It was Teddy’s number one fantasy, being dragged down the aisle by Steph D’Arezzo, and so what if it was in the wrong direction? His heart was still a balloon floating in his chest by the time they made it to the trolley.
The ice-skating rink was strung with lights and crowded with wedding guests when they arrived. The brick building that housed the skate rental counter and snack bar had its sliding glass doors flung open; inside were tables laden with food, drinks, and one extravagantly pink cake. Heat lamps edged along the outside of the rink itself, so anyone who didn’t want to skate still had a reasonable chance of staying warm in the late December night. A mix of holiday music, old INK songs, and cheesy aughts hits played into the night while wedding guests wobbled around the rink.
Next to Teddy, his son gave a primal noise of relief. “I see the nachos,” he whispered.
And that was all it took. Everyone who came on the trolley with them—including a clutch of boisterous triplets who weresomehow related to Kallum Lieberman—began streaming toward the brick building and its promise of cheese.
“Surely the bridal party has to be done with pictures by now,” Steph said as she allowed Teddy to tug her to the Nacho Promised Land. All of the Christmas Notch extended family were lining up to get a plate: Gretchen Young, who’d directed the movie that had brought Bee and Nolan together, and her screenwriter girlfriend, Pearl Purkiss; Isaac Kelly’s former bodyguard, Krysta, and her wife, Addison; Nolan’s mother and sister and grandparents; and Bee’s moms, both beaming and showing off their matchingmother of the bridesatin jackets.
“If the parents are already here, the bridal party won’t be long behind,” Teddy said with the authority of having been behind the scenes of exactly one wedding in his life. A wedding for a marriage that had ended with a pity-hug outside of a lawyer’s office and his then-teenagers taking him out for ice cream like he’d been a kid who’d just lost a baseball game.
But damn if he wasn’t ready to do this nonsense all over again.
By the time Steph and Teddy had loaded up their nachos, the trolley had arrived with a fresh batch of wedding guests—the strippers and the wedding party. Teddy watched as Kallum Lieberman helped his wife, Winnie, out of the trolley and they walked over to Kallum’s mom, who was waiting with their daughter, Grace. Despite the fact that Grace still had the toddler version of new car smell, Kallum had announced at the combined bachelor and bachelorette party two nights ago that Winnie was pregnant again. And indeed, when Kallum pointed across the ice-skating rink to the nacho bar with excitement scrawled across his bearded features, Winnie went a delicate shade of green and vigorously shook her head.
Behind them, Isaac Kelly stepped off the trolley, the stiff Vermont breeze ruffling the loose pink bow tie around hisneck. With his suntanned skin, shoulder-length blond hair, and square jaw, he looked like a living California stereotype... but there was a sadness clinging to him that no amount of sunshine and surf could brighten. It was in the haunted shape of his mouth and the indifferent way his eyes slid across the scene, as if nothing and no one could possibly make him smile.
Steph spotted him immediately.
“Gotcha,” she drawled in that carnivorous voice that never failed to make Teddy’s dick jolt. It was the voice of a hunter; it was like red fingernails dragging across his chest. It didn’t matter if she was talking business or climbing onto him as he sat in the passenger seat of her Mercedes S-Class—that voice made him hot, and it maybe made him a little afraid too, which got him hotter.
What could he say? Some men liked whips and chains; he liked pantsuits andI just signed a contract so big it’ll make you piss yourselfsmiles.
“Hold these,” Steph said, shoving her nachos into Teddy’s hand. She kissed his cheek, quick and hard enough to leave her lipstick above his scruff. “Wish me luck.”
“You don’t need it,” he said honestly, and the most beautiful woman in the world threw him a smirk before adjusting her trench coat and then striding off. Teddy didn’t expect her back soon; the hunt took as long as it took. Like any good predator, she’d stalk her prey, wait until he was separated from the pack, and then she’d pounce. Steph D’Arezzo got what she wanted.
But—Teddy sighed forlornly down at the two baskets of nachos he was holding—did she wanthim?
They’d all but moved in together, most of his Hawaiian shirts and all of his flip-flops in her closet next to her Stella McCartney blazers and the sheer things from Anya Lust that Teddy loved so very, very much. They brushed their teeth together, ate way-too-late dinners together, fell asleep after a single episode of anoverhyped drama together. They spent long Sunday mornings with black coffee and honest reflections about marriages and divorces, about having adult children and how scary it was to love brilliant people messily making their way in the world.
And when Teddy woke up in the morning, he found that Steph had wrapped her arms around his chest and tangled her legs in his, like she was afraid he’d leave her while she slept.
He knew that there was no one else for him, that there was no going back. At some point between all the stolen trysts in Christmas Notch and Mercedes-sexings and Sunday mornings where sunlight glinted off Steph’s cobalt eyes as she lowered wall after wall, Teddy had fallen harder than a shoddily mounted sex swing.
And like all the shoddily mounted sex swings he’d dealt with over the past twenty-odd years, there was no fixing it. There was only dealing with the bruising reality of it all.
He was a lost cause for Steph D’Arezzo.
After a few minutes of marinating in his feelings, Teddy made his way to the wall separating the actual rink from the rink-adjacent spaces and balanced the nachos on the ledge. A clear plastic dome on a mat had been set in the middle to make a dance floor of sorts, and people were already dancing inside while skaters circled around them. Kallum’s triplet nephews—newly into ice hockey, or so he’d heard—were carving a path of chaos through the wedding guests, and his own kids were out there: Astrid, his daughter, medusa piercing flashing and natural curls bouncing, and then Angel laughing beside her.
Teddy’s chest squeezed to watch them, the two best people in his life, happy and healthy and full of the energy that only chasing dreams could give them. He might not have been the most impressive father, but somehow he’d wound up with the most impressive kids, and because of that he’d never stop feeling like the luckiest bastard alive.
Someone came up next to him and braced their arms on the ledge. They had their phone out.
Teddy looked over to see the pink bridesmaid dress, dark hair, and trademark eyebrows of Sunny Palmer.
“No nachos?” Teddy asked and watched her thumbs fly over the screen of her phone.
“Yes nachos. I’ve already nacho-ed. I’m post-nacho.” She looked over at his two baskets of chips and cheese and then up to his face. “Double-fisting?”
“Steph’s on the client prowl,” Teddy explained. “Isaac Kelly.”
Dark slashes of red appeared on Sunny’s cheeks. “Oh,” she said. “Neat.” She saidneatthe way most people would sayI think my clothes just caught on fire, please help.
Hmm. Maybe there was something to that threesome rumor after all.
Astrid and Angel skated by—competently, if not without a wobble or two—and Angel tugged at Sunny’s cape as he passed. His kids had always been fond of Sunny, but Angel and Sunny had grown even closer since she’d played a role in his happily ever after with Teddy’s former costume designer Luca. (A happily ever after via aPretty Womanporn remake and an accident involving a rosebush, no less.) Sunny was getting something of a reputation as a matchmaker, or at least as a cupid of romantic chaos.
