Chapter 26
TRENT
Ihanded Charlotte two painkillers and a blue Gatorade. It was the closest thing to a magic potion I could conjure up. Then I flipped through the stack of Polaroids I’d found in my jacket pocket.
Our wedding photos. On the one hand, zero wait time for the photos. Now that’s quality service. On the other hand, we had actually gotten married.
Some of the photos showed us grinning like idiots under the chapel’s neon lights.
One was of Charlotte crying from laughter and one had me dipping her like I was auditioning for a ballroom dancing competition I absolutely wasn’t qualified for.
In another, some stranger dressed as Liberace was clapping enthusiastically in the background.
I was in an atrocious white tux, my chest puffed with pride like it’d been the deal of the century instead of something awful I must’ve spent an obscene amount of money on. At least we’d woken up fully clothed.
Mostly. In deeply humiliating clothing, but still, we’d been clothed.
Charlotte groaned from beside me on the sunken couch, rubbing her temples with the desperation of a person trying to massage her soul back into her body.
I wasn’t much better. My head felt like a herd of cattle had stampeded through it.
I hadn’t been this hungover since college, and back then, my body could bounce back from anything.
As I kept flipping through the pictures, my phone buzzed and I glanced at it, seeing Alex’s name on the screen. I groaned, staring at the device for a long, resigned moment before swiping to answer. “Talk softly please,” I said instead of hello.
“Put me on speaker,” Alex said. I could hear Nate laughing in the background.
I did as I’d been told, feeling too much like ass to even think about arguing. The moment the line clicked to speaker, Alex didn’t even bother with a greeting.
“I got the fax you had the front desk at the hotel send through,” he said. “The marriage certificate. It’s legit.”
Nate whistled. “Damn, guys. You didn’t waste any time, did you? How was the ceremony? Did I see an angel at the chapel?”
Charlotte let out a tiny, horrified squeak.
“That was Liberace,” I said.
Alex laughed outright. “Congratulations, you two. I—”
I hung up on them and handed Charlotte the stack of Polaroids. Scratching the side of my neck, I settled in beside her. “Do you have any idea where these came from?”
Charlotte pushed herself upright, moving like every motion cost her three years of her life, and took them from me. “Nope. We must’ve bought a camera somewhere. God, I hope we didn’t steal it.”
She looked up at me, her hair was a mess, her mascara smudged down her cheeks, and she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I had the urge to slide my arm around her shoulders, so I just went ahead and did it, pulling her into my side.
Today, I was blaming everything on the hangover.
The pounding in my skull had broken my impulse control.
I looked into her eyes and shook my tender head, needing to reassure her even if I could hardly remember a damn thing myself. “I don’t think we stole anything, but I sure as hell don’t remember where we got it. Maybe we paid Liberace to take the pictures?”
She settled beside me, leaning into me ever so slightly as her gaze lowered back to the pictures. She flipped through them slowly, her breath catching every few seconds. “We look happy.”
I peered at the picture she was looking at and damn it, she was right. There I was, grinning like a wild man with my eyes bright, my arms around her like she was the most important thing in my life.
“It looks like we had a good time,” she murmured, but then she flipped to the next picture, the one of our kiss and—
Jesus.
I’d kissed her like a man starved. Like someone who’d been waiting years instead of weeks. I’d literally swept her off her feet, my arm under her knees, her body arched against me, both of us laughing into each other’s mouths.
I couldn’t remember a single moment of it, but my body sure seemed to. As I stared at it, things happened south of the border that definitely shouldn’t have been happening. Charlotte might be my wife now, but this was also supposed to be fake.
I shifted, hooking my ankle over my knee so my little problem wouldn’t be immediately obvious if she happened to glance at my crotch.
But it turned out I shouldn’t have worried.
She was still intently flipping through the pictures and she lifted one, a portrait-style shot of us standing side by side in those hideous outfits, giving each other dopey, goofy smiles while standing in front of the Bellagio fountain.
“We should get this one framed to put on our mantel,” she joked.
I forced a nod, willing myself to get a fucking grip. “My mom would love that.”
Charlotte laughed, the sound soft, surprised, and a little cracked around the edges, but the tension that had been choking the room finally loosened. She leaned her head against my shoulder and looked up, still smiling.
Her eyes were bloodshot, but she didn’t seem unhappy or angry about what we’d done. “Our mantel. That’s going to be weird getting used to.”
I chuckled and rested my head on top of hers. “Let’s get cleaned up and find some food before we try to solve the rest of our lives.”
She nodded, but neither of us moved for a long moment.
Eventually, I got her downstairs for breakfast, though I wasn’t entirely sure how she was still upright.
I’d never seen her this undone before, no makeup, her hair a wet, wild mess after her shower, drowning in one of my old T-shirts and wearing a pair of athletic shorts I was pretty sure she stole out of my duffel.
I could’ve stared at her for an hour. The flip-flops, though?
“Those should be illegal,” I muttered as we walked toward the restaurant.
