Chapter 12 #2
“You mean you need to get on with your honeymoon, don’t you?
” Trochesky says, getting a laugh from the fans.
I settle into signing posters, t-shirts, and a few bare arms. Luckily, I sidestep the request to sign bare boobs.
Brooks helps with that, standing behind me with her arms folded, along with Stubby and a couple of security types.
Without turning around to see it, I can picture her staring down the nervy woman who dared to make the lewd request, with her signature librarian scowl.
The guys give me grief about the cut on my face and start calling me Frankenstein.
I’m damn lucky no one here asks me about a concussion, but then, they know better.
The extent of an injury is a closed-door discussion for any of us.
It’s understood that we need to play through whatever we can play through or lose our spot to the competition.
Worse, allow our competition to gain an edge on our team.
After what seems like a hundred signatures later, Bianca puts her hands on my shoulders and we call it quits. Sabien signals to the NHL officials, aka security, and they escort us through a shortcut out of there.
“I consider it a miracle that I got away without signing any boobs.” I grin at Bianca as we sit in the back seat of our Uber. She’s sandwiched between me and Sabien as we race back to the hotel.
She rolls her eyes.
“Maybe next time,” Sabien says.
“You didn’t have to leave early with us,” Brooks says.
“Sure I did. You think I’m going to miss the part where they saw his ring off?”
We finally arrive back at the hotel and my headache returns like a bad dream as I step from the car and through the doors. I can barely keep myself awake as I automatically walk toward the elevators, but Brooks tugs on my arm, stopping me.
“The jewelers are this way. They’re waiting for us.”
I turn, and Sabien turns with me.
“Do you really need to come with us?” she says to him.
“Absolutely. I need to see this charade through. And I’m curious as hell to meet the showgirl with the wicked sense of humor. I might want to thank her for slowing down the runaway train of the wild phenom.” He elbows me as we walk.
“If I weren’t so exhausted right now, I’d slow you down with a punch in the eye,” I say. I’m mostly not kidding.
Brooks takes my arm. “I’m sorry. I know you need to rest, but we have this one last stop before we get you to bed.”
That perks me up. “You tucking me in? You promised the doc you would—”
She blushes. “I know what I said.”
Sabien cough-laughs. “Sorry. Brody, you’re as subtle as a peacock with neon feathers.”
“Is that some kind of French-Canadian saying?” I let Brooks take my hand as we walk through the hotel lobby. It’s an oddly intimate gesture because I’m not used to hand-holding. I tend to skip straight to the main course with women, right past the getting-to-know-you stage.
She’s holding the hand with the wedding band, and I watch it flash hypnotically like sin and the devil while I pretend I don’t see Sabien flip me his middle finger.
We reach the shop with a barely legible sign that says Gregoire’s Gems, I think, over the door.
Brooks steps ahead of me and pushes through.
An older, impeccably groomed, white-haired man who looks like he’s trying out to play Liberace in a biopic stands behind a spotless glass case of gleaming gems that make me want to reach for my sunglasses. Instead, I look away.
And there she is, star baby, my show girl turned thief and mischief-maker of disastrous pranks. The non-descript guy—average height, average weight, medium brown hair, brown eyes, and nothing special about his face—stands with her. Bigelow.
Something about him doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s the way he ingratiates himself too readily, and then when he thinks you’re not looking, he wears a calculating, almost sneaky expression.
“And you must be Ms. Brooks,” the jeweler says to Bianca, taking her hand, easily spotting the lady with the money from a mile away and sucking up to her good and—never mind.
I nod at star-baby, and she barely acknowledges me, keeping her eyes on her shoes as if she’s worried they’ll walk away without her.
“Thank you for helping us,” Brooks says to the jeweler. “How does this work? I mean—”
I step forward and hold out my hand with the offending ring. “She means how do you get this damn ring off me without cutting off my finger?”
The jeweler chuckles, and I don’t like the nervous quality of the sound. “Follow me.”
If Brooks didn’t follow after me like we’re attached, I realize I would have insisted she come with me, resorting to physically dragging her if necessary. No way am I going to try and figure that out right now.
We head into a back room, and there’s a stainless-steel bench set up along a wall, gleaming with cleanliness. It’s empty save one small piece of equipment that I recognize as a miniature version of an electric saw. It looks like some kids playing butcher forgot their toy.
“Oh,” Brooks says, and I can almost hear her gulp. As it is, I tamp down the buzz of nerves that starts rising in my self-preservation system.
The jeweler directs me to sit on one of the two stools, and I do.
“Let’s get this over with.”
“Indeed.” He sits. “Before we start, can I ask if you’ll need two replacement rings or one?”
“What do you mean?” Brooks says.
“Mr. Bigelow indicated you may need—”
“Let’s discuss that later,” I say and place my hand palm down on the cloth he’s placed on the table.
The jeweler nods and turns my hand over so that it’s palm up.
“We’ll make the cut from this side where you have meatier flesh on the finger to…” He gives an apologetic smile and I hear Brooks suck in a breath.
