Chapter 2
KENYON O’brIEN
S he couldn’t believe this was happening. Why was it happening to her? Why now?
Kenyon O’Brien couldn’t breathe, her lungs refusing to function. She gasped so loudly half a dozen people looked her way, even in the din of raucous rock music.
“What is it?” Her friend Jessa asked. “Damn. We shouldn’t have had those third mojitos. You okay?”
No. She was not okay. And it had nothing to do with a fancy Cuban rum drink with a silly sprig of fresh mint floating on top. The instant flash of what she’d just witnessed tore out her heart, shattered her dreams, and tossed her future into the trash.
Trash. Like the stripper who sat on her fiancé’s lap down there near the stage, facing Chad with a leg on either side of his hips, her tongue jammed down his throat.
He took a turn with the tongue thing and Kenyon thought she might die right there sitting in the balcony of Babette’s Gentlemen’s Club.
The headline would read, “Bride-not-to-be keeled over dead upon spying intended groom in a sloppy, salacious act of betrayal.”
They hadn’t planned on following Chad to a strip joint.
After all, his bachelor party was supposed to have been a poker game in a buddy’s basement back home in Farmdale.
The bachelorette party had been held at an elegant supper club in the city.
Kenyon had wanted to enjoy a nice meal with her maid-of-honor Jessa and matron-of-honor Tamara and get home early for a good night’s sleep in preparation for all the life-changing activities to come.
It'd been a total fluke when they saw Chad, who’d been alone in his flashy Mercedes, drive by as they pulled out of the supper club parking lot. He’d been headed away from their small hometown.
Jessa, the maid-of-honor and designated driver, had flipped a U-turn and followed him. And there they were, three young women in the balcony of the tacky strip joint, spying down on the groom-to-be.
At first, Kenyon had been mad that he’d lied but still expected he’d be meeting up with his buddies. She’d not expected this.
She and Chad had been so devotedly, doggedly in love. Well, that naive belief just bit her in the butt. The harrowing sensation of being a chump swept over her – a pea-brained, gullible sucker. Momentarily stripped of any shred of cognitive ability, she sat there stunned, dumb as a rock.
Jessa stood up to try to get a gander at what Kenyon had seen that shocked her so.
But the dim main floor of the club was so jam packed with rowdy partiers her eyes didn’t land on the debacle of the supposedly upstanding young lawyer being ravaging by a dame with bare breasts the size of beach balls, a scanty G-string the only thing rendering her “dressed.” Mostly Jessa only saw the stripper on stage who wore a neon red polyester wig, giant red stilettos, and a glittery red bikini.
Not that she was tacky or anything. Jessa missed Chad and his floozy altogether.
Kenyon’s emotions volleyed between devastation and fury, with fury winning out by miles. She jumped up and stomped down the stairs, the lopsided faux bride’s veil stuck into her lush black hair fluttering behind her as she went.
This night had been meant to be a celebration of the glory of the most important day of her existence, the wedding that would lead to a bright happily-ever-after life to come.
Well, that fantasy had exploded. Obliterated in one fell swoop.
The Happily-Ever-After she’d savored in romance novels ever since she’d been a teen turned out to be a cruel farce.
She swept past the studly bouncer who guarded the entrance to the main floor. “Hey!” he hollered gruffly. “You can’t come in here!” He reached for her arm but Jessa and Tamara intervened, sloughing him off as they, too, slipped by.
No one in the audience even noticed as the murderous woman in a chintzy bride’s veil, with two staggering accomplices on her heels, trounced across the floor in front of the stage.
Those cavemen merely cocked their heads to look around the flashes of intrusion so as not to miss one moment of the drop-dead-gorgeous stripper decked out in red from head to toe, on stage gyrating wickedly to some song about a hoochie coochie man.
Kenyon made it halfway across the floor, her irate glare clued on her target, when an intimidating man in a suit approached the rutting couple and gestured an admonishment for their behavior in public, which seemed to be against the rules even in this tawdry place.
He jabbed a thumb toward a mottled metal door.
Chad and the slimy slut dashed out of sight.
Kenyon fled past the suited man, who tried to stop her, and hit that door with a shove so hard it banged against the brick wall of the alley outside.
