Lauren
Damn Dex Riggs.
Damn, damn, damn him.
It was my sister’s wedding day. Twenty after one in the afternoon. Emily was getting married at three; I was the maid of honor. And the groom’s brother, the best man—Dex Riggs—was nowhere to be found.
“He’ll show,” Emily said. We were in the master bedroom of the old Riggs house, which had been a rich man’s house once but now belonged on the wrong side of the tracks according to Westlake, Michigan. Emily was in a chair and Danielle, the stylist from my hair salon, was twisting her blonde hair in a beautiful updo. “At least, I think he will.”
I closed my eyes, trying to rein in my temper. Georgie, our makeup artist, took the opportunity to do an extra dusting of my lids. “I can’t freaking believe he’s not here. Have we tried calling him again?”
“Only twenty times,” Emily said. She was keeping it together, but her jaw was a little tight. She was marrying Luke Riggs, the love of her life, today and the only thing that had gone wrong was the absence of the best man. “Luke banged on the door of the guest house, and so did Jace. His car is there, but Dex doesn’t answer.”
“Jeez,” Georgie said, dabbing powder to my chin. “Do you think there’s something wrong? Maybe he’s dead.”
“He’d better be dead,” I said.
Georgie looked surprised at how seriously I said it. But she didn’t know Dex.
“We don’t need to make a big deal of it,” said Tara Montgomery, one of the other bridesmaids. She was sliding her feet into her high-heeled shoes. “The best man doesn’t do much, really. The wedding will happen with or without him.”
“He’s stressing Emily out,” I said.
“No, you’re stressing me out,” Emily corrected me. “I’m not marrying Dex, I’m marrying Luke. And Luke is here. I’m good.”
How can you say that? My mouth actually opened to form the words. Then I realized that Tara was giving me a firm look. Behind her, our other bridesmaid, Kate, was watching wide-eyed. Kate was new to Westlake and didn’t know the history.
Here’s how it goes: Emily and I are the daughters of a cop, and we’re the good girls of Westlake.
The Riggs brothers—Luke, Dex, Ryan, and Jace—are the bad boys on the wrong side of the tracks. They make trouble and fuck things up.
But we weren’t in high school anymore. Luke Riggs was marrying Emily, Jace Riggs was living with Tara, and Ryan Riggs was living with Kate. All three brothers were almost—almost—respectable. They ran two successful auto repair shops in town. Their father was a criminal serving time, but three of the Riggs boys had gone straight. For real.
Dex Riggs, the oldest Riggs brother, was the only one still following the script. Which meant he was keeping tradition and fucking things up.
It made my chest feel tight. I’d run a business for six years, I’d been married and divorced. I could handle a lot of things going wrong; I did it on a daily basis. But Dex Riggs was one of the few things I couldn’t handle. His particular brand of chaos always did me in. He was one of the only things in life that made me panic.
I couldn’t deal with Dex Riggs, today of all days. Which meant, of course, that I had to.
I stood up. “I’ll fix this,” I said.
Emily narrowed her eyes at me. She might be sappy on her wedding day, but she was my fraternal twin, we’d shared a uterus, and she knew me well. “How, exactly?”
“I’m going into the guest house myself. Isn’t there a spare key?”
The Riggs house had a guest house at the back of the property, a small self-contained unit. Dex was currently staying in said guest house because he’d left Detroit after his career as a cop crashed and burned.
“It’s in the kitchen,” Emily said, which meant she approved of my tactics. “The drawer under the sink.”
I nodded, trying to look confident. “The maid of honor is on it.”
“What if there’s a woman in there with him?” Emily said. “What if that’s why he’s not answering the door?”
Oh God, no. Please no. Confidence, Lauren. “If there’s a woman, then I’ll kick her out.”
“Seriously?” Kate was watching the back and forth between Emily and me. She had pretty red hair—Sunset Auburn, I knew because she got it done at my salon—that was in loose curls over her shoulders. It went perfectly with the dark green dress we were all wearing as bridesmaids. “You guys think he has some random in the guest house while his brother is getting married?”
I shrugged, and Emily rolled her eyes. Because yes, of course it was possible. This was Dex.
You never knew what Dex would do. He thrived on being unpredictable. He also thrived on pissing people off, especially his brothers. It was a hobby of his, a lifelong passion. He was a genius at it.
I really, really didn’t want there to be a woman in Dex’s bed. It was hard enough going in there to face him alone. But I was going to have to be the grownup here. I was two minutes older than Emily, and I was the maid of honor.
I put my heels on and walked downstairs to the kitchen. In the living room and the front room of the house, I could hear talking and laughter. The guests were gathering inside, waiting for the cue to go assemble for the ceremony. It was Thanksgiving weekend in Michigan, which meant it was cold and bleak outside, a few tiny flakes of early snow in the air. The ceremony would be held outside, but everyone would go out at the last minute, then come straight back in when it was over. We were Michiganers. We could deal with a little cold.
I opened the drawer beneath the sink and rifled through the junk in there. Elastic bands, coins, plastic take-out forks. I had found the key on its key ring when I was approached by a gorgeous man in a suit.
This was Luke Riggs, Emily’s husband-to-be. He was dark-haired and broody and had muscles everywhere under the suit. “What are you doing?” he asked in that lazy drawl that had put girls’ panties on the floor all through high school. Including, apparently, my sister’s.
“I’m going to get Dex,” I told him.
He looked startled. “You mean get him from the guest house?”
“Since that’s where he is, yes.”
“You better let me do it.”
“No. You’re the groom, Luke. Stay here.”
He winced. “Seriously, Lauren. We don’t know what’s in there. It might be… bad.”
