Chapter One
Knova
Sunlight streams across one side of my face. I try to open one of my eyes, but my brain is on fire with the mother of all hangovers. I moan and bury my face in the pillows. I’m not ready to be awake.
“Five more minutes,” a man’s voice says. Something beside me stirs.
I open one eye. Viktor’s lying beside me, looking just as destroyed as I feel. I close my eye again. Open it. He’s still there.
The fuck is going on?
That’s when I realize I’m naked.
I shriek as I scramble upright, wrapping a sheet around my naked body. Doing so means dragging the sheets off of Viktor’s body. He whimpers and tries to pull them back.
Why am I naked? Why is Viktor naked?
I need water. And an Advil. And I need to know what in God’s name happened last night. I remember whiskey. A lot of whiskey. And… Elvis? What was Elvis doing there?
Viktor rolls into his front and buries his face in the pillows. I’m overwhelmed by the smell of him: a hint of musk beneath layers of mint and pine and bergamot. I’ve spent enough time around big groups of unwashed men that I usually detest BO, but Viktor actually smells pretty good. I’m guessing he used body wash and followed it up with a splash of cologne for the party.
I shake my head. Focus, Knova! Stop huffing your childhood friend and get up. I start to edge toward the side of the bed when something flashes silver between the pillows. At first, I think my dog tags fell off, but no, they’re still around my neck. The silver came from something smaller. Something on the finger of Viktor’s left hand. A plain silver band.
A wedding ring. When did Viktor get married?
Elvis, I think, Elvis telling me to say, “I do.” The money shot. For Dante. I hold up my own left hand.
My ensuing scream is so loud that Viktor yelps and sits up too fast. He topples sideways over the edge of the bed and lands on the floor with a thump so heavy it rattles the floor. A moment later, his head pops back into view. “What?” he asks, his voice still thick with sleep and, probably, a hangover to rival mine. “What happened?”
I hold up my hand. Viktor squints. He stares so long that I wonder if he’s gone into some kind of error mode. Then, slowly, he lifts his hand and stares at the matching silver ring on his finger.
I expect him to scream, too. Instead, he bursts into laughter.
“This isn’t funny! ” I shriek.
“Are you kidding? It’s hilarious!” He laughs so hard that he ends up back on the floor, cackling and hooting. Clearly, he’s lost his mind, because there’s nothing funny about this.
I scramble out of bed and stalk around the room in search of my things. My clothes are everywhere. Did I explode out of them last night? Did Viktor and I…?
I can’t even bring myself to think it. There isn’t enough whiskey in the world to make me sleep with him now. We have too much history. He’s disappointed me too many times. I don’t hate him as much as I pretend to, but I certainly don’t like him enough to hook up with him. At least, I don’t think I do. Maybe impaired-me had other opinions.
I’m trying to figure out how to pull my dress on without dropping my sheet toga when the phone rings. An actual, honest-to-God landline. I’ve been so freaked out by waking up in bed with Viktor that I haven’t paid much attention to the room which is, admittedly, spectacular. Who paid for this? It looks like the presidential suite of a five-star hotel.
I change course and head toward the phone, past a table laden with plates that must have come from room service. There’s an empty champagne bottle and two flute glasses, one of which has lipstick smudged at the rim. I feel like a crime scene investigator processing clues, and I don’t like the picture that’s coming together.
I scoop up the phone’s receiver with one hand and tighten my grip on my sheet-toga with the other. “Hello?” I ask.
“Hello, Mrs. Hale? This is Cherie calling from the front desk. Is everyone all right? I’m told that someone in your room screamed earlier, and there was a loud noise…?”
Mrs. Hale? That doesn’t make sense. She must have just gotten it wrong—people screw up my name all the time, especially on junk mail and spam. But Mrs. Hale is my mother, Kingsley. It wouldn’t even register if it weren’t for the ring on my left hand and the piece of paper sitting on the small desk beside the phone.
“Mrs. Hale?” she repeats.
“I’m fine,” I say automatically. “Viktor fell over. He’s okay. Thanks for checking.”
Cherie chirps something through the phone, but I don’t hear what she says, because I’ve already hung up. I stand there, staring down at the paper with our signatures on them. The words at the top make my already pounding headache take a turn for the worse.
Marriage License.
My name. Is written on a marriage license.
Next. To. Viktor’s.
“Who was that?” Viktor asks.
I whirl toward him. “Please tell me we didn’t fuck last night,” I blurt. My thighs are sticky. I feel… Okay, not relaxed, because I’m in my own personal hell, but I feel that sticky post-coital release that comes with getting off, possibly more than once.
Viktor stands up and looks me up and down. His grin widens. He holds up both hands to sniff them. “My fingers smell like pussy,” he says, looking disgustingly pleased with himself. “The gourmet kind.”
“Not helpful!” I snap.
“No, but it’s a start.” Viktor slips his thumb under the waistband of his boxers. “Wanna come see if my dick smells like it, too?”
“You’re disgusting.” I stomp back to my dress and make a beeline for the bathroom. Viktor wiggles his eyebrows and glances down at his groin. When he does, his cheeks turn pink. He releases the elastic band which snaps against his annoyingly firm stomach. “Never mind,” he mumbles.
I pause in the door to the bathroom. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Viktor, tell me. ”
“I’m pretty sure we didn’t make it that far last night.” He dips his head and cuts his eyes away from me.
Relief washes through me. Thank God. I don’t know what the hell went down last night, but it’s a good thing if we didn’t have sex, right? That’ll make it easier to get an annulment. Assuming we need to. Maybe this is all a prank. Not the part where we’re naked, obviously, but Dante’s guy made us sign an NDA. I vaguely remember that. And there were cameras. This was planned. I mean Cherie just called me Mrs. Hale, not Mrs. Abbott.
I stumble into the bathroom and glance at the trashcan. No condom. Good. I’m increasingly sure that whatever we did last night didn’t involve full-on PIV. Aside from the fact that this information could help us secure an annulment, I’m relieved on a personal level. I don’t want the first sex I have after Mick to be drunk sex with my personal nemesis.
“I am almost a hundred percent sure, your dick has never been inside me,” I spit out at Viktor.
He looks almost dejected, but mostly hungover. “Sex can ruin a friendship, you know.”
Cocking my head to one side, I say, “Then it’s a good thing we’re not friends.”
I take a quick shower to wash the feel of my sticky thighs, and the smell of Viktor’s cologne off me and allow myself the luxury of blow-drying my hair. When I’m done, I feel better. Not great, but more human. The headache is receding. I’m back in control.
Viktor has crawled back into bed and cocooned himself in blankets. I jab him with my finger a few times before he finally stirs.
“Get up,” I tell him. “We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
Viktor burrows deeper into his blanket nest. “Nooo,” he moans. “Why?”
“Because we’re going to see Dante.” If I have anything to say about it, this stunt marriage will be annulled by lunchtime. Dante got us into this mess, I just know it.
So he damn well better be the able to get us out of it.