Chapter 16
MANDY
The walk back to my hotel had been a lot more enjoyable than I expected.
Briggs had been quiet for most of it, but it was a different kind of quiet than the stiff, attorney silence I’d come to associate with him.
It was the kind of quiet where he was actually listening while I told him a story about a client who wanted to have her wedding in complete darkness.
“This is me,” I said at the entrance of my hotel.
“Are you flying out tomorrow?” he asked.
“No. I was thinking maybe we could extend our stay a day or two.”
“We?”
I shrugged, suddenly feeling insecure. “I mean, we do need to sell this thing. We can say we’re on our honeymoon.”
“At different hotels.”
I laughed. “No one needs to know that.”
“I have work.”
“I’m your work,” I reminded him. “You need me to sign the growing number of contracts. So, being here is work.”
He thought about it. “Fine. Yeah. I can stay another day but only if you give me my pen back.”
“Sheesh, you’re very serious about your pen. Worse than the bank lady.”
“Sentimental. And expensive.”
I opened my purse and pulled it out, holding it in front of him. “I’m going to text you tomorrow. We’re going to do something that puts us in public so people see us. Do not come at me with another contract, got it? I will take your pen and toss it in the Pacific.”
“We’re a long way from the Pacific.”
“I live very close to the beach. I will toss it.”
He sighed. “Fine. No contracts. For now but at some point, you do need to sign the business one.”
“I know. And I will. As long as you keep up your end of the bargain.”
“Fine.”
I handed him the pen and saw true relief wash over him. He tucked it into his jacket. “Goodnight.”
“Night, Husband.”
“Stop calling me that,” he said as he walked away.
I grinned. It was going to be fun teasing him.
I let myself into my room, slipped off my heels, and sat on the edge of the bed staring at my phone. The selfie I’d taken at the end of the night was still in my camera roll. I pulled it up.
It was a good photo. Better than I expected, honestly. Briggs had actually smiled. My hair had gone a little loose in the Vegas breeze and I was leaning slightly into him like it was the most natural thing in the world.
We looked like a couple.
I edited it quickly. Brightened it just a touch, softened the shadows. Added a light filter that warmed the whole thing up. Then I sat there with my thumb hovering over the share button.
This was the moment. Once I posted this, we were doing this for real.
No taking it back, no quiet annulment and pretending Las Vegas never happened.
I was officially declaring to the internet, my clients, and to everyone who followed my work and my life that Briggs Blackwell and I were in love and very happily married.
I took a breath and typed the caption.
Turns out the best wedding I’ve ever attended was my own. The secret’s been impossible to keep. I am the luckiest girl in the world.
I hit share before I could talk myself out of it. Then I set my phone face down on the nightstand, changed into my pajamas, and watched twenty minutes of a sitcom I’d already seen three times before my eyes gave up entirely.
The notifications woke me before my alarm did.
I lay there listening to my phone buzz steadily on the nightstand.
I told myself to ignore it. Apparently, I had managed to ignore it all night.
That was the exhaustion that had me sleeping like a baby.
Curiosity overruled good sense and I picked it up.
The post had north of twelve thousand likes. I stared at that number for a full ten seconds.
The comments were pouring in, a waterfall of hearts and exclamation points and screaming emojis. Several of my clients had commented. Vendors I worked with regularly. A few bridal bloggers who had reposted the photo to their own stories with captions about romance and real love.
Real love.
I put the phone down and looked at the ceiling. Guilt made my stomach sour. I was a fraud. My career was all about making other people’s real love look beautiful. And I couldn’t get that real love myself, so I faked it. What happened when people figured out I was full of shit?
They would turn on you so fast, a voice in the back of my head said helpfully.
I sat up, shoved my hair out of my face, and told the voice to mind its business. The marriage had already happened. I had no choice but to keep the charade going. No one was going to find out. No one had to know it wasn’t exactly a love connection.
Fake it till you make it.
I went through the comments more carefully, responding to a few. Professional ones, mostly. I had to engage. That was Social Media 101. I liked a few hundred things and thanked the people I knew personally.
Then I switched from my post to my tagged photos and that’s when I saw the videos.
There were two that kept appearing. People had tagged me over and over in both of them and based on the view counts they had taken on a life entirely their own. I clicked on the first one.
