First Comes Marriage (Aster Bay #3)

Chapter Four

Then

“I never would’ve believed you’d be the next of us to tie the knot,” Ethan said, shaking his head as he refilled Baz’s tumbler of Scotch from the bar cart in the corner of the groomsmen’s suite at The Barclay.

Baz waved him away. “Get out of here with that. Don’t want to be drunk when I walk down the aisle.”

Ethan shrugged and took a sip from the glass himself before setting it down.

“You nervous?” Gavin asked.

“Not really.”

“The reality hasn’t sunk in yet, that’s all,” Jamie teased.

Baz supposed he should be nervous. Two hundred of his closest friends and family had gathered to watch him get married. Who was he kidding? There were about twenty people there for him and the rest were Holly’s guests.

“I was nervous as h-e-double-hockey-sticks on my wedding day,” Gavin said.

Brodie, Gavin’s thirteen-year-old son, looked up from his handheld video game. “I’m a teenager now, old man. You can say ‘hell’ around me.”

“Is it bad that I’m not nervous?” Baz asked, turning to his friends, genuine concern sinking into his gut.

“Don’t overthink it,” Ethan said.

Baz turned back to the mirror and straightened his bow tie. In less than an hour, he was getting married.

He stared at the man in the mirror and hardly recognized him. And it wasn’t about the clean-shaven jawline—because Holly complained of beard burn if he didn’t shave for even a day—and slicked back hair—because Holly said it made him look more sophisticated. He wasn’t this guy. the guy who jumped into things headfirst, who let his emotions determine his next move, who was willing to give up his entire life in Aster Bay—his friends, his fledgling accounting business—to follow a woman to Brookline.

He had only met Holly six months ago when she’d arrived in town to spend the summer with her sister and great aunt. She’d shown up at the food pantry where Baz and Sabrina volunteered together and turned his entire life upside down. He’d never thought he’d be that guy, yet here he was, preparing to marry a woman who, until last week, he hadn’t known hated board games.

But he wanted to be the guy she thought he was, or thought he could be—a guy worthy of Holly Page, country club princess and rising star lawyer at one of Boston’s top law firms. Still, in his rented tuxedo in this too-expensive suite in the fanciest hotel in his hometown, he felt like an imposter.

“Uncle Baz, are you gonna throw up?” Brodie eyed him warily from his perch on the ottoman.

“I need some air.” He pushed past his friends towards the door to the suite.

“We’ll come with you,” Gavin offered.

Baz shook his head. “Give me a minute.”

He was stomping down the hallway towards the bridal suite before he even recognized where he was headed. As he approached the room, his footsteps slowed and he tried to steady his breathing. He needed to see Holly, to touch her, to look into her eyes and remember how much he loved her, and then it wouldn’t matter that her family’s bank account had more figures in it than his family would see in a lifetime, that she was so far out of his league it was laughable. None of it would matter, because she had chosen him, because he had asked her to be his wife and she’d said yes.

“I won’t let you do this.” Sabrina’s tight voice drifted into the hallway through a crack in the bridal suite door.

Baz paused, leaning against the wall. He didn’t want to interrupt whatever sibling drama was unfolding behind that door. He knew Holly and Sabrina didn’t always see eye to eye, and his friendship with Sabrina had already caused more than a few arguments with Holly when Baz had made the mistake of trying to help Holly see her sister’s side of things. Sabrina was his friend, but Holly was about to be his wife. The last thing he wanted to do was put himself between them.

“I don’t think you really get a say here,” came Holly’s laughing reply. “You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Everybody does it.”

“Not you. Not Sebastian.”

Baz’s heart stopped at the mention of his name, at the vehemence in Sabrina’s tone.

“Are you jealous? Is that what this is about?” Holly asked. “You picked a hell of a time to tell me you’re in love with my fiancé.”

“I’m n—it’s not about that and you know it.”

“What I know, little sister, is that you are out of line.”

“You can’t marry him.”

Baz sucked in a breath, anger and confusion souring in his gut as he leaned against the wall.

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I have some fun?”

“Fun? You know this will never work. He doesn’t deserve— ”

“I’ve had about enough of hearing what you think my fiancé deserves.”

What the hell was happening? He and Sabrina were friends—weren’t they? Since when did she think he wasn’t good enough for her sister? That he didn’t deserve her?

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” Sabrina said, her voice tearful.

But Baz had heard enough. He turned and walked away, the voices of the arguing sisters receding into the background of the static slowly filling his brain.

