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EPILOGUE
CHASE
“Thanks for the ride tonight,” I said, holding the door for Zoe as we slipped out of Mickey’s Pub. “And for coming. It was cool to have you there.”
“No problem,” she replied. “That was really sweet what your friend did. That proposal was amazing.”
“It was.”
“But I have to say, don’t quit your day job. You’re a pretty terrible singer,” she teased.
“I’ll try to remember that,” I replied with a laugh. Then I glanced over my shoulder at the bar, sighing as I shook my head. “Speaking of jobs, I still can’t believe Beau’s hanging up the fake dating app. He made akillingtaking women to weddings. Doesn’t get much better than that.”
And I’d kill for that kind of money right now with everything on my plate. If I were him, I wouldn’t be so ready to give it up. But as close as Zoe and I were, I still hadn’t told her about my folks and what they were going through. And I didn’t want to go there right now. It was too big. Too frustrating. Not even venting would help.
Zoe sighed. “I think it’s weird. But then again, the weddings in my family are always a little nuts, so maybe it’d be different if it wasn’t aGreekwedding every time.”
Zoe Katsaros was one hundred percent Greek, fluent in the language, and complete with the family straight out ofMy Big Fat Greek Weddingif you heard her tell it. But she hadn’t wanted to join the family business running a restaurant like she’d been expected to. Instead, she’d joined the Marines, and was one of the toughest chicks I’d ever met in my entire life.Thetoughest, actually.
But looking at her now, you might not guess it. Not with how her soft brown hair fell in luscious curls around her shoulders. Or with her petite frame covered by a lace dress that looked painted on, wearing heels that would have me staring at my ceiling all night, no doubt. The woman looked like fire—but not in a scary way. In that enticing way that made you want to light a match just so you could watch it burn.
I shook my head to clear it. I couldn’t have thoughts like that about Zoe. She was all those things, but she was also my best friend in my shop. I had the guys here at Mickey’s tonight, for sure. They were all cool, and I knew they’d have my back if I ever needed it. I was closest to Will since he’d been my mentor when I’d needed it most and had brought me into his friend group without a moment’s hesitation.
But Zoe? This friendship was different. We’d worked side by side through our first deployment together. It was the first time either one of us had been that far away from our families for that long. Hers was right up the road in North Carolina, but mine was all the way in Hawaii, where I’d been born and raised after my tourist mom fell in love with a local fisherman.
Zoe and I had gotten close on a level that I’d never had outside of my brothers, and since I’d known from the beginning that she was destined to marry “a nice Greek man” and that most definitely wasn’t me, that closeness never morphed into anything beyond friendship.
Which was fine. With everything going on back home, I liked having someone I could talk to about it who wouldn’t judge me or expect me to act all tough about it. Zoe was a great listener, and since she had her own family stuff to work through, she could also relate and help me navigate it from the perspective of someone who felt the same way I did: family was everything.
So, there was absolutely no part of me that wanted a fling with Zoe Katsaros if she was only going to leave me so she could do what her family wanted and marry some guy named Nick. Or Christos. Or the actual guy her dad had already picked out for her—Thanos. Chef at their family restaurant and an all-around really nice guy. And I knew because I’d met him when I went there with her after our deployment.
Meeting Thanos and the rest of her family on that trip taught me two things. One, I was lucky to have a friend like Zoe, and two, I was plenty good enough to be her friend, but her family would never,everaccept me as more than that.
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