Chapter 9 - Simon
My phone starts ringing before the sun rises, waking me from a good dream.
I groan, rolling over, still half asleep, and reach for it.
I have more of a goal of shutting it up than of answering it.
Squinting as my eyes adjust to the rude awakening, I see Bardil’s name across the screen. Dammit. I have to answer.
“What?” I snap, never one for enjoying being woken up before I’m ready. Even if I do get up early, this is too early.
“Morning, did I wake you?” Bardil says, out of breath.
“Are you fucking running? It’s not even five yet,” I grumble, glancing at my watch.
“The wife prefers to run in the morning, so we’re out on a jog.”
“Ok, sounds fucking great. What do you want?” I sigh, sitting up and throwing my legs over the side of the bed because I’m never going to manage to get back to sleep anyway. I guess today will be an earlier start than usual.
“I heard something, and I’m not going to lie, it was a shock,” Bardil says testily.
“Spit it out, man, I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“Are you married, Simon?”
The question wakes me up fully.
“Uh…”
“Have you been hiding a secret wife from the family?” I hear Nikita laughing in the background.
“Is she listening?” I huff.
“You know Nikita and I have no secrets, man. Just spit it out. Have you got a secret wife or not? You’ve been very quiet lately,” he says.
I sigh heavily. “How did you find out?”
“You set up an entire company just to hire her. It’s hard to keep that a secret when you used family resources and hired her under her married name,” he chuckles.
Rubbing my hand over my face, I groan loudly.
“Any other secrets we should know about?” Bardil teases.
Yeah, one. I’m trying to exact revenge against Jaco Marcas.
“No, and I wasn’t exactly ready for you to find out about her yet,” I mutter.
“Ok, we know we have, so we want to meet her. Family dinner on Friday. Seven at Marlen’s place.”
“Marlen knows?” I groan.
“Come on, man, everyone knows. You think we weren’t going to place bets on whether or not it’s true?” he chuckles.
“I don’t think we’re ready for a family dinner yet, though. You guys are a lot to handle and she…”
“Dude, what are you hiding? Is she someone you shouldn’t be with? Is this going to piss Marlen off?”
Grumbling to myself, I realize that if I don’t agree to the family dinner, Bardil is going to get more suspicious and start investigating me.
He might find out about my revenge plan, and I have taken extreme measures to keep my family out of that whole project in order to keep them safe from my personal shit. Dinner it is. Unfortunately.
“Fine,” I growl. “Friday. Seven. Marlen’s place,” I snap.
“Can’t wait to meet her!” Nikita shouts.
“Dude, I can’t believe you kept me on speaker this whole time,” I moan.
“See you soon, brother!” Bardil says, laughing as he hangs up.
I stand next to my bed starting at the rumpled sheets with my hand halfway pushed through my hair and a scowl on my face. Shit.
Blair is not going to like this one bit. And if I don’t convince my family that this is a genuine marriage between two people who both wanted it… fuck sakes. They will have a thousand questions about how and why it happened, and there will be no way to hide my plot against Jaco.
I need Blair to play the role of a perfect wife in front of my family. But things between us aren’t exactly that great at the moment, so I can’t see this going down that well.
My head is spinning with possible solutions to try and make this work, but each one I come up with isn’t good enough.
Heading downstairs, I decide I need coffee, and maybe I need to jump into the ocean to properly wake myself up and restart this day on a more positive note.
Then, hopefully, after that, I’ll have an idea of how to address this problem.
And Blair should be up in the next hour or two as well.
I won’t delay asking her. Better to get it over and done with so she can be angry with me now and maybe have calmed down by Friday’s dinner.
Dammit. This does not fit well into my plans. But it’s fine. I’ll work it out.
***
The ocean water is refreshing. I stay floating in the clear salted waves for twenty minutes while I meditate on how to tell Blair.
My skin soaks up the magnesium from the water and helps relax my body.
When I step out of the ocean and onto the white sand, I look up and see Blair standing on the deck holding a cup of coffee.
Lifting my hand, I wave. She tilts her head to the side, but the halfhearted wave she sends back at me is only a brush of her fingers through the air.
Rubbing the towel over my hair, I walk toward her with a smile on my face.
“How did you sleep?” I ask when I’m close enough.
“Fine, thanks.”
“The water’s great. I should start every morning with a soak in the ocean,” I remark, trying to set the mood before I broach the tense subject.
She sips her coffee, and I notice how her eyes drift over my body. It makes me smirk. She is terrible at hiding it when she checks me out. She might not like me very much, but she’s attracted to me whether she wants to be or not.
“Listen, Blair, we have a dinner with my family on Friday night,” I say casually. “At seven,” I add, watching her expression to try to read her reaction.
“Ok,” she says skeptically. “And they know about you forcing me to marry you?” she asks with a challenging tone.
“They know we are married, yes.”
“That’s not what I asked, and you know it.”
I smirk. She’s sharp-witted. It’s something I rather enjoy about her. I love how one moment she seems shy and timid, but as soon as you cross a line, she’s fiery.
“I need them to think we are happily married,” I sigh. “What are the chances of that happening?” I ask with one brow raised.
“Why do you need them to think we are happily married? What difference does it make?”
“Because I don’t want them to know about Jaco Marcas and my vendetta against him. If they know I forced you into marriage, they will ask questions, and I don’t want questions.”
“Mm. You need me to keep your secret,” she says, her eyes narrowing and a dark expression crossing her face.
She tilts her head to the side and scrunches her nose thoughtfully. I love how she looks when she’s just woken up. A little messy. Her hair wild over her shoulders. Her eyes a little red, and her lips soft and slightly pouted.
