Page 16 of Knot Your Bridezilla (High Fructose Corn Syrup Verse #2)

DAVID

I wasn’t avoiding her.

Really.

It was a natural progression of the business. At some point I was always going to need to hire additional servers. It’s not like I could work at my bar twenty-four seven, all day every day—that wasn’t feasible.

Alright, so maybe my timing happened to exactly match the day after Avril sprung her wedding dilemma on me. But that didn’t change the fact that I needed to hire some new blood. That didn’t mean that I was hiding.

I needed to think. Just needed to wrap my mind around everything that was happening.

Avril was more than gorgeous—she was my dream girl.

From the first moment I saw her, I just knew.

There was something about her. Something within Avril that resonated with me.

And that little flame of recognition just grew every single time I saw her on another date with another awful guy.

Inside myself, I couldn’t help it. I burned.

There wasn’t any question about it. I needed her.

I knew that if I didn’t go chasing after her, I would spend the rest of my life comparing every single woman that I ever met to her .

I couldn’t just let her be the one who got away.

But this whole marriage thing? This was absolute lunacy.

It was crazy. People didn’t just get married to people they barely knew.

That was the recipe for divorce. That was the recipe for financial ruin.

That was the recipe for my parents being beyond disappointed in me—if they found out about this, they would probably want to disown me, and I wouldn’t blame them for it.

It was every single stupid thing I was told not to do growing up.

But that didn’t change the simple fact that Avril was everything I wanted—delivered in the ultimate worst package, with wedding bells ringing in a few short months. So what the fuck was I supposed to do?

My work phone rang, and I picked it up immediately.

“Hey boss,” Mateo said.

Mateo was my first new hire. He had an excellent resume, and I had a good feeling about him. The fact he was very gay, and not going to be added to Avril’s list of potential husbands, didn’t even have much to do with the hiring process.

“What’s up?” I went over all the logistics with Mateo the day before, and it wasn’t like he was a newbie. There must have been something that I forgot to mention. Good on him for being proactive and reaching out to—

“There was an incident at The Pearl…” Mateo’s voice trailed off, and his chipper voice was tinged with anxiety.

Damn it.

“Police were involved. I got more of the details after they dragged the suspect out.”

“There was a criminal in my bar? Did he steal something?” The one day I decided to take some time off, of course everything would blow up in my face.

“No, he wasn’t robbing us. The man came to the bar on a date.” Mateo’s voice somehow was getting even higher.

I pinched the space between my brows, clenching my eyes shut. An awful date… at my bar. There was only one person who could have asked him out.

Even though I felt like I already knew the answer, I had to ask.

“Was it Avril’s date?”

“I don’t remember her name.”

“Tall. Long wavy hair and crystal blue eyes that put sapphires to shame. Looks like she should be a model on the cover of magazines.” Confident and gorgeous.

A girl who looked like she stepped straight out of my dreams…

except that my dreams were boring. The other night I dreamed that I was late for work and the toaster grew lips and started chasing me around the kitchen screaming how it was my fault that all the bread was burned.

“Yeah, sounds like that could be her.”

“Was Avril hurt?”

Did she like, ask about me at all? She clearly wasn’t too bent out of shape after the two of us flirted.

Shit, that wasn’t a good thing. She was already back to dating losers.

I had to come to terms with the fact that if I wasn’t going to seriously go after this girl; I was going to lose her. That was the choice that I was making, and I had to be okay with that.

Or get off my fucking ass and just start dating her. Take her like I wanted to.

“She wasn’t hurt… though the suspect did break some glass, three chairs, and managed to dent the door when he tried to escape.”

Fuck .

Avril hadn’t gotten hurt, but she was way too close to danger… and during all of that, where was I? Sulking at home pretending that I wasn’t hiding from the woman I wanted like a little bitch.

Someone should just tear my designation away and throw me in my entirety into the trash heap along with the rest of the pathetic men who let Avril down.

What if it had been worse?

It was already obvious that Avril—for some reason—had the absolute worst dating karma. I would never forgive myself if Avril ended up hurt in my own damn bar. I wasn’t going to let it happen.

Besides, it was my damn business. Maybe that little weasel wouldn’t have tried to pull all that shit if I had been there to put a stop to it.

Shit, he dented the door? How does somebody just dent a commercial door? It was made of steel. Would I need to replace it? Is that something that was covered by insurance or would I have to talk to someone at the police station? “Did you get any other information?”

“The police did mention that one of the warrants for his arrest was for domestic violence.”

Domestic violence?

My blood ran cold.

If the police hadn’t carted this guy away, he might have been able to wrap Avril around in a web of manipulation, until she was in too deep… she was targeted as his next victim.

Fuck, I’d noticed before that for some reason this girl had the survival skills of a naked mole rat crawling in the middle of the highway. Keeping my eye on her was nerve-wracking… the only thing she was successfully flirting with was disaster.

If her date hadn’t gotten arrested, would she have taken a criminal to the altar? How far would it have gone? Would my perfect girl end up as a story in the news, as her literally criminal boyfriend turned husband put her life at risk somehow?

When my parents warned me about marrying someone too soon—they were worried about people like him.

I couldn’t insert myself into Avril’s life—I couldn’t stand in the way of her getting married, if I knew that was what she wanted. But I also couldn’t stand aside. She was a disaster magnet and had already had too many close calls.

I wasn’t going to hide from her anymore.

If I wanted to keep her safe, I didn’t have a choice.