into a chair front and center by the stage and then winking at him. “You have Kyra to thank.”
She hurried away behind the woman who had let them in.
O-kay. He was giving them five minutes, and then he was marching back there to see what the fuck was going on.
Suddenly four spotlights illuminated the stage and music started playing.
A waitress brought him a drink. He frowned, but as he was about to open his mouth, she said, “Hold your horses. Just a second. She’s almost ready.”
The music changed, turned sultry, and Christy appeared on the stage, dressed in a supertight, supershort, shiny white dress with tassels. She sashayed on high heels down the catwalk on her way to him and the dance pole.
He tried to close his mouth. He really did. But he couldn’t pick his jaw up from the floor while Christy treated him to the most spectacular striptease he’d ever seen. He sat there spellbound, his heart in a fist, his cock stiff, watching as the most beautiful woman in the world to him finally realized how stunning she was.
Chapter Six
Five weeks later
“You understand you’ll never live this picture down, don’t you?” Max asked with a smirk, pointing at the wedding shot Elle had enlarged and placed on the wall of fame at Rosita’s.
“I know,” Cole said, studying the image.
Not a bride and a groom alone, a sunset on the backdrop, but surrounded by a bunch of aliens, all of them, the bride included, making hand signs that Cole didn’t understand for shit.
They had planned the wedding to be just the two of them and a couple of witnesses, but Christy’s crew had found out, and they had been waiting in full force. Even the green woman with whom Vic had hooked up for the weekend was there. Dressed like an Orion sex slave, of course. Man, didn’t any of them own normal clothes? Apparently not. Uhura’s costume must had been too sober for the occasion, because they got the Borg Queen as their maid of honor. Huzzah.
Christy was smiling big. So fucking beautiful. She’d worn a white dress, kind of like the garment she’d stripped in, which had kept him hard during the whole ceremony. He’d bought a suit for the occasion, but somehow, one of those nutcases had slipped a Starfleet insignia on the lapel. Cole hadn’t noticed until afterward.
Surprisingly enough, neither the insignia nor the fact they had been surrounded by aliens had mattered to him. The woman he loved more than anything and anybody in this world was marrying him. That was all he’d been able to think of.
“On the plus side,” James interjected, “very few people have their wedding picture autographed by the whole cast of Star Trek. The old and the new. You can get a helluva price for this on e-bay.”
True.
Max frowned. “Christy would skin him alive.”
True again.
“Was the new Star Trek movie good?”
Sure, if one could ignore the horde of aliens wearing 3D glasses and munching on fluorescent popcorn—something Cole had no clue even existed—cheering and whistling at the screen as if there was no tomorrow. The most interactive crowd he’d ever seen. When Captain Kirk had saved the day, the whole place had erupted in a roar, clapping and hurrahing.
Cole would die before ever admitting it out loud, but keeping in mind the glaring differences, he hadn’t seen that kind of enthusiasm and team spirit since the Marines.
Max leaned closer to the picture. “Is that Klingon holding a bow?”
Cole nodded. “Legolas’s original bow from The Lord of the Rings.”
“What?”
“Christy’s gang won it during the treasure hunt on the Strip.”
“A what?” James asked, his voice laced with laughter.
“The treasure hunt on the Strip,” Cole repeated. “You don’t want to know.”
It had been a very bad idea to hold an open bar before that. There was only one thing worse than seeing a horde of sci-fi nuts running on the Strip, and that was to watch them stumble in a drunken stupor while screaming in an imaginary language only they understood.
It had been a stroke of luck they hadn’t won the One Ring to rule them all, which had also been available. Otherwise they would have ended up using them as wedding bands, Cole was sure. As it was, that damn bow was on Christy’s office.
“That’s what you get for eloping,” Max admonished him.
James nodded in agreement. “Max, don’t you recall a certain brother of ours saying that he’d rather burn in hell than get married?”
“I certainly do.”
“That was before Christy,”