke a promise in front of people.
He still kept my scratched college phone in his nightstand, switched off, because he said it was the first thing of mine he ever held.
That was the kind of man he was.
Tucker's best man, Dex, held the bowl out to me.
I took the card on top.
It was white, with a room number and a name in black marker.
It said Room 1412, Dex Alder.
I read it twice.
Dex was staring at the carpet.
"Tucker," I said.
He stood across the room holding his own card up to the light, grinning at the crowd.
Someone by the window already had a phone out, filming him.
"Tucker," I said again, louder.
"Oh, I almost forgot." He lifted the card higher. "Mine says Mallory Mulligan."
The room whooped.
Mallory stood a few feet from me with her card already in her hand.
I could read the marker from where I stood.
It said Tucker.
She didn't look surprised, and she didn't look at me.
Tucker crossed the carpet, took her hand and held it up over his head.
"Rules are rules," he told the room.
"You said you fixed it," I said, and my voice came out small and flat.
"I did fix it." He turned to me, still smiling. "You didn't get stuck with a stranger. You got Dex, and Dex is a great guy."
"Tucker."
"It's one night, Jos. Don't be a prude about it."
"I didn't know," Dex said, to nobody.
"Addie." Mallory's hand was still in Tucker's. "It's a game. Nobody's going to hold you to it."
"You're holding his hand."
"It's a game," she said again.
At least six phones were pointed at me.
I looked at the ring on my finger, the one Tucker had told everyone cost four months of his salary.
My grandmother Bev had cried when she saw it.
I looked at Tucker, who was waiting for me to laugh.
So I stepped out.
I pulled off the ring, walked to the bar and dropped it into the ice bucket.
It made a small, clean sound.
"Addie, don't be dramatic," Tucker called.
I kept walking, and behind me somebody turned the music down.
The elevator doors closed on forty phones.
In the lobby I stopped in front of the bar, because my hands were shaking too hard to call a car.
The bartender was polishing a glass.
At the far end, alone, a man in a dark suit sat with a glass of water and a closed laptop.
He looked up.
He was older, with grey at his temples and a hard line between his eyes that hadn't been there at twenty-six.
But I knew him. I'd have known him in a crowd of a thousand.
"Addie," he said.
"Mr. Corbin," the bartender said, "do you want the bar closed?"
"No." Heath Corbin kept his eyes on my bare left hand. "Give her whatever she wants."
I hadn't seen him in eight years.
The last thing he had ever sent me was one line telling me not to contact him again.
Tucker had never let me say his name in our home, because Heath was the man he hated most in the world.
I sat down on the stool beside him.
"Is this your hotel?" I asked.
"It is."
"Tucker's friends are drawing names out of a bowl on your fourteenth floor."
"I know. Security called me." He turned his water glass a quarter turn. "I was deciding whether to go up."
"Don't," I said. "I'm getting married a week from Saturday, and I just lost my groom."
Something moved in his face and was gone.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Are you busy that day?" I asked.
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