🔥 Exclusive Bonus Chapter

Best Man, Better Kisser
by Jace Wilder

The Rehearsal

Six months after the wedding that started it all, Eli and Nico return to Ridgewater Estate — this time, to plan their own.

NICO

The irony of a wedding planner planning his own wedding was not lost on me.

I’d planned a hundred and twelve weddings. I’d coordinated processionals in five states. I’d taste-tested seven hundred cakes, approved four thousand floral arrangements, and talked no fewer than sixty brides off a ledge involving monogrammed napkins. I was, by any objective metric, the most qualified human being on the planet to plan a wedding.

And I was standing in the Ridgewater Estate barn at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, holding a color swatch fan and having a full-blown crisis about whether the chair sashes should be “champagne” or “warm ivory.”

“They’re the same color,” Eli said.

“They are not the same color. Champagne has a gold undertone. Warm ivory has a cream undertone. They are fundamentally different fabrics with fundamentally different visual profiles.”

“Nico.”

“If we go champagne, it clashes with the table runners, which are ecru—”

“Nico.”

“—but if we go warm ivory, the pew draping looks too matchy, and the photos will read as washed-out in the afternoon light, and—”

Eli took the swatch fan out of my hand, set it on the nearest table, put both hands on my face, and kissed me.

Not a quick kiss. Not a “calm down” kiss. A slow, thorough, brain-emptying kiss that started at my mouth and ended somewhere in the vicinity of my central nervous system. His hands were warm on my jaw. His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone. He tasted like the coffee he’d brought me an hour ago and the mint gum he chewed when he was trying not to snack, and underneath that, the taste that was just Eli — clean and warm and home.

He pulled back. Looked at me. Blue eyes, gold flecks, the crooked grin.

“Better?” he asked.

“I was making a valid point about undertones.”

“You were spiraling about chair sashes at your own wedding. In a barn where we’ve already had sex twice.”

“Three times. And the barn wasn’t ours at the time.”

“It’s ours now.” He was still holding my face, still grinning, still being the most infuriatingly steady man on earth while I vibrated at a frequency usually reserved for tuning forks. “We’re getting married here. In this barn. With these fairy lights. And whether the sashes are champagne or ivory or covered in dinosaur print, it’s going to be perfect, because you’re planning it and you’re a genius and I will be standing at that altar in whatever you tell me to wear, looking at you, thinking about how I fell in love with a man who has opinions about grout.”

My eyes stung. Damn him. Damn his calm and his hands and his total, infuriating certainty that everything would be fine.

“Champagne,” I said. “The sashes should be champagne.”

“Perfect.”

“You don’t even know what champagne looks like.”

“I know what you look like when you’ve made a decision. That’s all I need to know.” He kissed my forehead — the spot between my eyebrows, our spot, the kiss that had started in a wine cellar and had become the punctuation mark of every important moment between us. “Now. The venue’s empty. Maren’s not here. The estate staff left at two.”

“Your point?”

“My point is that we’re alone in a barn with a thousand fairy lights and a dance floor and approximately eight months of pent-up wedding-planning stress that I think we should address.”

“Address how?”

He pulled me closer. His hand slid from my face to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair. His other hand found my waist — low, possessive, the grip of a man who knew exactly where I liked to be held because he’d spent six months learning my body the way he’d learned the venue’s architecture: thoroughly, structurally, with an attention to load-bearing points that was frankly obscene.

“I think,” he said, his voice dropping to the register that bypassed my brain and went directly to my spine, “that we should practice.”

My breath caught. “Practice what?”

“The first dance. The processional. The—” His lips brushed my ear. “—wedding night.”

“The wedding isn’t for four months.”

“Better start rehearsing, then.”

ELI

Practice. Our word. The word that had started everything — the practice kiss in the carriage house, the practice touches in the wine cellar, the systematic dismantling of every wall I’d ever built, disguised as wedding-week choreography.

We didn’t need the pretense anymore. We hadn’t needed it in months. But there was something about this barn — about standing on the same dance floor where I’d first held him, first danced with him, first said I love you into the fairy lights — that made the word feel sacred. An inside joke turned invocation. A spell we’d cast on each other and never broken.

I pulled him to the center of the dance floor. The fairy lights were on — always on now, the estate had made them permanent after Drew and Sophie’s wedding — and they cast their warm, golden glow across the empty barn, turning every surface to honey.

“First dance,” I said. “Show me the hold.”

Nico’s eyes darkened. He stepped into me the way he had on that Wednesday afternoon a lifetime ago — hand on my shoulder, other hand in mine, chin lifted, professional and devastating.

“Right hand on my back,” he said. The coaching voice. The low, instructional murmur that did things to my nervous system that no sound should legally be able to do. “Between the shoulder blades. Feel the beat.”

I put my hand on his back. Lower than the shoulder blades. Much lower. My fingertips found the warm strip of skin above his belt where his shirt had come untucked, and I pressed against it, and the sound he made — a soft, involuntary intake of breath — was the same sound he’d made the first time my hand had drifted during dance practice.

Muscle memory. The good kind.

We swayed. No music, no count, just the hum of the fairy lights and the sound of our breathing syncing the way it always did when we were close. His head found my shoulder. His hand found the back of my neck. His body pressed against mine with the fluid, instinctive familiarity of a man who’d learned my rhythm and matched it — in dancing, in bed, in life.

“I’m going to marry you,” I said into his hair. Not a question. A fact. The most important fact I’d ever learned.

“In four months,” he corrected. “After the tasting and the final fitting and the—”

I tipped his chin up. Kissed him. Slow and deep and thorough, tasting the last of his coffee and the first of his surrender, feeling his body soften against mine the way it did when he stopped planning and started feeling.

