Down the Aisle Read Free

instead.
    “You made me a bucket list?”
    “Yep.” She sat down and chair danced, not even having the grace to look contrite.
    “You realize that a bucket list is a list of things a person wants to do before they die, right? It’s not supposed to be a list of things Cat thinks you should do before you die.”
    Cat shrugged her slim shoulders. “Six of one, half dozen of the other.”
    “No. No, not really,” Lacey began and then thought better of it. What difference did it make? This was the last week of her single life and their lives together as single besties. If Cat wanted to spend it with her in a kitschy strip club, she was going to make the best of it. The hard part was over. She’d taken her lickings—albeit under duress—and now she could sit back, have a few drinks, talk with her friends, and ignore the gyrating men on stage. Then tomorrow, when she’d slept off her hangover, she could talk to Galen about the issue she’d been putting off for so long now. The only thing that would have been left on her real bucket list, if she’d had one.
    She shook off the sudden melancholy and pasted on a smile. “These shots aren’t going to drink themselves.”
    Courtney and Cat both whooped and grabbed their glasses. “Down the hatch,” Lacey said, and they drank. That shot was the first of many, and by the time the dancers had packed away their oil and g-strings, Lacey was well and truly drunk.
    “So who else is coming?” she asked idly, counting the glasses in front of her. She’d drunk more than her fair share, but kept losing track.
    “No one, why?”
    She leveled Cat with a frown. “You said I’d be letting people down if I didn’t come along, remember?”
    Cat shifted in her seat and nodded, motioning to the strangers milling around. “Yeah. All these nice ladies were waiting on you. Not to mention old Officer Steele and Thor.”
    She reapplied her lip gloss casually, and Lacey tried to muster the will to strangle her, but it never came. Heck, who cared? She’d gotten through it, and now she was pleasantly buzzed and having a great time with her friends. She gave up with a snort and slumped back, her attention caught by the black hood on the corner of the table.
    She picked it up and shook it out to see it more clearly. “Wow, this thing is pretty fancy for a gag. What’s that made of, velvet?”
    Cat shrugged. “I guess so.”
    “Where did you even get it?”
    “Rafe let me borrow it. He was there when we were telling Shane about our plans. We were just going to go to the dollar store to get a cheap mask, and he offered to let us use his stuff.” Cat scooted in closer and looked around before whispering so loud, anyone who wanted to listen would have heard her anyway. “He came back with all kinds of stuff. Restraints, a hood, the blindfold, you should’ve seen it all.”
    Rafe was a friend of Galen and Cat’s boyfriend, Shane. He was a detective at their local Police Department, so the cuffs made sense. But the hood?
    “Why would he have all that stuff?”
    “Rafe has…interesting taste,” Cat said, her green eyes going comically wide.
    “What does that mean?” Courtney asked, dragging her bar stool closer, curiosity lighting her face.
    “Well,” Cat gave a furtive glance around before continuing. “I guess he likes it rough and wild.”
    Lacey mulled that over for a second then shrugged. Probably a well-placed tie around the eyes and some spanking. That wasn’t so wild. Heck, she was a notorious prude, and she and Galen had done that plenty of times, the old slap—
    “With cat-o-nine-tails and public sex.”
    Oh, snap. Well that was different.
    “He wouldn’t give me all the details—and believe me”—Cat rolled her eyes—“it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
    Courtney sat back with a thud, her cheeks highlighted with twin flags of red. “For real? I thought that kind of stuff was just in books and movies.”
    “Nope. And apparently, it’s not just a