Chapter 4 Introducing Mrs. Black #2
And just like that, the memory dissipated into the vapor.
Fuck. Fuck.
But as I ducked under the hot water, other bits and pieces started to come back.
Seeing her in Naxos, to start. The greatest kiss in the history of the universe, for another.
And that had somehow led to…Christ Almighty, had I really proposed outside the Fountain of the Gods with Pegasus photo bombing the moment?
Had we really exchanged vows in front of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe?
I simply couldn’t discern between reality and fantasy.
And while that was usually the goal on nights like that—nights where a combo of pills and alcohol helped me banish other memories like the ones I tried and failed to leave in the desert—this time I sincerely wanted to know how the fuck I had gone from sampling tequila and Laney Fisher’s delectable neck at a nightclub to united to the girl in holy fucking matrimony.
It was enough to swear off candy-flipping for life.
And then there was the little chat I’d been having with Liza just before Laney walked in. The one where she informed me that my eldest brother had just walked away from Blackguard for good.
Brendan signed away half his shares to Huntington during the hostage situation.
Ezra’s father took his seat on the board, and your father forced Brendan to resign yesterday.
He signed the papers. It’s done.
Brendan, the golden child, the heir apparent, and the eldest Black brother, had traded his crown for love, of all pitiful things.
And no one had stopped him. Not Shea or Owen.
Not Liza or her son, Liam, and certainly not my father.
Dad was still recovering from a recent heart surgery (it was a shock to everyone that he even had one), which meant that since Brendan, the former interim CEO, was out, there was no one running one of the largest investment firms in the world.
Our family’s lifeblood for sixty years.
Liza’s second announcement rang through my mind.
Since the company needs an interim CEO now…Brendan nominated you for the job.
The thing was, I wasn’t CEO material. True, I’d be lying if I said I’d never thought about it—our father’s habit of making all his children fight over the succession carrot had raised us all to want it. But I was the fixer, not the prince. The Black son who lived in the shadows, not in the sun.
But Brendan had named me instead of Owen or Shea. With the potential to make the job permanent.
If I could meet certain unspoken conditions.
Liza’s final gauntlet.
The board—your father included—expects the CEO to meet certain standards.
Family values. Stability.
They want someone who’s going to settle down, get married, have kids.
Now, I was hiding from the wife I didn’t know I had—the wife I wasn’t sure I wanted—in the bathroom, trying to decide whether I wanted to jack off to the memory against this very wall or go back out and ask her the impossible question that had been quietly occurring to me since she held up her ring.
Would she be willing to stay my wife?
No. Impossible. Not to mention reckless, asking a complete stranger to do the one thing that would help me get out of the box I’d been trapped in for most of my life.
She could be anyone.
A criminal.
A con artist.
A sociopath (and really, this marriage only had room for one, okay?).
But maybe just for a week. A month?
Forever?
“Stop it,” I muttered with a quick slap to my face.
I was mixing fantasy and reality. When had it become so hard to separate a critical calculation from a pipe dream?
I finished my shower with quick, methodical movements that included equally methodical masturbation (if only to think more clearly when I got out). By the time I’d located a pair of jeans, I knew what I was going to do.
When I reentered the living room, Laney was sitting on the couch, still swathed in the bedsheet, phone pressed to her ear. Her eyes deepened to the color of a soccer pitch when she caught sight of my abs just before I tugged a white T-shirt over them.
She really couldn’t hide a thing she was thinking.
I found I liked her all the more for it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to help me here.
“Megan, I have to go,” she said into the phone. “No, don’t come. I’ll meet you in the room before we have to leave.” She ended the call without waiting for a response. “Hey.”
She looked… different. Paler, somehow. Her hands shook slightly as she set the phone next to her on the sofa.
Shit. What had happened in the five minutes I’d been in the shower?
More importantly, why did I care?
“So, I was thinking, room service?” I affected my very best boy-next-door charm as I sauntered across the room. “The Minoan makes killer French toast, and I don’t know about you, but I could use a vat of coffee—”
“You’re a billionaire,” she interrupted.
Well, fuck. So much for the boy-next-door strategy.
“Ah.” I took a seat next to her on the couch and tried not to take it personally when she slid as far away as she could. “You Googled me.”
