Summer of Love Read online

  “Honest mistake?” He shrugs.

  “You piece of shit, Huxley!” I say, throwing my bouquet at him. He fumbles it for a moment but manages to recover as I stoop down to gather up my train.

  I yank it out from beneath his feet while mumbling every goddamn swear I know under my breath—even the French ones.

  And the French ones are fucking dirty. That summer I spent rolling cigarettes for pretty male art students in Paris has finally paid off—and if there’s anyone deserving of a little excusez mon français, it’s Huxley Athens right now.

  “Mon Dieu, Olivia. Language!” Huxley clucks, totally underwhelmed by what a massive fuck-up he’s created. “Here—let me see if I can fix this.”

  I’m about as skeptical about Huxley’s ability to perform last-minute surgery on my gown as I am about aliens being responsible for the Kennedy assassination. So when Huxley reaches for my train, I gather it up even closer to me and pull away from him.

  “You stay back,” I warn him. “I think you’ve helped enough for one—oof!”

  I edge closer to the doors to the wedding hall as I try to evade him, but as I do, the sole of my stiletto presses down on something oddly slick and slimy.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say that someone spilled caviar on the ballroom floor—but that seems so oddly specific, it couldn’t be true…right?

  Caviar or no, I lose my footing immediately. I slip, and as Huxley dives toward me in an attempt to catch me before I fall, we both tumble through the doors to the wedding hall…

  And that’s when shit really starts to go south.

  The rest of the wedding party seems to be gathered right in front of those doors. We knock into them, sending the bridesmaids stumbling forward on their heels as well. Most of them keep their feet…

  But unfortunately for Chad Huntington-Beaumont, keeping his feet under him went out the door about three bottles of champagne ago.

  “Wuh…woah!” Chad slurs, tumbling forward like a wrecking ball powered only by booze and the desire to acquire more.

  He grabs onto a floral arrangement to try and keep his footing—bad move, Chad. Instead of keeping him upright, he knocks it over completely.

  Suddenly, the wedding aisle that we’re supposed to be doing the whole here comes the bride thing down right now is the stage for a disaster of floral dominoes. Every marble vase of chrysanthemums topples over, knocking into the next—and the next—and the next, carpet bombing the entire aisle with a thick cloud of yellow pollen.

  “Achoo!” sneezes Nana Vandercliff who—you guessed it—couldn’t be more fucking allergic to chrysanthemums if she was trying. Which would have been mostly harmless…

  Except that Nana Vandercliff just sneezed with a mouthful of champagne.

  Right in front of one of the many candles currently providing mood lighting for the wedding hall.

  Long story short, now the curtains are on fire.

  And just like a Billy Mays commercial…But wait! There’s more!

  As the curtains go up in smoke, they trigger the sprinkler system. Now, all of my fancy relatives in their expensive suits and gowns are in a panic—because believe it or not, priceless silk ballgowns and unexpected indoor downpours don’t exactly mix well.

  “My Chanel!” Senator Keen’s wife wails as her orange-red dye job immediately begins to melt onto her pearl-colored shawl which—lets be real—is two seasons out of season and not nearly old enough to pass as vintage yet.

  Serves the bitch right for wearing white on my sister’s wedding.

  Senator Keen’s wife whips the shawl off anyway, and like a damp towel in a middle school locker room, it snaps hard against Huxley’s mother’s ass.

  “Ooh!” Mrs. Athens coos in far too much delight to be appropriate, given the setting. If we’d been in any other situation, I would have chosen that moment to give Huxley a lot of shit about his mother’s latent kinks—

  But then the thing with the cake happens.

  And once the thing with the cake happens, it’s all downhill from there.

  The towel snap from Senator Keen’s wife seems to make Mrs. Athens weak in the knees, and with her mascara turning to sludge under the sprinklers, she can’t exactly see where she’s sitting down at.

  So instead of planting her matronly ass back down in her chair, she misses by a solid foot and sits down on the refreshments table instead.