She snorted. “They’re comfortable. That’s the only thing that matters today.”
“They look like you mugged a middle-aged tourist.”
She shoved me with her shoulder, laughing again. “You’re just jealous. Your feet aren’t nearly as relaxed as mine right now, but I couldn’t even brush my freaking hair properly without crying. There was no way I was putting on heels.”
As she lifted her hand to touch her hair as if to prove her point, I noticed the ring, but not the real engagement ring I’d slid onto her finger back in Chicago. The other one.
A gaudy, fake, plastic monstrosity we must’ve bought last night. Big, gold, and ugly as sin. It looked like something a washed-up Vegas lounge singer would pawn for bus fare, and then I glanced down at my own hand.
Same damn thing. Huge. Hideous. Sparkling like a cheap disco ball on my knuckle. She followed my stare and bit down a laugh.
“Oh my God. Trent. What the hell were we thinking?”
“I’m never taking it off,” I declared in response, my face completely straight. “It’s mine and I love it.”
“It’s turning your finger green.”
I shrugged. “Wicked.”
What I didn’t expect as I steered her into the restaurant was the pang of truth beneath those words, but it was there and it slammed into my chest like a punch. I, Trent Shepard, liked having this ring on my finger.
I liked seeing something on her hand that said she was mine and I was hers, even if it was that plastic nightmare. I liked it so much that not even the pounding in my head could stop the surge of excitement that shot through me.
Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice the way I was staring at her as we sat down. Charlotte Westwood. My wife. Technically, Charlotte Shepard now.
Just the thought made my cock start swelling behind my fly all over again. It seemed I was developing a new kink—knowing that my wife was my wife. Yeah, that’s going to make things uncomfortable for me for a while.
She ordered a mountain of pancakes with strawberries, whipped cream, chocolate chips, and caramel. More toppings than actual pancake.
I stuck to my usual—eggs, bacon, and sausage. After the waitress left us alone, Charlotte looked around the dining area, her gaze flitting from one table to another like she was trying to ascertain if we were the only ones who’d done something crazy last night.
On the other hand, we were going to do it this morning anyway. It just looked like we’d been a lot more relaxed about it last night than we would’ve been right about now.
“Do you remember anything from last night?” she finally asked, bringing those soft, hungover eyes back to mine. “I don’t. Not much, anyway.”
“I remember some of it,” I admitted. “There are flashes, but they’re pretty blurry and vague.”
“Are there any flashes of our wedding?”
I shook my head. “Sadly, not many.”
“Sadly?” She cocked her head a little, those eyes drinking me in like she couldn’t stop staring. “Why are you sad about it?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I would’ve liked to remember you actually saying yes to me.”
Her cheeks flushed, but then our food came and we were both too ravenous to keep talking. Eventually, between bites of Pancake Mountain, she looked up at me again. “What was your first wedding like?”
I pushed my eggs around the plate. “It wasn’t really a wedding. We went to the courthouse and signed the papers. That was it.”
Her face fell just a little, worry or maybe guilt flickering across her features. In the last couple weeks, I’d gotten to know her a little better, enough to know that right now, she was worried about me. About how I felt and what all this might be dredging up.
I reached across the table and took her hand before she could curl in on herself. Her non-pancake-eating hand. Both rings were on her finger, the real one and the cheap Vegas disaster, and I smoothed my thumb over them, over the soft skin of her knuckle, too.
“This was way more fun,” I told her, and I meant it. “I don’t have to remember it all to know that. We had a damn good time together last night. So good that we decided to move up the wedding.”
Her palm turned under my hand, her fingers sliding between mine.
I folded them around hers, holding on tight as I looked into her eyes.
She held them for a beat before the tiniest smile ghosted across her lips.
“I suppose it’s better we did it the way we did, huh? At least this way, it’s a cool story.”
I nodded, watching as her gaze dropped to our joined hands. She stared at them for a moment, then slowly lifted those eyes back to mine like something important had only just occurred to her.
Somehow, she managed to pale and flush at the same time, the apples of her cheeks turning beet red but the rest of the color draining. “Did we, uh, did we… you know, sleep together?”
My entire body locked up, but I scanned every corner of my foggy brain and every broken shard of memory from last night. There was laughing. Gambling. Her blowing on dice. My arm around her. A chapel. A vows-that-I-probably-slurred moment. Carrying her across the threshold into our room.
But nothing more. Thank God.
Seeing her like this, however, with her hair wild, her face soft, and wearing my shirt, made that want I’d been fighting back surge so hard it hurt. It’d been hurting for days, actually.
Weeks. Since before I’d even kissed her in the damn stable, but drunk or not, there was no universe in which I’d taken her to bed and then forgot it in the morning. I knew that with absolute certainty.
“We didn’t,” I said quietly, looking right into her eyes. “We woke up fully clothed. I think sleep was the only thing we did in that bed.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief—or disappointment. I wasn’t sure which.