PROLOGUE
Five Years Earlier
Cade
Iwas never really the partying type, and it was becoming more and more apparent why not with every second that passed. From the bright lights to the overflowing booze to the skimpy over-the-top outfits, Vegas didn’t agree with me. Even if I wasn’t currently heartbroken and decidedly not in a partying mood.
I wasn’t sure I had such a thing as a partying mood anyway. Not really my style. Yet somehow, my two best friends from college were the kings of letting loose, and it was the two of them who had the idea to drag me to Sin City after my broken engagement.
“Drink up, dude!” Luca encouraged me, his speech a little slurred but his smile just as clear and bright as always. “How are you supposed to forget if you don’t drink?”
“I don’t think he’ll be able to forget if you keep reminding him,” Gavin quipped in response.
“I’ve been drinking plenty,” I grumbled with an appropriate slur in my own voice to prove myself.
Gavin sloshed his own half-empty bourbon drink as he turned toward me. “Come on, Cade. We’re in the perfect place for you to find a suitably hot rebound and get properly laid. Why else do you think I got us separate hotel rooms?”
“Because Daddy’s money is paying for it,” Luca piped up. Gavin flipped him off, and for the first time since we’d gotten to the Strip, I felt myself actually do something that almost constituted a laugh.
“I appreciate all the effort, guys, but you know me. Rebounding isn’t really my style.” Never mind that I’d never needed to rebound before. Jordyn—my once-fiancée, whose name struck an arrow through my bloody heart even when I hadn’t heard it spoken out loud—had been my high school sweetheart. She’d followed me to a college not far from our Southern California hometown instead of jetting off across the country like she may have otherwise. She’d said yes when I asked her to marry me and had worn the ring on her finger with pride until the day she blindsided me completely and gave it back to me.
Her words were burned into my brain too.“You know I love you, Cade,”she’d started, and I’d sensed it even before she took a hard left into destroying me.“You’re just…not who I see myself with forever. I don’t know if you’re husband material.”
She didn’t give a real reason beyond that. Which left my mind to spiral off in a million directions, looking for all the ways I wasn’t good enough for the woman I’d thought would be my wife. The number one reason was my choice of future career.
Jordyn came from money. A level of privilege that wasn’t foreign to me, since Gavin was the son of a record label moguland had always been richer than God—and more generous to boot. She’d never minded that I was of a humbler background than she was, raised in a solidly working-class family, but she’d drawn the line at my ambitions as an artist.
“Shouldn’t you try for something more…practical?” she’d ask me when I first expressed my desire to make a living as a wood-carver. I’d learned the skill from my grandpa, and it was what I was best at, the only thing that felt right.
“Nothing practical about wasting my life doing something I don’t love,” I’d told her then, and every conversation we’d had about it over the years of our relationship had gone about the same way. I got the sense eventually that she didn’t think passion was a luxury the lower classes could afford.
She had highbrow tastes, of course. Though she was working toward her own eventual career in the marketing department of her dad’s athletic wear company, she never seemed to like the idea of supporting a starving artist spouse. Hence,not husband material.
Pity parties, it seemed, were a place where I really thrived. Silver linings.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried, Cade,” Gavin urged me, jerking my sad brain back to the present. It wasn’t much better than the recent past, but the last week since Jordyn broke things off had slightly dulled the jagged pain in my chest, at least. And the whiskey was helping a little too. “Haven’t you heard the age-old advice? ‘The best way to get over someone is to get under someone new.’” He bounced his dark eyebrows at me, cartoonish and yet somehow not corny enough to make him look uncool.
“You’re not exactly the best source on this subject. You’ve never even been with a woman long enough toneedto get over her,” Luca snorted.
“Fair point,” Gavin agreed, grinning a little smugly before he downed the last of his drink in one big gulp. He had awomanizing reputation, but at least he always left his partners happy, never leading the women he slept with to believe they could turn him into a relationship guy through sheer force of will. “But hey, boning a sexy woman who likes to be on top is a gift regardless of circumstances. Certainly can’t hurt. And look, gentlemen—there’s a great candidate right over there.”
Gavin jerked his head in the direction he wanted me to look, his dark curls falling onto his forehead. I reluctantly looked, finding a blonde in his line of sight. Curvy, scantily clad, armed with a huge smile and a group of friends who seemed to be celebrating a different blonde’s upcoming nuptials, if the hugeBRIDEsash was any indication. She was pretty, of course. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a woman who wasn’t pretty in my life. But recognizing that in an abstract way didn’t mean my body, my heart, my mind had any reaction to her.
“No ring,” Gavin pointed out. Subtle as a bullhorn.
“Dude,” Luca hissed, and both of my friends winced as they realized they were joking a little too close to the sun. They didn’t even know I still had Jordyn’s ring tucked in my jacket pocket, and I wasn’t about to tell them. They’d already looked at me with plenty of pity in the past few days.
I wasn’t even quite sure why I was carrying the thing around. Why I hadn’t chucked it into the nearest body of water the second she handed it back to me. Sure, it was expensive, and if I’d tossed it in an emotional impulse, I might have lived to regret it someday. But right now, I just knew it’d feel amazing to be rid of it. And yet I was just pathetic enough to still have it tucked in a pocket close to my stupid, broken, battered heart. Yeah, better they didn’t know.
“It’s fine,” I told Luca. I sipped my drink again. “You can’t avoid it here. In hindsight, maybe coming to Bachelorette City wasn’t the best idea.”
“Damn it, I didn’t even think about it,” Gavin admitted with another cringing wince. “I just thought booze, gambling, debauchery…the recipe to cheering up a man who’s down on his luck.”
“It’s fine,” I said again, ending that line of thought. I tried to give Gavin a smile to show that I was grateful for the effort, but I was sure it looked more like I’d smelled something rancid. He knew me well enough to know that I was trying, and I meant it when I said, “It was a good idea.”
It would have been perfect for someone who was less of a killjoy anyway. My friends would never call me that, but I knew I’d earned the title even before today. This was just my final, grumpiest form. Or at least I hoped I couldn’t get any lower.
The ring faux pas didn’t stop my friends from looking for my next lay though. Reassurances about how many fish were in the proverbial sea continued as they scoped out every eligible woman that came into our line of sight. There was a gorgeous cocktail waitress with mocha skin who giggled when Gavin flirted with her supposedly on my behalf; there was a pair of brunettes in the poker game we played, Gavin bankrolling our string of losses to them. Luca suggested I talk up a girl with cute glasses at the next bar we visited who looked about as enthused about being here as I was, but I had no desire to ruin her night in addition to my own.