  Spoiler alert: the refreshments table was not balanced to hold the weight of a kinky, buxom 60-something. Instead of bearing the load, one end of the table collapses beneath Mrs. Athens—

  Which is how the cake ends up launched all the way across the hall until it’s smeared across the eastern wall.

  “Oh my,” Mrs. Athens says softly, watching it go.

  “Lord have mercy.” Our priest crosses himself in horror as the cake splatters and—just as he thinks no one is looking, takes a swig of the communion wine to fortify himself.

  If only the wine agreed with him. The blood of Christ might be thicker than water, but something tells me it must be laced with ipecac…because it sure as hell ain’t thicker than the massive fountain of vomit that pours out of the priest’s mouth, Exorcist-style. It comes out so hard, it knocks him backward—sending the Vandercliff family swords hanging on the wall behind him clanging down on his head.

  That’s the point where I’m pretty much ready to call it a day. For real. There are only so many things that can fuck up at once, right?

  But it doesn’t end there.

  God, I only wish it ended there.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” the priest swears as the swords clatter down on top of him. He catches one by the handle…but fumbles the other, sending it flying, pointy end first, through a crowd of panicking wedding guests.

  The guests flail and dive out of the way, narrowly avoiding decapitations and amputations abound. To their credit, when their lives are on the line my parents friends move surprisingly quickly.

  Unfortunately for my father, he’s not quite quick enough.

  The sword pins him to the wall by the leg of his suit pants in a way that makes me feel like I’m not going to end up with any more siblings any time soon—or ever. Daddy’s face goes ghost-white as he reaches the same realization as the rest of us—if it wasn’t for the lifts my mother makes him wear in his shoes, he would be dealing with a full-on castration right now.

  On the other end of the hall, fire continues to eat through the curtains, steadily devouring its way toward the altar. Chad Huntington-Beaumont, to his credit, gets up for just long enough to grab the hall’s emergency fire extinguisher—but then a loud POP! sounds from beneath the altar cloth and a champagne cork launches across the hall. It hits Chad right between the eyes—and this time when he goes down, he’s down for the count.

  I side-step him to keep from ending up beneath two-hundred beefy pounds of Huntington-Beaumont man meat…which should have been a successful evasive maneuver.

  And it would have been, too, if someone wasn’t standing on the train of my dress.

  “Olivia—wait!” Huxley Athens calls out just a moment too late.

  If the first rip to my dress was disastrous, this one is fucking Armageddon-level world-ending.

  And that’s it. That’s all she wrote.

  That’s how I end up standing in middle of the aisle of my sister’s wedding hall, bare-ass naked except for my little blue thong, with my bridesmaid dress in tatters at my feet and no one but Huxley fucking Athens to blame.

  Huxley

  I thought taking Olivia to the powder room would calm her down.

  I mean, whoever stocked this place knows how to put the ‘rest’ in restroom. There’s lavender hand soap, Egyptian cotton towels, and a basket of feminine products for every level of flow.

  But Olivia doesn’t want to see that right now. She’s closing her eyes and muttering something under her breath.

  Is she practicing her bridesmaid toast? With the bride and groom missing and the wedding venue destr
oyed, I doubt it. Maybe she’s putting a pox on both our houses for ruining this event. Only time will tell.

  Whatever she’s doing, I hope she snaps out of it soon. Otherwise, I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to get us out of here fully clothed and ready to do damage control.

  Finally, she opens her eyes and glares at me. I can’t tell if she’s angrier with our siblings for leaving her alone with me or with me for leaving her naked and afraid.

  “This is all your fault, Huxley.”

  Oh. Well, that’s true—my mistake.

  With an irritated grunt, Olivia plops onto the tufted stool in front of the vanity mirror. The sight of her mascara running down her face does not soothe her in any way.

  “I look like shit,” she says. She buries her face in her hands and sobs. “How am I going to fix this?”

