The Wedding Steal - A SEAL Romance Read online

  I didn’t like the idea of keeping anything from Tony’s dad, Benny, and I definitely didn’t want to have to kidnap an innocent young woman, but it didn’t seem like I had much of a choice.

  “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

  Tony lifted one hand from the steering wheel to reach over and clap it on my shoulder, shaking me.

  “Good man, good man. You’ll feel better about it once the cash is in your hands.” His laughter echoed through the car, and I resisted the urge to plug my ears.

  “Who is she?” I asked again.

  “That,” Tony said, shoving a fat finger at the young woman’s smiling face, “is Jenna Kendrick.”

  Chapter 2

  Rachel

  Coming home always looked different than I imagined. Although I’d grown up in Pineville, Ohio, it took on a different shape in my mind the longer I was away. I began to see it the way the rest of the world imagined it—barren, surrounded by farmland, horse and buggies trotting down Main Street. The number of times that someone in Chicago found out I was from Ohio and then asked if I came from an Amish family was staggering. If I had a nickel.

  Perhaps part of the reason I imagined it differently was because of the jokes I told. In my stand-up routine, I brought up every stereotype that had ever been thrown at Ohio and either dismissed it with a self-deprecating remark or confirmed it. I made Ohio seem like the state version of the proverbial child raised by wolves.

  I did love being from Ohio, though. I loved chili on spaghetti and buying homemade jams and butters from the farmer’s market down the road from my childhood home. And I loved being with my family. Mostly.

  Family was why I’d come back for the first time in months. My cousin Jenna was getting married to Ethan. No, Evan. His name was Evan. I hit the palm of my hand against the steering wheel of my rental car three times, repeating his name each time so I wouldn’t forget, literally trying to beat it into my memory.

  It was just like Jenna to marry a man named Evan. I had never met him, but I’d seen pictures, and he looked exactly like you’d imagine an Evan to look: hair gelled into a perfect coif on top of his head, long legs that had definitely stepped foot on a lacrosse field at some point in his high school or college years, and teeth worthy of an ‘after’ photo at an orthodontist’s office. He and Jenna made a great pair.

  Seeing pictures of the two of them together sparked a gnawing jealousy deep in my gut, but in a weird way, it also gave me hope. Growing up, everyone had mistaken Jenna and me for twins. Our moms were both pregnant at the same time, so we were always in the same grade in school, and we shared a last name, which didn’t help with the confusion. We both had long brown hair, blue eyes, and the pointy Kendrick chin that looked dainty on us and distinguished on our fathers. So, seeing Jenna with a man like Evan made me realize that, if I were to change everything about my current lifestyle and personality, I could also be with a man like him.

  It wasn’t so much that I wanted to have a boyfriend or a fiancé, but rather that I wanted to know it was possible. I’d had a few boyfriends over the years, but nothing that ever felt serious. No one I wanted to take home for Thanksgiving and show off to my family. And dating in Chicago was going less well than I’d imagined. Even interested men seemed to grow wary as soon as they learned I was trying to make it in comedy, and unlike most normal professions, no one seemed to be able to look past my unconventional life choices.

  Will I have to come to your shows?

  No, please don’t.

  You won’t talk about this date on stage, will you?

  He accepted a phone call from his ex-girlfriend who was in the middle of moving out of the apartment they still shared, so yes, I used it for a joke.

  I have to tell you this joke I thought of the other day. You can use it in your act!

  Thanks, but I’m good.

  Truthfully, I thought having a boyfriend might take some of the pressure off of me when I did see my parents. They were the Jenna and Evan of their generation—perfectly matched, catalog worthy, conventional in every way. They got married in their twenties, held down respectable jobs with consistent paychecks, and raised one child because—always thinking of the bigger picture—they thought the world was becoming overpopulated, and if everyone only had one child, things would turn around. Plus, my mother said I was perfect, and they knew any child after me would simply be a disappointment.