“That doesn’t sound good,” she says. “Can’t you... I don’t know. Somehow—”
“Yes,” the jeweler says. “Don’t worry.” He proceeds to stuff a cotton ball between the ring and my finger where it connects to my hand, as best he can. There’s not a lot of space. With the ring uncomfortably wedged with cotton at the bottom of my finger, the jeweler picks up the small saw.
Our eyes meet and I nod. He starts up the saw and it whines like a dentist’s drill. I’m watching it as he brings it toward my hand, trying not to flinch. Debating whether or not to look away, when Brooks moves closer, I turn and look at her.
Then, without planning to, I take her hand in my free hand and hold on as I feel the ring vibrating on my other hand.
Then a few seconds later, I feel it snap apart and the whining of the saw silences instantly.
Brooks smiles and I don’t look away from her as she watches the jeweler remove the remnants of the wedding band and hand it over to her.
“We’ll need another one just like it,” she says.
My mouth opens, but all I can do is laugh because she’s out of her mind.
“For the show girl,” she whispers, omitting the you arrogant ass I hear in her voice. “To replace this one.” She opens her hand where the broken gold band sits sadly in her palm. “We don’t want her to tell her fiancée what happened to his ring, do we?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but I shake my head, grinning like an idiot and rub my now bare ring finger with the kind of euphoria normally reserved for goal scoring or—
“Follow me,” the jeweler says, leading us back to the front of the store where Bigelow and Star Baby wait for us.
I lean into Brooks and whisper, “What’s her name?”
She gives me a side-eye. “Tammi,” she says under her breath with enough annoyance to please me.
“Here are the three rings Bigelow has suggested for you.”
“Three—” I say at the same time as Brooks, and we trade glances like we’re on the same side, teamed up against… the jeweler? Bigelow?
Bigelow speaks up, aiming his confident smile at Brooks. “I took the liberty of choosing matching rings for you and Mr. Holden in light of—”
“What did you do that for?” Brooks sputters with newfound indignance. “What are you thinking?”
“I think Bigs was just about to tell us what he’s thinking,” I point out and gesture for him to continue.
He nods at me. I don’t nod back because I’m doubtful he has a good enough explanation to convince me that I ought to be buying matching wedding bands for me and Brooks.
“In light of the recent explosion of social media about the wedding—”
“What? Are you serious?” Brooks says. “Twenty minutes haven’t passed since—”
Sabien coughs, laughs, and waves his hand. I tamp down my knee-jerk response to punch him.
“I agree with Bigelow,” Sabien puts in. “You can’t back out of this lie now. What are you going to tell people?”
Tammi audibly gasps. “You can’t tell anyone that I—”
“We can’t keep on with this charade. It’s crazy. We should tell the truth,” Brooks says. I can tell she’s regretting the last twenty-four hours almost as much as I am.
“You’re right,” I admit. “This pretend newlywed story has gone far enough.” She looks at me and then at Sabien and then nods.
Turning to Tammi, she says, “I’m sorry, but we’ll need your help to make the explanation believable after all our… pretense.”
Sabien says, “We can say we were protecting her.”
“No,” Tammi crosses her arms across her chest with finality.
“I won’t go along with it, and there’s no way you can make me.
” She hitches her bag over her shoulder and turns to the door.
“Give me my ring, and I’m out of here. If my fiancée finds out about this, I’m in trouble.
” She scans the room, staring at each of us. “We’re all in trouble.”
For a brief moment, I wonder who the hell her fiancée is.
“Looks to me like you two will need a fake divorce for your fake marriage,” Sabien says. “At some point.” He splits his grin between me and Brooks. “In the meantime, you’re carrying off the biggest publicity stunt in sports history since the Janet Jackson so-called wardrobe failure.”
“You’re a crazy bastard.” I shake my head and feel Brooks step closer. “We’ll get a news cycle of attention, and then we’re done.”
Meeting Brooks’ eyes, I see all kinds of emotion welling. “We can hang in for a few more days, right?”
Her mouth firms and her shoulders square like I’m asking her to go into mortal battle.
She nods and says to Tammi, “Okay. Don’t worry. We won’t say a word about your part in this, right Bigelow? We have an agreement to keep our secret. Mutually assured destruction or whatever that is, sealing our deal.”
“Then it’s agreed,” Sabien says. “Three rings. One for…” he waves a hand in Tammi’s direction. “And two for Mr. Holden.”
The jeweler looks between the three of us. “Who’s going to… pay?”
“I am,” Brooks says before I can open my mouth.
“No, you’re not. I’ll pay. This is my mess—”
“It’s my responsibility.” She takes out her credit card and turns it over to the jeweler, but not before I notice it has her name on it, not the Jett Agency’s.
No way I’m letting her get away with this, but I’ll save the problem for later when my head’s not pounding like a wrongly jailed prisoner locked inside.
One way or another, I’ll trick her into taking the money.
A half hour later, with properly sized rings on our fingers, we leave the jewelry store in silence. Not even Sabien has anything to say about our stupefying situation—that we actually committed to continuing our newlywed charade beyond Vegas.