  So far, all my ham-fisted efforts to try to help her have failed, so I give her the only answer I can think of: booze. I pass her the flask from the inside of my tuxedo jacket and she snatches it from my hand with a scowl.

  “Is there one of those little hotel sewing kits in the medicine cabinet, do you think? We could try to put your dress back together.”

  Olivia raises a cruel eyebrow at me and I recall the soaked, soggy, utterly torn pile of silk that we left in the wedding hall as it burned down around us.

  “Okay, scratch that then,” I relent. “What do you want to do?”

  “I…I don’t know,” Olivia says with a scowl. “I want to tell you that you’re the biggest piece of shit in the entire shitty fucking universe, and this wedding is shit and our siblings are shit and this entire day is shitty, shitty, shit-eating fucking shit.”

  When she runs out of ammo, I stand up and face her like a man. The best man. “See? Was that so hard to admit?”

  Her lip twitches, and before I can retract my statement, she surprises me with the sexiest smile I’ve ever seen.

  “I’ve been wanting to say that to somebody—anybody—all fucking day. I’m sick of being in charge of this shitshow. It’s the most thankless job I’ve ever had, and I used to chair my sorority’s discipline committee.”

  Now, she’s speaking my language.

  “Discipline committee?” I ask, unable to help myself.

  “There were exactly as many paddlings as you’re hoping there were,” she teases, forgetting our predicament for a moment.

  In fact, I think I do know how to fix this for her. It might take a little longer, but it’s not like the bride and groom are in a hurry to get this wedding started…since they didn’t bother to show up.

  There’s a bridal shop nearby. If she can tell me the color and brand of her dress, I can pull something off the rack that’s similar, if not identical. I’ll just get the sample size and ask the shopkeeper for some safety pins to make it fit.

  In my fraternity, I supplied the costumes for our various talent shows. If I can squeeze a six-foot-four frat boy into a bridesmaid dress, I’ll have no trouble with Olivia’s hot little figure.

  She can just wait here and drink my secret tequila and cry herself to sleep if that’s what she wants.

  But when I look at her beautiful, tear-soaked face, I know that she doesn’t really give a shit about her dress, the wedding, or any of this. She’s doing it because she feels like she has to.

  And she needs a fucking break. She wants someone else to take the lead for a change.

  She’s waiting for me to tell her what I want and to show her what I’m willing to do for her to get it.

  She looks so elegant wearing my jacket, with its coattails hanging off the back of the stool. Standing behind her, I can see her cleavage on display in the mirror. She locks eyes with me, and I melt.

  I’m done obsessing about this wedding. I want Olivia.

  I’ve wanted her since the minute I saw her. I want every inch of her. And I want her right here, right now.

  “Let me relieve you of your duties, then,” I offer. “May I take your coat?”

  She nods, still sniffling. I slide the coat off her shoulders, letting it fall gently on the floor, and watch her face for permission to continue.

  Instead of covering herself, Olivia straightens on her stool, plumping her ass in the process. She reaches up and strokes my chest with her hand, practically fogging the mirror with the heat of her gaze.

  I kiss her softly on the neck and behind her ear before tilting her chin toward me to taste her lips. Just a taste, I think. I give her one tender kiss on the lips and then back away.

  “Now what?” she asks me.

  This is better than I could’ve possibly imagined. I hardly know where to start. But I owe it to Olivia to try my best.

  I look down at my flask then back into her pretty jade eyes. “You need to relax a bit more. Drink up.”

  She takes a long sip and swallows hard, drowning her stress and frustration in a sea of Patrón. Emboldened, she tilts her head back and downs the rest in one gulp.

  She cocks her eyebrow at me, filled with liquid courage. “Next?”

  I smile wickedly. “Get those tits over here..”

  She smiles and licks the tequila off her lips. When she swivels on her stool as if to present her tits to me, I don’t even try to fight it.