  I often wondered whether they regretted that choice. A second kid would have been like a back-up in case the first one dropped out of college and moved to Chicago to stand on small, sticky stages and tell jokes for a living.

  My mom met me at the door and grabbed my duffel bag, dropping it in the hallway.

  “Your dad can take that up to your room for you,” she said, eyeing it like it was a snake that might jump up and bite her. “Is that all you brought, honey? What are you going to wear to the bachelorette party?”

  I frowned and gestured to my black leggings, slouchy tank-top, and long gray cardigan. “I thought I’d wear this.”

  My mom’s eyes widened. “I’m not sure, Rachel. I bet we’re about the same size. You could—”

  “Kidding.” My jokes had to come with a label around my mom. Needless to say, she wasn’t my target audience.

  My mom lifted her manicured eyebrows and smiled. “Yes, of course. I should just assume you’re kidding unless you say otherwise.”

  “That would certainly speed things up.”

  “Rach!” My dad charged into the entryway, pushed past my mom, and wrapped his arms around my waist, jostling me from side to side like a vending machine that had eaten his money. “So good to see you, kid. How long has it been?”

  “Twenty years, at least.”

  “Hardy har har,” he said. “Always with the jokes.”

  “You just missed a great one, Mitch,” Mom said, winking at me over his shoulder.

  He grabbed my duffel bag, hitched it over his shoulder, and headed for the stairs. “I’m sure there’s plenty more where that came from, huh, Rach? You don’t get paid the big bucks for nothing.”

  I followed him up the stairs and tried not to grimace. In an effort to get my parents on board with me supporting myself with stand-up, I may have inflated my income a tad. Not by enough to ruin my street cred, of course. I still wanted my family to know that I was a starving artist, working my way up the ladder. But I told them a number that encouraged the belief that I was eating three square meals a day—which was true in the sense that most of my meals started out as square-shaped instant noodles. But I took a daily vitamin, which most likely filled in the gaps in my nutrition. Probably.

  “How have things been going recently?” Mom asked in a voice that sounded curious but had a touch of worry in it. “With your comedy, I mean.”

  “Good,” I said, perhaps a little too cheerily. “Great. I just had a show last night. I opened for a friend of mine.”

  “Oh.”

  I knew immediately what she was thinking about. She was remembering the concert she’d taken me and Jenna to in middle school when we’d had to sit through almost an hour of the worst opening act in the history of opening acts. The band had over twenty members, each of them playing an instrument I vaguely recognized but couldn’t name. It sounded like someone was playing a record in reverse. The crowd booed, but I don’t think anyone on stage could hear it over their own noise.

  “An opening act in comedy is different,” I said. “At our level, no one is there to hear a big name. They just want to laugh. It went great.”

  It hadn’t gone great. I’d bombed, and I didn’t understand why. My jokes were funny. At least, I thought so. They’d played well when I’d tested them on a few of my other comedy friends. But the crowd had offered up little more than pity laughs. After the show, Mariana found me. We’d met when I first moved to Chicago, both trolling the same comedy hot spots, hoping to squeeze onto a set list somewhere just so someone outside of our apartments could hear our jokes. Now, she was gearing up for
a headliner spot at one of the most famous amateur comedy spots in Chicago. Her career was going places, and I was still in almost the same place.

  I recalled our conversation with a cringe.

  “That was great,” Mariana said, pulling me into a hug.

  I grabbed her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Be straight with me.”

  Her brow furrowed, and I shook her. “Mariana, come on. What happened? Was my mic broken or something?”

  She sighed and gave me a sad smile. “It happens, Rach. You know that. Some gigs just fall flat. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Yours don’t fall flat,” I said, sounding bitterer than I intended. I bit my lip. “Do you have any advice?”

  “Well, okay, yeah, I do.”

  “Hit me with it,” I said, smiling.

  Mariana crossed her arms and stepped away from me as if I was a piece of art in a gallery she wanted to understand. “You need more confidence. If you aren’t feeling your own jokes, the audience won’t, either.”

  My forehead wrinkled. “I’m confident.”