“I’m aware. But Dex is not a nuclear bomb. Whatever is in there, I can take it. Did you happen to notice if he brought anyone home last night?” Or were you too busy banging your bride-to-be?
I actually had to bite the words back. Be nice, Lauren. I’d always been the nicer sister. The calm one next to Emily’s drama, the one who soothed her temper tantrums. But since getting divorced four months ago at the ripe old age of twenty-six, my niceness was harder and harder to find. I wanted to bark at people in coffee shop lineups and give people the finger in parking lots. I was constantly biting back the urge to tell people to shove it. I wanted to get laid, but I sure as hell didn’t want to date anyone. The only man I’d ever dated was Vic, and I was sixteen on our first date. I wasn’t even thirty now, and I was pathetically out of practice.
I was an old spinster at twenty-six, which didn’t seem fair.
I was truly happy that Emily was in love—I really was. I was happy that she had a hot guy who adored her, who had apparently secretly adored her all this time. I was happy that she was having nonstop, smoking-hot, paint-peeling sex with Luke Riggs. I was happy that she showed up to work at our hair salon half the time with a dreamy, over-orgasmed look on her face. I was happy about all of that.
But something about it made me a teeny, tiny bit miserable. Something about it made me want to be jealous and petty and low. I hated that part of myself and shut it up hard. But it was still there.
“Dex came home alone,” Luke said, answering my question and surprising me. “His light was still on late, though. Really late.”
“Okay. That’s something.” It meant that Dex didn’t have a woman there, at least. It also meant that Luke had been awake late last night, and that he was paying attention to his oldest brother, who he usually couldn’t stand. That was the thing about the Riggs brothers: no matter how well or how long you knew them, they could always surprise you.
Like Dex coming home alone and staying up late into the night. Why, I wondered? What was he doing?
I looked up to see Luke grinning at me. “Don’t look so afraid,” he said. “It’s just Dex. You’ve known him since we were what, sixteen?”
“Fifteen,” I said, and sighed. “Okay, wish me luck. Here I go.”
“You’re a strong, brave woman, Lauren,” Luke said, saluting me.
No, I’m not. I’m an empty shell, and I’m miserable, and I have no idea how to fix it. “I know,” I said to Luke, and left.
I had grabbed my wrap, and I pulled it around my shoulders as I walked out the back door into the cold. The wrap was soft cashmere and dark chocolate brown, and it perfectly set off the dark green of the dress. All four of us bridesmaids had one. We’d need it to stand by the altar in the cold. I loved mine, and I was probably going to sleep with it all winter. Since I had no human to sleep with, of course. Maybe I’d get a cat.
Divorced women got cats, right? Especially ones who—
No. I wasn’t going to think about that right now.
I banged the side of my fist on the guest house door, glancing at the darkened windows. “Dex!” I shouted. “It’s Lauren. I’m coming in.”
No answer. Maybe a faint groan—or maybe that was the wind.
For the first time, I felt a shiver of real alarm. What if something bad had actually happened to Dex while we were all sitting around thinking he was an asshole? Without knocking again, I put my key in the lock and opened the door.
It was quiet and dark in here. With the blinds down and the sky outside overcast, the guest house was suffused with soft gray light. It was a cozy, open space, with a small kitchen to the left of the door and a bachelor bedroom to the right. Empty beer bottles lined the kitchen counter. On the small table was a baggie of weed and the remnants of a few joints. There was the faint, sweet smell of weed in the air, as if it had been smoked hours ago.
There were two suitcases stacked in a corner, one of them open and spilling clothes. Was that all Dex brought with him from Detroit? I wondered. Is that all he owns? I thought I’d pared my belongings down in a big way after the divorce, but I still had a small condo full of stuff.
In the main room was a bed, messy and piled with sheets and blankets. On the bed was Dex.
He wasn’t dead. He was very much alive—and naked.
Not that I could see everything. He was lying on his stomach, and the sheet was pulled carelessly over his ass. But I could see that the rest of him was bare, and beneath the edge of the sheet I could see the unbroken line of bare skin along his hip, which meant he wasn’t wearing underwear. He wasn’t wearing anything.
I peeled my gaze away from that strip of skin and took in the rest of him. I’d never seen Dex naked—I’d never seen any real-life man naked except for my ex-husband, a fact that I used to be proud of but now made me feel like a loser. The Riggs brothers were all different—Luke had all those bad-boy muscles, Jace was big and powerful, and Ryan was flat-out gorgeous with an athlete’s grace. Dex was tall and his body was lean and hard, tight with muscle, the dip of his spine and the line of his shoulders like a well-oiled machine. His legs were lean and perfect, and his biceps were tight and powerful. Something about him reminded me of the MMA fighters you see on cable—a body honed and made for fighting. Except now it was at rest, the muscles lax, the limbs thrown carelessly in the sheets. My gaze traveled to where a single tattoo was inked on his right shoulder, the only tattoo I could see. It was two words, stark against his skin: Never Fear.
I stood there blinking, taking all of it in. For as long as I’d known him, Dex had worn one kind of clothes: battered jeans, worn-out tees, button-downs so well-used that the cuffs were thinning. He kept his hair messy and usually had a scruff of negligent beard on his jaw. It made him look like he’d just gotten off an all-night Greyhound, but now I realized that Dex’s clothes were camouflage. Underneath them, he was honed and freaking gorgeous.
I was still standing there speechless when he shifted in the bed and rolled over onto his back. He absently grabbed the sheet as he did so, adjusting it over his crotch. His eyes opened halfway and he blinked at me. He didn’t seem in the least surprised to see me.
My eyes caught his and I hesitated.
That was all the opening he needed. Looking more awake now, Dex scrubbed a hand through his hair and smiled. “Morning, Lauren,” he said. “Did you come here to kiss me again?”