Two Pucking Grooms (Puck Passions #2)

1. Chapter One

Chapter One

Mac

“You’re tapping your leg again.” Sebastian’s lowered voice drizzled through my veins like warm honey.

It helped my nerves, but didn’t exactly cool me down.

“Where is she?”

“She just texted.” Em held her phone up. “She’s running a little late, but she’ll be here any minute.”

“I still don’t see why we had to hire a wedding planner,” Sebastian grumbled.

“She’s doing a lot for us,” I said, hoping to diffuse this before their stress matched mine.

“I had it perfectly—”

Em pressed her finger to Bash’s full lips and softly shushed him. “You were running yourself ragged trying to do and be everything. It’s okay to take a backseat.”

“Not to my own wedding.” He folded his arms over his chest and sat back with a huff.

The tall, plush chairs in the trendy café totally undermined his haughty reaction. Instead of slumping back, or doing anything remotely dramatic, he just kind of squished against the chair slowly.

“ Our wedding,” I muttered.

I was doing my best to keep my head in this game when my head wanted to be in another game. When we proposed and made these wedding plans, we didn’t know my team would make it to the final series.

Game six was days away, and we needed to win in order to tie up the series. I had so much riding on this. It was my first year with the Evergreens and I had spent too much time injured.

No one had addressed my potential renewal or, God forbid, trade, so I knew it was all coming down to whether we got the cup.

Em slipped her hand into mine, smoothing the tension in my fingers. She grabbed Bash and tugged us closer until our joined hands were in a heap on her lap.

“We all want this to be perfect. And it will be.”

My chest relaxed. My nerves unfurled. She was right. No matter what happened, the most important parts of the wedding were sitting here at this table.

It might have taken me a little too long to admit my feelings for Sebastian Bardot, but with Em? With her, it was instant. The moment I saw Emily Avery, I knew she was the one. In this dim-lit café, with her curly hair frizzy from the drizzly early summer day, her blue eyes searching mine for reassurance and her hand clutching mine to the hand of the man I loved, I was thankful our paths crossed.

If Em thought she needed to coddle the two of us, we were doing a horrible job of being her fiancés.

I brushed her curls out of her face and traced her lips with my thumb. “With the two of you by my side, this wedding will be perfect, no matter what.”

Even Bash melted a little at that, caressing the back of my hand with his thumb as his eyebrows relaxed.

“Here. This will distract us.” Em disassembled our hand pile and pulled out a three-inch binder Bash had nicknamed Big Daddy .

The tome had every idea the three of us could come up with as we daydreamed and conjured our special day. Loose papers were jammed in between dividers, and notes were scribbled in the margins. A physical manifestation of everything we wanted.

Em slammed him down on the table and I could have sworn I heard him groan. We probably should have upgraded him to at least a four-inch binder. Poor guy.

But with practice time looming over me and an uneasy twist in my stomach, I wasn’t sure Big Daddy could even get my head in the game. I meant it when I said all I needed was the two of them. All the planning was driving me crazy.

I wanted simple, but a big wedding was important to Bardot and I enjoyed seeing him happy. Plus, Emily was thriving with all the planning. We had a shared Pinterest board and everything. My phone was constantly pinging with notifications from her, and I loved it.

At the stadium, I would hear Bash’s phone beep at the same time as mine and we’d share a secret smile, knowing our girl was just as excited to marry us as we were to marry her.

I would have married them the second after we proposed. My feelings hadn’t changed. I could stand up in front of the patrons of this trendy coffee shop—Roast—and profess my love for these two in a wedding ceremony that would be more than enough for me.

But that wasn’t what they wanted, and I wanted them happy.

The chime of the bell over the door—melodic and chic, just like everything else in Roast—rang softly through the shop.

Harriet, our wedding planner, rushed over to the table. “So sorry I’m late.”

Her windbreaker was wet, the beaded water falling on my arm as she dropped into her chair.

I didn’t miss my hometown a lot, but at least June felt like summer. Despite it being the middle of the month, the skies were gray, and I had to go back in the house for a coat that morning.

“I have good news and bad news,” Harriet said, grimacing as she pulled papers out of her own Big Daddy .

I watched Bash and Em tense, and my nerves skyrocketed. I should have insisted on sitting in the middle. While I was okay with this wedding going however it went, the two people I loved most in the world had a lot riding on the most minute details. As soon as Harriet said bad news , my arms itched to pull them both in close, but I couldn’t. I could only scoot my cumbersome chair closer to Em and give Bash a reassuring smile.

He frowned and turned his attention to Harriet. “What’s the bad news?”

Harriet worried her lower lip between her teeth and slipped a folder out of her binder. “The venue was double booked.”