  She shrugged. “That might be true, but you didn’t show it on the stage. It needs to feel like you’re telling a funny story to a good friend, but it felt like you were making a speech in front of a class.”

  Ouch. I tried to keep the smile on my face, but the edges of my mouth trembled. “Is that all?”

  She nodded and then froze. “Well, actually, the joke towards the end about the stay-at-home moms stealing wine at the neighborhood grocery store? It’s a little played out. I’d recommend dropping it for something fresher.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, waving it away. “I’ll drop it. It was a transitional joke, anyway. Thanks for the help.”

  “You’ll get ‘em next time,” Mariana said, rubbing my shoulder. I felt six inches tall.

  “I didn’t suggest it didn’t go well, did I?” Mom asked, reclaiming my attention. She lifted her hands and looked at my dad for confirmation that she hadn’t said anything too offensive.

  “No, I was only explaining,” I said.

  “Here we are,” Dad said, ignoring us both and pushing the door to my bedroom open. He ushered me inside. “Mom washed your sheets, and I fixed the antenna on the television set in the closet. You should be able to get three channels now.”

  “Nobody watches cable anymore, Dad. I stream everything.”

  He lifted his nose in the air and made a snooty face, puckering his lips. “I had no idea Chicago would change you so much,” he teased.

  “When does the bachelorette party start?” my mom asked, checking her watch. “If you want to make it on time, we should leave you be so you can shower and get ready.”

  I wanted to tell my mom I’d showered that morning and didn’t plan to take another before the party. I also wanted to mention that, unlike her, it did not take me two hours to do my hair and makeup. However, both of those statements would have only served to prove how different we were from one another, and I wasn’t in the mood to be reminded of that fact. For just a little while—at least as long as I was going to be in Ohio—I wanted to pretend that everything in my life was her idea of normal.

  “Have you talked to your twinny recently?” Dad asked, calling Jenna by the pet name he’d adopted for her when we were little girls. “Is she excited to be getting married?”

  “You’ve probably talked to her more recently than I have,” I said, half-serious.

  My dad frowned. “Are you two not staying in touch?”

  “Of course they are,” Mom interjected. “Rach is going to be a bridesmaid in the wedding, after all.”

  I smiled, hoping that would count as an answer, and thankfully, they both looked satisfied. I started pushing them both towards the door. “Thanks for escorting me upstairs, but I can take it from here.”

  “Towels are in the linen closet,” Mom said, popping her head around the doorframe.

  I smiled and nodded. The towels had been in the same linen closet in the hallway across from the bathroom since we’d moved into the two-story bungalow when I was twelve.

  “And the shower is in the bathroom,” my dad said, giving us each a mischievous grin. He liked to think I got my comedy chops from him, but his humor was largely of the cheesy, dad-joke variety. Of course, I had no intention of correcting him.

  When they both finally left and I closed my door, I turned and flopped back on my twin-sized bed and stared up at the ceiling. I’d done the same thing many times throughout my teenage years, but I had rarely felt more angsty then than I did right now.

  I hadn’t seen Jenna in almost six months, and it had been eight months since we’d seen each other before that. She had a busy life and it was hard for me to make it back to Ohio often, so we’d been away from each other. It made me sad, because we had been like sisters growing up, but in other ways, I didn’t mind it. Things in Chicago weren’t going as well as I’d hoped. I’d expected to be much further in my career by now, living in an apartment that didn’t leak when it rained and turn into an oven in the summer. I’d expected to be in a serious relationship and have a plan for my future, not working two minimum-wage jobs just to scrape by. So, not seeing Jenna made it easier to bear the areas of my life where I’d fallen short. Now that we were going to be reunited again, however, I was forced to think about the ways her life was better than mine.