  I reach out and cup them in my hands. She sighs as I gently run the pads of my thumbs across her nipples to make them hard.

  She looks so perfect, so willing. I can’t wait any longer. “Now take off your thong.”

  She reaches down and slides off her little blue thong, locking eyes with me as she drops it on the floor.

  My cock is rock hard and straining against the waistband of my pants. She leans toward me, letting my cock bump her lips.

  She’s still looking up at me, waiting for instructions.

  “I want to get you ready for me. Will you let me do that?” I ask her, pulling her toward me and stroking her hair.

  “Yes,” she says softly. She reaches up to feel the hard bulge inside my pants, but I stop her with my hand.

  “Not yet.”

  It’s too much, too soon. I want to savor every second of this. Before I blow my load, I back away from her face and kneel down.

  “Will you spread your legs for me?”

  She does as she’s told, and I bury my face in her pussy. I’m on my hands and knees, stroking her clit so lightly with my tongue that she inches forward for more.

  Her clit is red and throbbing. Oh, she’s ready for me alright.

  I grab her thighs and press in harder, faster, until she moans in ecstasy and grabs my hair in her tight little fist.

  I slip my finger inside her pussy, where she’s engorged, wet, and already pulsating with satisfaction.

  It will take every ounce of self-control I have to stop myself from bending her over this stool and holding her beautiful ass in my hands while I slide my cock inside her.

  But that’s what I have to do. I know she wants me to fuck her right now—believe me, the feeling is mutual. But now isn’t the right time.

  Olivia and I need to finish what we started and get this fucking wedding over with. We’ll never forgive ourselves if we don’t.

  “Are you finished, princess?”

  “Yes, Huxley.”

  I love the sound of her voice, so husky and wanton.

  “Good.” Reluctantly, I stand up and head for the door.

  She plucks my jacket from the floor and clutches it to her chest, suddenly shy. “Wait, where are you going? I thought you wanted to…”

  She stops and waits for me to finish her sentence for her. It breaks my heart to know that I can’t. Not right now, anyway.

  Any man who’s willing to apply himself can give a woman an orgasm. But the best man will give her everything she deserves, in and out of the bedroom—on time and just the way she likes it.

  I run back for one more kiss with those sweet, pouty lips. Olivia is starting to make her grumpy face, and it’s fucking adorable. It pains me to leave her like this.

  “I
do want to,” I assure her. “But not yet. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think? I’m going to get you a dress!”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?” she asks, pouting even more.

  “Not a damn thing. You stay right here, drink champagne, look hot, and try to imagine what I look like naked.”

  Olivia

  All I can say is wow.

  Just when I’m ready to murder Huxley and toss his body into the Atlantic Ocean with the sharks, he drops down to his knees and gives me a mind-blowing orgasm.

  Don’t get me wrong—I’m still pissed off. That cocky idiot ruined my dress and embarrassed me in front of everyone. And he continues to strut around like he’s the best man of the whole fucking world.

  But I have to admit that the tequila he offered me helped a lot—as did, well, the orgasm. I can just sit here and bask in the afterglow while whatever’s left of this wedding blows itself up.

  I take a deep breath and try to keep things in perspective. I do feel a lot better now. The reception hall is destroyed, but at least the bride and groom weren’t here to see it.

  There’s a silver lining in here somewhere. If I squint, I might be able to spot it.

  I swivel on my stool, trying to think. Huxley says he’s out getting me a new dress. If he delivers on his promise, I might be able to forgive him.

  If he comes back ready to roll up his sleeves and get this wedding venue back in working order, I might even have sex with him.

  Not as a reward, mind you, but because I think I might actually like him a little bit.

  There. I said it.

  When he told me to sit here and look pretty while he does all the work, I thought I had died and gone to Jamaica for an all-inclusive vacation.

  But I can’t think about that right now. As far as I know, the wedding is still happening sometime today. Until I hear from Emma, I have to stick to the plan and get myself ready.