Chapter 10 Logan
LOGAN
Icould finally exhale again now that I was sure news of my drunken marriage hadn’t gotten out.
There was always the possibility that someone could’ve recognized me at the chapel and made some money selling the story, but my Google alerts were only turning up mentions of how amazing our maiden voyage had been going. Forty-eight hours of business as usual.
Good.
Nina and I seemed to have each decided that polite distance was the way to navigate our way through the aftershocks. Because I certainly was having them, despite how wasted I had been that night.
Very few of my memories were concrete, but the one part that was seared in my brain?
Kissing Nina.
Kissing every inch of her perfect body. Whenever a thought of it flitted into my consciousness, I was overcome by the drive to make it happen again. Obviously, that wasn’t possible, so I forced myself to ignore those lips every time she smiled at me.
“Daddy!”
Noah ran over to me with his eyes shining and Ariel tumbling along behind him.
“What’s up, buddy? Ready for breakfast?” I knelt down to give him my full attention—something Nina had suggested, and of course it was already having a positive impact. Ariel stalked closer and went to town on my shoelace.
Noah was dressed for the day, with his backpack full of whatever he decided was required for his “work.” He shrugged it off, set it on the ground in front of him, and started digging through it, removing random Legos and action figures until he pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“What is this?” He held it out to me. “Because it looks like the same thing Uncle Harry and Aunt Gwen have on their wall. Their driver’s license.”
I frowned at him as I took the paper. “Hm?”
My heart sank when I saw what it actually was. “Noey, where did you find this?”
“In there.”
He pointed to my bedroom, the one spot where I thought the dreaded marriage license would be safe from little curious eyes. But surely he couldn’t read the fancy script?
“I see your name, and Miss Nina’s name. Does that mean you guys have a driver’s license together, like Uncle Harry and Aunt Gwen?”
I knew my son was precocious, but I was shocked that he was drawing a parallel between this marriage license and the framed one hanging on the wall at my brother’s house. I debated how to navigate his discovery.
I contemplated outright lying about it. He was six and couldn’t read what the license actually said.
But doing that could come back to bite me in the ass.
Besides, Noah had gone through so much, losing his mother.
I finally felt like we were building something together, and I didn’t want to betray his trust.
So I had to give him a version of the truth.
“Bud, this is a marriage license, not a driver’s license.”
His eyes went wide, and he broke into a giant grin. “You married Miss Nina? All of my cruiser friends are going to be so jealous when I tell them.”
Alarm bells. That absolutely could not happen.
I had to find a way to rectify this so that we could go through with our plan to get the marriage annulled on the downlow.
But at the same time, I loathed telling Noah that he needed to lie or hide it from everyone.
There was no way I wanted my son to think that keeping secrets for grown-ups was a good idea.
I grasped his shoulders gently and waited for him to look at my face.
“Miss Nina and my marriage license isn’t like Uncle Harry and Aunt Gwen’s.”
He blinked at me, curious and confused. “It’s not?”
“No.” I hedged, racking my brain for an explanation. “It’s a special kind of practice marriage…to make sure that we all like it before making it official.”
“Oh. Like Ariel.” His smile dimmed a little as he processed that both his kitten and nanny could disappear from his life. “But why wouldn’t we like it?”
Pull up a chair, son, and let me tell you about all of the ways Nina Reyes is wrong for me.
“It’s a big change, Noey. We need time to adjust and make sure that it’s going to work out for all of us, including you.”
He went quiet and looked down at the kitten. “What happens if it goes bad?”
My heart pinched at his worst-case scenario assumption.
I ran my hand over the top of his head. “Then we’ll have a conversation and agree to just be good friends.”
“But if it goes good, will you keep your driver’s license?”
“Marriage license,” I corrected. “And, yeah, if we all agreed, I suppose we would.”
“Yay!” He jumped up and down, clapping. I felt that pinch in my chest again. I wished things were that simple. “I like Miss Nina. She’s fun.”
“Oh yeah? What do you like about her?” A part of me was desperate to shift the subject away from Nina and our marriage, but the question was out of my mouth before I could stop myself.
His eyes lit up, just like they always used to when he got excited about something.
I missed those happy, babbling lectures he used to give about his favorite toy, his favorite TV show, his favorite cartoon character.
If he was willing to wax on about Nina, I was more than willing to listen.
He still had grumpy days, when he’d shut down and only offer single-word answers, and that made moments like this all the more precious.
“Well, Miss Nina taught me how to take care of Ariel!” Noah reached down to pick up the kitten, who turned to stretchy taffy in his little hands.
He cradled her to his chest and the kitten started purring.
“And she’s a good draw-er. She lets me use the fancy markers, because she says I’m extra careful.