  And not only that, but I had to endure the embarrassment that everyone else was definitely comparing us to one another. It had been that way our entire lives. We looked so much alike and spent all of our time together that everyone had expected us to succeed in the same ways. Jenna had gone to Princeton while I’d dropped out of community college. She graduated and went straight into a job as an accountant for a major green energy company, which supplied her with a large enough salary that she could afford her own home, while I while I schlepped cappuccinos at a college campus coffee shop and lived in a studio that was probably the same size as her master bathroom. And now, as if to rub it in my face even more, she was getting married and forcing me to bear witness to it by standing a few feet to her left throughout the entire thing. It would be torture.

  I was still happy for her. So happy for her. I loved Jenna, and she and Ethan—Evan!—did make a really cute couple. When she’d video-chatted me to ask me to be her bridesmaid, I thought the radiance of her smile would shatter my phone screen. She oozed contentment, and I was thrilled she’d found it. It just would have been a little easier to be happy for her if I had some contentment of my own.

  But I knew contentment for me would be something else. I didn’t know what, but it wouldn’t be the same as what Jenna and Evan had. I wanted to be happy, but I didn’t want to be another comedian telling jokes about my husband who wears a cell-phone clip on his belt, our mid-sized rescue dog who’s too dumb to even play fetch, and the drama I incur at my yoga studio. My path had always been different from Jenna’s; it just so happened that at the moment, I didn’t know where my path was located.

  No one needed to know that, though. I took my mom’s advice and showered, changed into the slinky black dress I usually reserved for first dates, and layered on the mascara. Suddenly, I was determined that no one at the bachelorette party was going to see me as a loser. They were going to see a single, confident woman, striking it out on her own in the big city. They were going to be jealous of me for once, even if I had to fudge the truth a little to make it happen.

  Plus, it was just a night out with Jenna and her friends. What was the worst that could happen?

  Chapter 3

  Colton

  The drive was so much worse than I’d imagined. When I’d agreed to the terms of Tony’s secret mission, I hadn’t really been thinking about what eight hours in a car alone would look like. The radio stations were slim pickings the further into Middle America I got, and after a while, I couldn’t even find a single rock station, which made for a very boring journey. Without music to distract me, my thoughts settled in darker places, going to the co
rners of my mind I usually tried to avoid. Namely, what was I doing with my life?

  I had never been very introspective. Before she died, my mom had been very religious and purpose-driven. She believed in her ability to make a difference in the world and the lives of those around her through love and compassion. While I respected her conviction, the truth was that I mostly looked out for myself. I went into the Navy so I could see the world, knowing I wouldn’t have the money or means to travel on my own, and a large motivation for my decision to become a SEAL was the huge paycheck bonus. Honestly, my underlying conviction had a lot more to do with wanderlust and competitiveness than it did with a desire to serve my country and make sacrifices.

  Really, retiring from being a SEAL had been the real sacrifice. I wanted to stay and keep working. I liked the structure it gave my life. However, I’d always regretted not being emotionally present for my mom while she was sick, so when I heard my dad was dying from a different type of the same damn disease that had stolen my mom away, I felt like I had to be there for him. It seemed like my opportunity to make things right. By being there for my dad, I could be there for both of my parents. And then, he’d gone and died right after I got home.

  My dad had written to me telling me he was sick, but in classic tough-guy fashion, he’d downplayed the severity of his condition. He told me he was fine and that his doctors were handling everything. He told me not to worry about him, to continue living my life and not let him disrupt me, but he just wanted me to know that it was terminal, and he wouldn’t make it. My relationship with my dad had suffered after my mom’s death—he had always been a very cerebral guy, lacking the emotional availability of a 1950s sitcom father—so his diagnosis meant I had a severely limited amount of time to fix it all. I just wish I’d realized how limited that time would be.

  After he died, I wavered. Without the structure of the military or the purpose of mending things with my dad, I lost my way. I started drinking and partying, and then, somehow, I found myself working for the mob. I’d gone from living a life my mom would have been proud of, to intimidating indebted businessmen in dark alleys. And now, I was about to kidnap an innocent, beautiful woman—and for what? Because her father owed Tony some money? I couldn’t help but feel that I was doing this for no good reason.