“My friend told me.” She waved her phone like evidence in a trial. “She said you’re the son of some big-shot investment banker. Niall Black, the owner of Blackguard Holding. Is that true?”
“Well, technically, shareholders own Blackguard. My family just happens to be the majority holders.” I ran a hand through my still-damp hair, which was already starting to curl into ringlets over my forehead. “It’s boring, actually. A lot of paperwork and stock chitchat, and—”
“Megan said you paid the entire bill last night at the club. Table service and everything for her whole bridal party.”
I shrugged. “I don’t really keep track of—”
“The ring.” She held up her hand, and there it was, the pretty piece of gold that matched the band on my hand. “How much did this cost?”
“I don’t know.”
Technically, that was true. I honestly didn’t remember buying the rings, so, sure, there was the possibility I purchased them at the same Elvis-run chapel where we’d apparently promised to love each other for eternity.
Then again, I had also purchased enough pretty baubles during other benders that I had a local jeweler on speed dial.
“Does it matter where we got it?” I said instead.
At that, Laney finally exploded. “Yes, it matters! I woke up with an incredibly beautiful ring on my finger, a husband who looks like you who apparently has a billion dollars—”
“Well, more like twenty-two, but that’s just my shares—”
“—and I don’t even know how I got here!”
By the time she was finished, her hands were flying all over the place, and her sheet was so tantalizingly close to falling from around breasts that I had to sit on my hands not to yank it the rest of the way.
Unfortunately, she caught it just in time and tugged the fabric back into place, covering even more than before.
Damn. So close.
“We’re legally married.” Laney started pacing in front of the couch.
“I found an actual marriage license on the desk over there.” She threw an elegant hand toward the little desk while the other pressed the sheet to her chest. “Oh, God. Oh God. We’re married, and you’re some billionaire playboy with a bedpost a mile high, and now I’m probably pregnant or infected with some horrible STI—”
“Oh, definitely not. I’m a rubber or die kind of guy. Plus, I get tested all the time—”
“And now I have to tell my friends what—” Unable to finish, she bent over the arm of the couch, face turning ashen.
“Laney.” I crossed to her in three strides, took her shoulders, and turned her to face me. “Look at me. Breathe, baby. Just breathe.”
Those green eyes speared right through my guts. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to help her.
“I can’t—” The hand on her chest clawed like she was trying to pull the air out. It wasn’t coming.
“Yes, you can, baby. Look at me.” I bent so we were eye level. “In, two three four. Hold your breath now. Good. I got you. Keep doing it while I count.”
We continued like that for several minutes, and though I could feel the rest of her body relax under my grip, her eyes still had that deer-in-the-headlights look.
“How did you—how do you know that I need to—” Her breath hitched before she could finish.
“I have a brother. In through your nose now,” I prompted, thumbs stroking her bare skin. “He has PTS. Now, out through your mouth. Come on, Laney, do it for me.”
We breathed together, though hers hitched continuously.
“I need my—I need my pills—” She could barely get the words out.
“Sit down.” I guided her to the couch, but didn’t take my hands off her when we got there. Couldn’t seem to make myself do it. “Keep breathing, baby.”
“Don’t”—she took another gasp— “call me that.”
I grinned as I massaged her upper arms. “Pick your poison, then. Honey? Dearest? Snookums? Or should we be traditional and go with Mrs. Black?”
Absolute wrong thing to say.
The moment “Mrs. Black” echoed through the room, her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Laney!” I caught her right before she pitched into the coffee table, instead guiding her onto my chest instead.
Now I was the one who couldn’t breathe properly. Something was happening with my chest. A constriction. A tightness I didn’t recognize.
Panic, some small voice in the back of my mind directed me. Panic, for the first time in my life, over a woman I barely knew.
“Laney.” I tapped her cheek. That’s what they did to people in movies, right? Were smelling salts still a thing? “Laney. Ariadne. Wake up for me, okay? Please, baby, I need you to wake up.”
Married to a stranger and now begging for the first time in my life, I was trying to do the right thing. But it was no good.
Faced with the prospect of being Mrs. Black—my Mrs. Black—my wife had gone and fainted. And I was completely at her mercy.