I peer up at him.
He’s watching the room around us like he’s waiting for something, but I don’t get the feeling he’s unengaged.
Is hetooengaged?
Ishetrying to play it cool with offering to show me fun?
Addison isn’t watching us. She’s chatting with Theo’s dad and uncle and cousin. Sabrina and Decker are whispering furiously. Most of Chandler’s family is fawning over Emma.
Everything seems pretty normal.
Lucky stands and clinks a spoon against his glass before I can figure out the answers to all of my questions. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming to Chandler and Emma’s bachelor-bachelorette party. In just a minute here, we’re gonna be handing out clues for you to scurry off into the night on a scavenger hunt to find the world’s most epic bridal shower gift. You don’t get to keep it, but you do get to give it to the happy couple. You ready for this?”
There are probably sixty people here now, and they all erupt in cheers.
“A’right! That’s what I love to hear. Party people finding the presents! Yeah! Let’sdo this!My brothers, roll out the clues.”
Theo adjusts himself so he’s looping his arm around my shoulders, his hand hanging casually over my collarbone.
And it’s a thrill.
A serious,a sexy man is touching methrill.
I know this is just Theo. He flirts with anything that moves. He puts fun above all else. And this isfun.
But it’s also making me warm and fuzzy and more than a little turned on inside.
I tell myself it’s because I’m basically playing besties with the baddest bad boy to everbad boyin the Tooth. That it’s the thrill of rebelling against the idea that he’s off-limits to a woman from a proper upper-middle-class family running, as Addison said, the biggest photo gift business in the country.
But thinking about him being not good enough for me makes me want to hit something at the same time.
He’snota bad guy. Sabrina’s right. Since he discovered legal boundaries, he’s mostly harmless fun.
Who apparently solved an issue with the scavenger hunt before I ever thought to wonder if there was a problem with it. “When you sayyou fixed this,” I say quietly as Jack approaches us with a basket full of clues, “what exactly do you mean?”
“In the interest of your innocence when everything goes to shit, as it inevitably will since I have done a good deed, I’m not telling. But before everything goes to shit, you should know that I did the best I could with what I had when the resort didn’t do what they’re fucking being paid to do.”
Jack stops in front of us. He looks at Theo, then at me, and then at Theo’s arm. “Ooooh, somebody’s parents are gonna have a shit fit,” he says.
“I know,” Theo says. “Dad was hoping I’d go for a chick with a motorcycle and more tats than me, maybe a longer rap sheet too, but here we are.”
Jack chortles. “Here, Laney. Bet you figure this out faster than he does. Good luck and don’t cheat.” He points two fingers to his own eyes, then at Theo, then back to his own eyes. “I’m watching you.”
“Not as close as I’m watching you.”
They both grin and do a complicated handshake, then Jack moves on to the next couple.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” I ask Theo.
“That Jack, Lucky, and Decker think you’re worth protecting?”
“That they have to tear you down to say something nice about someone else.”
“I’ve dragged all of their asses out of the bar one too many nights for me to take any of them seriously. And the day any of those dudes finds a classy-ass woman who takes him down a billion pegs will be the day I’m standing in line to say the same, then beat the shit out of anyone else who insults him the way I get to.”
We’re following everyone else off the lanai, even though Theo and I both apparently know where all of the clues will take us. The staff is supposed to lay out food while we’re scavenger hunting, and then we’ll have fun again.
“You sound like you’re their brother,” I say.