“I think that the possibilities of your family believing our marriage is real depend on how well negotiations go.” She says critically.
“Negotiations?” I ask, confused.
“I can pretend to be a happy wife, in love with my new husband, whom I obviously adore, if you can agree that after the dinner you will let me do whatever I want.”
“You need to be more specific,” I growl, not liking the sound of do whatever I want.
She smirks. “Freedom, Simon. Without you trying to control every single thing I do and every place I go,” she says.
“But you will remain married to me?”
“Yes, for now.”
I grunt in annoyance. She’s pushing my buttons, and by the look on her face, she knows it.
Unfortunately, I am backed into a corner with this.
I need the dinner to go well. It’s more important than this future battle I am going to have with her regarding our marriage and convincing her to stay in it.
Although it doesn’t feel more important.
“Fine. I accept the terms of your deal.” My voice comes out gruff and agitated.
“Good. Then I’ll be the perfect wife on Friday night at seven,” she smiles, spinning away from me and walking back into the house.
***
It’s eight-thirty on Friday night, and my family is seated around the dinner table at Marlen’s house.
Blair is next to me, leaning slightly toward me with my hand on her lap and her fingers intertwined between mine.
She placed my hand there. She’s been very affectionate since we arrived here, and it’s making it difficult for me to concentrate.
“So, how did you two meet then?” Bardil asks, throwing me a challenging stare.
So far, she has been answering questions about her background and handling my brothers’ underhanded interrogation quite well.
I glance at Blair, who smiles at me. She grins and answers for both of us. “I literally walked into him on the street. He had an iced coffee in his hand, and I knocked it all over him. I felt terrible.”
“She insisted on buying me a new shirt,” I chuckle.
“And he insisted that I help him choose it. So, we ended up going shopping together,” she adds.
“You went shopping with a stranger?” Marlen asks Blair.
“Technically yes, but it didn’t feel like he was a stranger. I don’t really know how to explain it, and it probably sounds silly to say out loud, but it was one of those moments where you just know…”
I chuckle. “It was the same for me. I saw her, and right away I just knew.”
She rests her head briefly on my shoulder, her eyes full of warmth and her smile genuine.
“He asked me to dinner after shopping.”
“And from then on, I couldn’t stay away from her. We got married quite quickly. I realized that to anyone looking in from the outside, it looked completely nuts. Like we were moving too fast…” I speak.
“So, you kept it a secret,” Bardil comments.
“We wanted to enjoy it in private for a while,” I say.
She bites her bottom lip, her cheeks flushing pink.
“Why did you start that company, though?” Bardil asks.
“I didn’t like the idea of her being so exposed working at the bookstore where she used to work. After she found out the truth about who I am, my connections, my family…I just wanted to keep her close and safe,” I explain.
“It doesn’t bother you that he’s part of the mafia?” Marlen asks, his eyes piercing into Blair.
“It was a bit of a shock at first. I’ve never really had experience with stuff like that. But at the end of the day, I don’t really care about what he does…it’s about who he is as a person,” she replies. “I quite like who he is as a person,” she grins.
“I don’t like the fact that we never got to have a big wedding!” Talia complains. “I think you have to make it up to us by planning properly and redoing the vows in front of the family,” she grumbles.
“It’s not a bad idea. I guess we can do that later on,” I say, glancing at Blair.
“I don’t mind having a proper wedding. It was all quite rushed. It would be nice to wear a pretty dress and all that,” she agrees.
Talia and Blair start discussing wedding ideas, and the guys ask me a few more questions to settle their curiosity. By the time dinner is finished and we’re all standing outside having a drink, things seem to be settling down, and they appear to have accepted the whole thing.
Bardil is talking to Blair. My eyes keep drifting toward them even though Marlen and I are discussing some work stuff I’ve been neglecting.
Blair looks so relaxed with Bardil. And when she spoke to Marlen earlier, she looked really relaxed around him, too. She laughs easily and doesn’t have any of that skittishness she has with me, where she looks like she wants to run away if I reach for her.
For some reason, seeing her so relaxed around my brothers is really getting to me.
Why don’t I get to experience this side of her?
Why is she so at ease with them but awkward around me?
“And?” Marlen says, sounding annoyed.
“Huh?” I ask, turning back toward him.
“Were you listening to anything I just said?” he huffs.
“Um, yes, yes, I was. The ledgers…” I say the last thing I remember him mentioning.
“Bloody hell. That was how the whole conversation started. You really are smitten, aren’t you, youthful,” he says, shaking his head.
I grin, relieved that he is taking that way.
“I guess I am,” I agree.
“I’m happy for both of you. She seems like a nice girl,” he says, slapping my arm. “We expect her to attend all of the family dinners from now on?” he asks, raising his brows at me.
“We’ll be there,” I chuckle. My family took to her so easily. She has that effect on people, though. She certainly had that effect on me. I suspect that only part of this was an act for her, the part where she had to be my wife. The rest was just her being herself.
I didn’t expect everything to go so smoothly, but it’s definitely a relief.
***
Blair kept her promise. She was the sweetest, most loving wife I could have asked for all night at dinner.
She did it so well that there were even times when I was starting to believe she actually liked me.
I should be thrilled as we drive back toward our home, but I’m not.
I can’t get the image of her smile out of my head when she was talking to my brother.
I can’t understand why or how she can be so friendly and flirtatious with him, yet so off toward me.
By the time we get home, and I close the front door behind us, I am struggling to keep the annoyance in check. The last thing I want to do is blow up at her, so I’m doing my best to stay calm. It’s not going very well, though.