CHAPTER ONE

Noah Logan always knew the day would come when he officially morphed into someone he no longer recognized, and apparently his thirty-first birthday was going to be it.

But only if he didn't put up a fight.

And, hell yes, was he going to fight.

He folded his arms across his chest, adopted a you wanna say that again stance he'd learned from his military father, and clenched his jaw beneath the scruff of his beard. "No. No way. Not in a million fucking years."

His friend Braden Mack stuck out his bottom lip. "Come on, man. It'll be the best birthday present ever."

"It's my birthday, dipshit," Noah grumbled. He threw his hand out wide to gesture at the large circle of men and one woman who gathered around a table near the empty dance floor in Mack's country and western dance club, Temple. "And you can save that pouty thing for them. It doesn't work on me."

Which was a lie. Mack's pouty face was how Noah got here. At first, he'd been honored and humbled when Mack asked him to stand up with him in his upcoming wedding alongside his other close friends. But then came the bottom-lip thing, and the next goddamned thing Noah knew, he was doing all the shit he thought brides were supposed to do. Apparently, Mack's fiancŽe, Liv, had turned all planning over to Mack, who in turn had deemed it only fair that his male buddies get a small taste of what society usually required of women.

Which, hey, Noah was all for. But Christ, in the past eight months, he'd helped Mack pick out flower arrangements, considered lighting schemes, debated the mixed messaging of a particular Bible verse, and gotten into one singularly heated exchange with another groomsman over whether Mack should abandon the outdated tradition of tossing the garter. The wedding was next month, and Mack had officially reached epic levels of groomzilla.

And today? Oh, today they were crafting. Mack wanted a handmade archway at the entrance to the reception hall.

Which is why they were all gathered at his club at three o'clock in the afternoon on a Thursday in October to make about five hundred paper flowers. But clearly, it was all a ruse to drop the latest what the fuck.

Mack wanted them to perform a dance routine at the reception. A dance routine.

"Let me put this in words you understand," Noah said. "Fuck. You. I'm. Not. Dancing."

Mack glared with all the frustration of a kindergartner who'd been denied a second chocolate milk at snack time. Behind Noah, the scruff of shoes on the well-worn wooden floor told him that Mack was about to get backup. Seconds later, a calloused hand clapped him on the shoulder. Noah pitched forward, and his thick, black-framed glasses slid down his nose.

"We dance for Mack," said Vlad Konnikov, a hockey player they all just called the Russian because he was, in fact, Russian. His heavy accent dipped into the or else territory.

Which sent Noah's voice higher into the oh shit range as he tried another tactic. "What about Liam? Your brother lives in California. How's he going to learn the dance routine if he's not even here?"

"I'm sending him a video to learn on his own."

Noah pushed his glasses up and turned around and found an entire table of upturned faces watching him in anticipation of his inevitable defeat. "You all agreed to this?"

"Friends don't let friends embarrass themselves alone," said Del Hicks, a player for the Nashville Legends...