It's the summer break, and for the first time in his life, Mike would rather stay in the bloody classroom.<br><br>It's wedding season, and Mike is doomed to spend all summer sipping cheap champagne and pretending he likes tiny portions of posh food. From the passive-aggressive torment of Mike's mother-in-law to the insulting incredulity of his colleagues over what his mysterious husband actually looks like, Mike would voluntarily teach sex education to fourteen-year-olds for the rest of his life if it would only get him out of one more wedding. Even his husband in a kilt isn't going to save this one.<br><br>But there's nothing like watching someone else get hitched to remind him of where he's come from ... and where he's determined to go from here.

Married Ones

And her face lit up in a way that made Mike’s chest hurt.


Suze, preceded by her tiny nieces scattering petals, and holding onto her elderly father’s arm, was nothing short of beautiful. She was beaming and crying all at once, and the look of complete rapture on Vikki’s face dragged Mike into the past as much as when he’d seen Beth enter that tiny Scottish chapelat the beginning of the summer.


But it wasn’t Suze who reminded him of where he’d come from—it was Vikki. They didn’t share a singledrop of blood, but that look of stunned happiness was one Mike knew from his own past. And not his wedding, but on Stephen’s twenty-second birthday.


Chapter 44