I had seen this video before. It featured a small bar with a small stage.
It was a little place called Dirty Shirley’s, with a karaoke setup with one of those old-school screens showing the lyrics.
The video was vertical and a little shaky, clearly shot by someone in the audience.
Someone that might have been as drunk as we were.
The piano introduction made my stomach flip over. Wise men say, only fools rush in…
And there was Briggs. Not the stone-cold attorney. That was Briggs the Viking. A man. A very hot man.
Briggs was standing at the microphone with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, one hand loosely holding the mic and the other holding a drink.
His hair had come loose from whatever product kept it in place.
He was grinning. The drunken grin was very boyish and yet somehow ridiculously sexy. He looked ten years younger.
And he was looking directly at me.
I watched myself on screen, sitting at a small table with a drink in my hand, laughing and clapping. Even through someone else’s slightly shaky phone camera I looked happy. I looked like a woman who was having the best night of her life.
I played it again.
Then again.
He got to the chorus and the grin softened into something else. He was looking at me the way Victoria’s groom had looked at her when she appeared at the end of the aisle in the chapel. Like there was no one else in the world.
Take my hand, take my whole life too…
I paused the video.
I’d spent the last week being exasperated by Briggs Blackwell. He irritated me. Pissed me off like no other person had been able to. Just thinking of his name had me grinding my molars.
But this man on screen? This man was not a problem. This man was the reason a perfectly sensible woman with a fully functional brain had apparently agreed to marry someone she barely knew in an Elvis chapel in Las Vegas.
How did I end up married to him? That was the question I’d been asking myself since I found a wedding ring on my bathroom counter.
I knew how I married the man doing his best to sound like Elvis. The man in that video? I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.
Which was a terrifying thought.
If only there was some way to bring out the man in that video.
I chewed on my bottom lip, thinking. He was in there. I’d seen the evidence with my own two eyes. I couldn’t remember meeting that guy, but the internet didn’t lie. Okay, it lied all day every day, but that video was authentic.
Whatever armor he wore on the daily hid the man who sang Elvis at a karaoke bar. That was the man I wanted to meet—while I was sober preferably.
I clicked on the second tagged video, anxious to see what other songs he’d serenaded me with.
“Oh no,” I groaned.
It wasn’t Briggs at the mic. It was me. I heard myself sing all the time when I was in the shower or in the car. I didn’t need to see it in living color and neither did millions of people. But that was exactly what happened.
I made a sound like a dying animal. Or maybe a horny one trying to produce some kind of mating call.
“Oh good Lord. Who let me do that?”
I wasn’t even singing the right words. Singing was a very generous term. Screeching was more accurate. The person filming was clearly trying very hard not to laugh based on the snorting and phone shaking.
And through every single off-key catastrophic second of it, Briggs was watching me like I was the only person in the room.
I paused it again on his face. His chin was resting on one hand and his elbow was on the table and he was just looking at me. Soft. Open. The kind of look that didn’t have any strategy or armor in it at all. He was looking at me like a man in love.
And I knew that couldn’t be right. There was no way.
No man had ever looked at me like that.
I had watched grooms tear up when their brides appeared in the doorway. I’d witnessed men look at women like they were the whole world. I was professionally fluent in what love looked like.
I was certain that’s what I saw in Briggs’s expression.
How?
Why?
When did that happen?
I scrolled through the comments on the second video. The reaction was somehow even more enthusiastic than the first one. People were talking about how Briggs hadn’t taken his eyes off me once. People commenting they wanted their man to look at them like that.
The internet believed we were in love.
The problem was that I needed the man from the video, and what I had was the man with the Montblanc pen and the endless contracts.
I had an idea. I picked up my phone, scrolled to Briggs’s number, and opened a text.
Meet me at eight tonight. Dirty Shirley’s.
I hit send before I could overthink it. Almost ten minutes later he finally replied.
Is there a reason we’re going to a karaoke bar?
I smiled.
Non-negotiable, I typed back. Your wife wants to go.
I waited. Would he shut me down? I was going to assume he was sober at nine in the morning. Drunk Briggs would say yes. Sober Briggs would want to put a contract in place about a night out.
He replied. Fine. But I’m not singing.
I set my phone down on the nightstand and went to make coffee, smiling to myself.
We’d see about that.