“Right now,” I said against his mouth. “In my head, I’m marrying you right now. On this dance floor. Under these lights. Every day until the ceremony makes it official, I’m marrying you.”

“That’s—” His voice cracked. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me and you said it while groping my lower back.”

“Multitasking.”

“I love you so much it’s structurally unsound.”

“Good thing I’m a contractor. I’ll reinforce the foundation.”

He laughed — the full, cracked-open laugh that I’d been chasing since the first day I saw his dimple — and then he was pulling my shirt over my head, and I was unbuttoning his vest, and we were stripping each other on the dance floor in the fairy lights the way we’d done exactly once before, the night of Drew and Sophie’s wedding, except this time there was no urgency. No deadline. No Sunday checkout and no distance to negotiate.

This time, we had forever.

I laid him down on the dance floor. The hardwood was cool against his bare back — I saw the goosebumps rise on his arms, the way his stomach clenched — and I covered him with my body, kissing down his throat, his chest, the trail below his navel that I could navigate blindfolded.

“The floor is cold,” he protested.

“I’ll warm you up.”

“That’s a terrible line.”

“You love my terrible lines.”

“I love you. Your lines are a regrettable package deal.”

I shut him up with my mouth. Not on his lips — lower. I kissed down his stomach, unbuckled his belt, pulled him free, and took him in my mouth with the practiced confidence of six months of learning exactly what made Nico Salazar come apart.

He arched off the floor. His hand found my hair — gripping, guiding, the familiar choreography of his fingers in my strands that I craved the way I craved air. I worked him slow, then fast, then slow again, edging him with the patience of a man who’d learned that the build was better than the rush.

“Eli — God — don’t stop—”

I didn’t stop. I took him to the edge twice and pulled back, watching his body bow and shudder, listening to the sounds he made — those broken, helpless, beautiful sounds that echoed off the barn rafters like music.

The third time, I didn’t pull back. I took him deep, swallowed around him, and he came with a cry that scattered the silence like a flock of startled birds — loud, uninhibited, my name wrapped around a sound that was half scream and half prayer.

I held him through it. Kissed his hip. Rested my cheek against his thigh and felt the aftershocks ripple through his body.

“Your turn,” he said. Breathless. Already moving, pushing me onto my back, straddling my hips with the fluid authority of a man who directed events for a living and brought the same energy to the bedroom.

He rode me on the dance floor.

Under the fairy lights. On the hardwood we’d first danced on. In the barn where I’d confessed I loved him, where we’d swayed to no music, where he’d put down his clipboard and walked into a love story he’d been building for everyone else and finally, finally claimed for himself.

He was magnificent. Lean and angular above me, his hands braced on my chest, his hips rolling in a rhythm that was — because this was Nico, because everything Nico did was choreographed to perfection — exactly right. The angle, the depth, the pace. He knew my body the way he knew a floor plan: every dimension, every tolerance, every point where pressure produced the maximum result.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I told him. Not because it was the right thing to say. Because looking up at him — fairy lights haloed behind his head, his face flushed, his lips parted, his eyes locked on mine with an intensity that burned — it was the truest thing I knew. “You’re incredible. You’re perfect. Every part of you. Every part.”

The praise hit him the way it always did — like fuel. His rhythm faltered, quickened, his fingers digging into my chest, his head tipping back. I gripped his hips and drove up into him, matching his pace, and the sound we made together — the collision of bodies and breath and six months of love expressed in its most physical, most honest form — filled the barn like a symphony.

We came together. Or close enough — me first by half a breath, the orgasm ripping through me with a force that arched my spine off the floor, and him a second later, triggered by the pulse of me inside him, his whole body clenching and shuddering and collapsing against my chest with a moan that I felt in my teeth.

We lay on the dance floor. Tangled, sweating, breathing hard. The fairy lights glowed above us like a private galaxy. The barn smelled like old wood and fresh sweat and the cedar soap I still used because Nico once told me, in a post-orgasmic haze, that it was “the single most effective aphrodisiac in human history.”

“The floor is cold,” I admitted.

“Told you.” He propped himself up on my chest. Looked down at me with both dimples and eyes that were soft and bright and full of the kind of love that wedding planners build entire careers trying to create for other people. “We should get a rug.”

“For the wedding?”

“For the dance floor. For future reference.”

“Future reference. You’re planning future dance floor sex.”

“I plan everything. It’s a professional requirement.” He kissed my chin. My jaw. The corner of my mouth. “I’m also planning the processional. We’re walking the aisle together. No one gives anyone away. We just walk in, side by side, the way we walked out of this barn the first time.”

My eyes burned. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Drew’s the best man. Sophie’s the best woman. Maren is…” He paused. “Maren is in charge of everything and everyone and we should both be afraid.”

I laughed. Pulled him down. Kissed him under the fairy lights, on the dance floor, in the barn where everything started.

“So,” I said. “Champagne sashes?”

“Champagne sashes.”

“And the warm ivory is out?”

“The warm ivory was never in. I was testing you.”

“You were having a breakdown about fabric.”

“I was having a moment. There’s a difference.” He pressed his forehead against mine. Our position. Our resting place. “Thank you for knowing how to fix it.”

“I’ll always know how to fix it.”

“The sashes or the breakdowns?”

“Both.” I kissed the spot between his eyebrows. “Always both.”

He smiled. The real one. Dimple and all.

And in the warm glow of a thousand fairy lights, on the floor of a barn where two strangers had fallen in love during someone else’s wedding, I held the man I was going to marry and thought: Practice makes perfect.

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