There he was. Chad Damon, the popular young lawyer whose billboards touted him as “the moral choice.” The love of her life had his immoral wang out, ready to drill into the busty dame.
Right there in a stinking, dank alley next to the trash bin.
He didn’t even look up to see who’d barreled out the door, laser focused as he was on one thing and one thing only. It was the broad who looked up and ducked in time to miss Kenyan’s purse as she swung it with all her might, clobbering Chad square in the jaw.
He staggered back, his manhood suddenly shriveling up like a puckered-up prune. The slut disappeared back through the door. Dazed, it took him a beat to realize who’d hit him.
“Kenyon? What in hell are you doing here?” He swiped at a drop of blood on his lip.
“The question is, Chad, what in hell are you doing here?”
“Oh. Oh, um….” He fumbled with zipping up his pants. “I, ah….”
“You fucking bastard!” In a startling flash, Tamara lost it, pummeling him with her hefty purse. “How could you do this to me?”
Chad cowered under the assault, raising his arms to defend himself like a pitiful boxer losing a round to Mohammed Ali.
For a split-second Kenyon had been thrilled that her lifelong friend, her matron-of-honor, defended her honor. But like a coma patient groggily coming to, Kenyan’s fuzzy, mojito-infused brain caught on to what Tamara had said. “ Me .”
“What?” Kenyon snatched Tamara’s arm. “Wait. What do you mean, ‘me’? You said he did this to you .” She suddenly realized her friend was as furious as she was.
Jessa spat it out. “She’s been screwing Chad the whole time you’ve been dating him. I’ve tried to convince them to stop. But they’re gonna keep doing it even after you get married. Tamara said so. They’re disgusting.”
Kenyon gawked at Jessa as her brain struggled to absorb what she’d heard. “What?” Her voice took on the grate of a dying animal. “What?”
“Ah huh.” Jessa, unsteady from alcohol, stumbled sideways, righted herself, and pointed at the miscreant adulterers.
“She tells her husband Larry…” she emphasized “husband” “…that she visits her sister one night a week, and he…” she snarled disgustedly at Chad “…tells you he’s playing poker. Everybody knows but you.”
Kenyon gulped in a breath. “You,” she cried, addressing Chad, “you, my husband-to-be, with her , my best friend since third grade?” Her watery eyes fell on Tamara in utter disbelief. “You did this to me? What about Larry? What about me? You tramp!”
The instant Kenyon took her eyes off him, Chad escaped back inside. Tamara ignored Kenyan, not caring one whit how much she’d hurt her husband or her friend. She went after her nascent lover. The spurned bride-to-be Kenyan and now bogus maid of honor Jessa scurried behind.
The quickest way out of the building was across the main floor right in front of the stage. Chad made it halfway before Tamara flung herself onto his back and brought him down. Like a World Wrestling Association champion, she pummeled his back with one fist and yanked at his hair with the other.
Chad couldn’t be heard over the blasting music, but the giant “O” of his mouth indicated screaming.
The red-wigged stripper on stage sighed disgustedly, stopped dancing, and plopped her fists onto her hips, looking down over the edge of the stage at the brawling couple on the floor.
The rabid audience of men tore their eyes away from the object of their desire on stage and quickly became entertained by the fight.
Someone cheered, “Go bitch! Get the bastard!” Another hollered, “Hey dude, man up and put her down!” Many whistled and applauded but the brawny bouncer and the hefty man in a suit appeared and yanked them apart. The audience went wild with applause while hooting and hollering.
Utterly lost, standing in a tortured trance, Kenyon watched as her former fiancé and her former best friend got hauled away.
She blinked and glanced up at the dancer on stage.
The deafening music still blared, and the woman started dancing again.
But Kenyon caught the look in the stripper’s dazzling lake-blue eyes before she turned away.
A stripper in a garish get-up, with glittery eyelids and wearing a cheap wig, pitied her. Kenyon O’Brien, the privileged and admittedly pampered daughter of prominent parents, had sunk so low she garnered pathetic pity from a sleazy peeler.
Life couldn’t possibly get any grimmer.
Her world went black as she crumbled to the floor.