It would be fine. He and Holly would get married and Sabrina would see how much he would do to deserve Holly, how hard he would work to make her happy. He’d prove it to everyone. And if Sabrina couldn’t be happy for him, if she really believed that her sister shouldn’t marry him, then maybe they were never really friends to begin with.

***

“Don’t forget to breathe,” Gavin whispered at Baz’s back.

Baz glanced over his shoulder at his friends lined up in their matching tuxes at the front of St. Anthony’s, and gave a small nod. He hated standing there, at the front of the church he’d been attending his whole life, with all those people looking at him. He felt certain they could all tell that he didn’t belong in this life, in the tuxedo with the too-tight shoes surrounded by flower arrangements that cost more than he made in a year, preparing to marry a woman who should have never even known his name. If Sabrina could see that they didn’t fit, surely everyone else in this cavernous church could too.

The music changed and the first of the bridesmaids appeared at the back of the church in a long, pale pink dress—one of Holly’s college roommates. The one who married the doctor. She was followed by Holly’s cousin, the one who competed in dressage tournaments, not that Baz had even known what dressage was when they’d been introduced. Another college roommate—the one who clerked for the Senator. And then Sabrina appeared at the back of the church. Her face was red, eyes puffy, and she kept her gaze focused on the ground in front of her as she walked.

She couldn’t even look at him. Did she hate him that much? After all this time, months of volunteering together, laughing together, and it was all, what, a fucking game to her? It didn’t make sense. And he hated that he was even trying to puzzle it out on what should have been the happiest day of his life. He was marrying Holly Page. He was going to have the picture-perfect future that no one believed he could have.

Fuck Sabrina .

Sabrina took her place at the front of the line of bridesmaids, directly opposite from Baz, her eyes locked on his shoes.

The music changed and the crowd turned as one to face the back of the church. But not Baz. He couldn’t stop staring at Sabrina, daring her to look at him, so it took him a beat longer than everyone else to notice that something was wrong.

Holly should have entered the church already. The song had gone on too long, the organist glancing around as he continued playing, uneasy murmuring rippling through the crowd. Baz turned his head to look over his shoulder at Gavin, who clapped him on the back. “Probably just fixing her veil,” Gavin said.

Baz nodded and turned back towards the church, towards the empty doorway where his fiancée should have appeared by now. At the front of the church, his mother sent a concerned look his way, but Baz shook his head roughly. Everything was fine .

As the organist started the song over and the crowd began shuffling in their seats, the murmurs growing louder, something sickly and cold turned in Baz’s gut, gathering size and weight with each moment that passed. In his jacket pocket, his cell phone vibrated and he whipped around, turning his back to the assembled congregation as he pulled out his phone .

Gavin, Ethan, and Jamie huddled around Baz as he stared at the screen in disbelief.

Holly: I can’t do this. Sabrina was right.

Holly: It’s over.

“What is it?” Ethan asked.

Baz shoved the phone towards him, each inch of his body growing hot with awareness of the hundreds of eyes watching his every move, waiting for him to come to grips with what they had already realized.

“What do you want to do?” Jamie asked, handing Baz back his phone.

“I—I don’t know.”

“Baz, let’s get out of here,” Gavin said.

“I’ll handle the guests,” Ethan offered.

Baz nodded numbly. Gavin and Jamie flanked him, moving as one to escort him out of the church, as though they could somehow lessen the embarrassment of literally being left at the altar.

“What’s going on?” Baz froze at the sound of Sabrina’s voice behind him. He spun around, meeting her eyes for the first time all day, and clenched his jaw to keep from shouting. “Is everything alright?”

“You got what you wanted,” he snarled.

“What do you—” Her face went white, her lip quivered, and fuck her . She didn’t get to cry. Not when he was the one who’d been humiliated. Not when she was the one who’d caused it all in the first place. “Oh, I didn’t—This isn’t what I wanted.”

Baz scoffed and scraped his hand over his jaw, aware of all the people staring at them now—the cousin who competed in fancy horse competitions and the great aunt who baked the best thumbprint cookies in Aster Bay, Ethan’s parents who’d been the first to take a chance on Baz’s new accounting firm, his own mother. They were all witness to his humiliation. There wouldn’t be a place in Aster Bay he could go after this where people wouldn’t know that Sebastian Graham had been publicly rejected, weighed and measured and found lacking.

And it was her fault.

Baz leaned close to Sabrina, his lungs burning with the rage he refused to let loose in a church, and dropped his voice dangerously low. “Get the fuck out of my town.”