Total pages in book: 35
Estimated words: 33589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 134(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 33589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 134(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
He’s an artist, a maniac, a brilliant sculptor capable of molding the most delicate clay into something beautiful and unbreakable. He teases that he makes magic, but it’s not a joke to me. He is a magician.
He will break you apart and rebuild you, and only then will you know true freedom.
He will give you what you never knew you needed, whether you want him to or not.
He will make you his.
If you’re me, anyway.
I thought I knew what love was, but he opened my eyes to depths invisible to anyone who doesn’t know him.
I don’t know how I lived for so long in the cold, cruel world without him.
Now, I need him to breathe, and he needs me the same way.
Call it sickness, call it obsession.
Tell me I’m brainwashed, that he’s more villain than hero.
I don’t care.
I’m in love, and this is the story of how he made me his.
The Best Man was previously published on Kindle Vella. This is a high spice standalone dark romance with a morally flexible "hero" and is intended only for a mature adult audience. If you require content warnings, please make sure to read the author's note in the beginning of the book.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Playlist
Tolerate It – Taylor Swift (Jessa and Joey at the beginning of the book)
I Don’t Believe You – Pink (Julia and Jared at the beginning of the book)
Exile – Taylor Swift
Everything – Michael Bublé
Chapter One
I’ve always looked forward to getting married.
Not for the pretty dress or the party, but because to me, getting married meant becoming part of a family.
I never had that.
My mom went through a string of boyfriends, but none that ever meant anything to me. My father left when I was too little to remember much about him. There’s a sliver of a memory of him sitting on the couch with me watching a cartoon while Mom brought me a snack, but that’s about it.
Mom had to fill in the gaps. She says he was an asshole, hard to please, didn’t care about anything but his own selfish needs. Maybe it was her bitterness talking, but I figured at least some of it must be true. He left his child to go live a string-free life, after all.
She stuck around to raise me, I guess, but she’s not much better. She is missing my wedding to go to a concert a few states away with her newest boyfriend.
So, when I met Joey, I thought all my dreams were coming true.
He’s a handsome man with a good job in his family business. His mom and dad are still together, and he’s the youngest of five strapping boys. I desperately want a family, so while I’ve never admitted it to anyone, good genes are something else I look for in a man.
And Joey has excellent genes.
When I met him, I couldn’t believe how handsome he was, and more than that, I couldn’t believe how humble he was. Surely a man like that must get fawned over all the time, but he didn’t behave like super-hot men usually do. It impressed me that he managed not to have a big head.
Then he took me home on the Fourth of July to meet his family for a cookout.
I met his brothers and his father.
I’m not sure how, but Joey is the least handsome of them. It seems like each older brother gets more and more handsome until you make it to the original masterpiece—their father.
I’ve never hung out with the most attractive people in the room before, and I was anxious about his family liking me on top of it. I felt like he really should have warned me that his brothers had godlike physiques and roguish smiles that could melt every pair of panties in Victoria’s Secret. That way, I could have at least been prepared.
I was so shy I could scarcely speak the whole time we were there.
My shyness may have been misinterpreted as standoffishness, though, because I didn’t seem to make a great first impression.
I know his mom didn’t care much for me, but I’m not sure she would have liked anyone. She’s easily agitated and clearly favors the daughter-in-law she got through Jared’s marriage. Since she enjoyed the existing family dynamic, she did not seem enthusiastic about expanding and letting someone else in. I was nothing but nice to her when we did speak, but she was grumpy and treated me like an annoyance she’d rather be rid of. No matter how hard I tried, I could tell she wasn’t impressed.
Her husband Marcus Sr. was nice, though.
The eldest son, also Marcus, picked on me a lot.
Jared is married. He’s not nice, but his wife is.
Then there was Matt. He was nice to me, but he has the bluest eyes, and I had a hard time holding his gaze for too long.