Em’s mouth fell open and Bash sat forward. I stretched across Em’s lap and put my hand on Bash’s knee. It temporarily distracted him while he took a second to think. He was never intentionally rude, but sometimes he needed a moment before he responded with something surly.

“What’s the good news?” I asked.

Harriet’s shoulders sagged in relief when Em and Bash kept their mouths shut. This wasn’t the first bit of bad news she had given us and the two of them were too invested to handle any setbacks reasonably. I was invested, too, but solely in the marriage. The wedding truly didn’t matter to me as long as the three of us got to say our vows and ride off into the sunset together.

I hadn’t told them that, though. I wasn’t sure how it would go over. If maybe they’d think I wasn’t as invested, when that was the furthest thing from the truth.

“Your second venue, the one at the lily gardens, has an opening for your date.” She handed me a piece of paper detailing the cost and logistics.

Passing the paper to Em, I watched her face go from frustration to hopeful. “We can make this work. There’s enough space for our guests.”

“But lilies?” Sebastian was never as easily convinced.

“Lilies are pretty flowers, Bardot.”

“Michael, it’ll be August.” He said this like I didn’t know when our wedding was, so I stuck my tongue out and he scowled. “Most of them will be bloomed out.”

Okay, that part I didn’t know.

Harriet cleared her throat. “The gardens have a variety of flowers that will be in bloom.”

We both looked at Em, following her lead. We had a sort of hierarchy that had naturally occurred during the planning process. Sebastian was the most vocal. I wasn’t invested in what the wedding would end up looking like, so I kept my thoughts to myself. And we both deferred to Emily when a final decision had to be made.

“What do you say, Pink?”

She turned her bottomless blue eyes in my direction. “I love the gardens.”

“The gardens it is.” I pressed my palms to my thighs and motioned to Big Daddy. “Is there anything else we have to go over today?”

Harriet shook her head and slid her binder back into her bag. “Hiccups are normal when planning a wedding. We’re just getting them all out now, apparently.”

I could tell her smile was supposed to be reassuring, but it completely missed the mark.

She shuffled out of the café and Bash at least had the decency to wait until she crossed the street before he groaned and covered his face.

“This is a disaster.”

“I don’t care where we get married,” Em crooned, rubbing his arm the best she could over the armchair’s bulk.

“I want this to be perfect,” he admitted.

“It will be,” I assured him. “We’ve got some wrinkles to iron out and then it’ll be smooth sailing.” I slid my palm through the air, and he laughed.

There it was. A gruff melody that I felt through my whole body. If we could just keep laughing, we could come out on the other side stronger than ever.

Em flopped Big Daddy back into her bag. I grabbed it from her, slinging it over my shoulder as I guided my two favorite people outside where the rain had cleared up. It wasn’t exactly blue skies, but it felt good.

I wrapped an arm around Em’s waist, Bash fell in step with us on her other side and copied me. We let our hands graze, our fingers lacing loosely as we walked to our car.

Without discussing it, we had silently kept our public displays of affection minimal—unless it involved at least one of us with our pants around our ankles and a decent certainty no one could see us.

We had announced our relationship months ago, but it had slipped under the radar of most media outlets. It was for the best. Bash and Em were a lot more private about their life than I cared to be. I knew being a professional athlete meant I gave up a percentage of my privacy.

Eventually, the world would catch on, but for now, it was nice having this little bubble where we could love each other openly with no real scrutiny.

“Have your parents RSVP’d yet?” Em asked Bash as he opened her door.

Our eyes met over the top of the car, and my stomach flopped. It wasn’t as if he was a super smiley person, but all traces of humor had left his face.

“No.”

“Not yet,” Em gently corrected as he and I slid into our seats. “There’s still a lot of time.”

Something about the way he only grunted a response and the way she kept a saccharin smile on her face told me this was going to be an even bigger hiccup than changing venues.

“Why don’t we check out the lily gardens?” I asked.

“But what about practice?” Bash glanced at me in the rearview mirror.

“The meeting with Harriet was way shorter than we planned. I have an hour to spare.”

Em turned around to face me at a red light. “Can we?”

“Of course. Anything for you, Pink.” I brushed my knuckles along her jaw, and she sighed with utter contentment before turning around.

The sigh reverberated through me and I briefly contemplated the ramifications of taking her—or both of them—in the middle of the gardens.

Maybe some fun in the car before we got there?

I shifted in my seat, adjusting myself. Bash caught me in the mirror and smirked.

“Don’t do something that’ll get us banned from this venue.”

I stuck my tongue out, earning me a hearty laugh.

He was my forever person. One third of a soulmate trifecta. But damn if it frustrated me when he could see right through me.

“I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“You better be,” he murmured, as if he didn’t know that was literally the worst thing he could say to me.