She’s silly, too! She does funny dances with us. ”
I smiled. That tracked.
“And she looks like a princess,” he said in an awed voice. “I think she’s the prettiest lady in the world.”
I cleared my throat. That made two of us, bud.
“I’m glad to hear that you like her so much. You have to remember that Miss Nina and I need to make sure we like being married. If not, we might decide to tear up the license.”
“No! You can’t, Daddy!”
I could see him already starting to tense up. I reached over to rub his back, to center him in the current conversation instead of allowing him to catastrophize the future in his imagination.
Another Nina tip.
“We’ll figure it out, Noey. Don’t worry.” I bit my lip, still rubbing his back. “For now, though, Miss Nina and I want to try out being married in private, so it would be best if you didn’t tell your cruiser friends.”
His expression remained troubled. “Why?”
“You know how usually when people get married, they have a big party?”
He nodded. “Yup, like Uncle Harry and Aunt Gwen!”
“Exactly,” I nodded. “Well, Miss Nina and I didn’t have a wedding yet, because we want to make sure that being married to each other is the right thing for us. So for right now, it’s private, just for the three of us to know.”
I was digging a hole that just kept getting deeper and deeper. I was feeding into a delusion that there was a chance Nina and I would end up together. But it was keeping him calm in the moment, and Noah would have all of the distractions on our voyage to keep him from dwelling on the possibility.
Hell, there was a chance he’d totally forget about it.
Noah was looking down at the marriage license.
“Does that make sense?” I asked him.
He nodded, not tearing his eyes from the document.
“Can I talk to Miss Nina about it?”
I weighed the question before responding.
“Maybe a little, but not when anyone is around. When you’re at the Club, you need to focus on your activities and your friends, not chatting with Miss Nina.”
“Okay. But she’s really fun to talk to.”
I smiled at him. “You’re right. She is.”
Yeah, I knew firsthand that there were plenty of ways to have fun with Nina.
“Here,” Noah said.
He held out the certificate reluctantly.
I smiled at him as I took it. “Thank you. I’m going to put it away, then we can go down to breakfast.”
I checked the time as I walked back to my suite. We were now running fifteen minutes late, which made me instinctively bristle. But I reminded myself that Nina was right, and I’d been too strict trying to bring normalcy to Noah’s life. Small deviations from his schedule were fine.
I was coming to realize that Nina was right about plenty when it came to Noah.
The marriage might be fake, but the benefits of having her in our lives were very real.
Now all we had to do was survive the rest of the cruise without word of our mistake leaking, and we’d be fine.
“We need to get moving, bud,” I said as Noah pulled more from his backpack. I wondered what other sorts of contraband he had in it. “Pack it up, please.”
He nodded and shoved a sketchpad I’d never seen before into the pack. He’d always enjoyed drawing, but this trip had sent his love of art into overdrive.
We set off for the main dining room.
“So when we get back to port, Miss Nina will be coming home with us?” Noah asked as he skipped beside me. His tone was excited—louder than I’d like it to be.
I cleared my throat and glanced around the hall even though I knew there was no chance anyone was near. Still, I had to find a way to redirect Noah’s questions without adding fuel to the marriage fire.
“Noey,” I began. “Remember what we just talked about? That this is just between the three of us?”
I was inching closer to telling him to keep secrets.
“Uh-huh!”
“Well, that means we need to, uh, not talk about it outside of our cabin. We can say everything we want when we’re in our rooms, but once we step outside, we shouldn’t talk about that, okay? It’s private—just for us.”
“Okay!”
I had a feeling that he wasn’t processing what I was telling him, and my stomach tensed. Loose lips sunk ships, and in this case, Noah spilling the news about our accidental marriage could sink our entire fleet. The future of Ashford Cruises rested on my son’s tiny shoulders.
We arrived at the busy dining room, and as usual, I was greeted by smiles, handshakes, and compliments from our cruisers. Being very present was part of the deal on launch cruises. My introverted nature had to take a backseat while Showman Logan took over.
Having Noah along was an added benefit today, now that he seemed to be back to the previous version of himself—the sunny, happy-go-lucky boy who was delighted to welcome adventures.
I had a feeling I knew exactly why his mood was so bubbly, and it made me preemptively worried.
He’d dealt with so much change over the last few months, and now this Nina-shaped monkey wrench was yet another hurdle I’d have to help him get past. I just hoped he wouldn’t be brought low again when the inevitable dissolution of marriage came through.
I was counting on Nina giving me some talking points to help soften the blow.
But I could already tell he wasn’t going to take it well.
Noah hopped into his seat at our table. “Let’s eat fast! I wanna get to the Kids’ Club so I can talk to Miss Nina about,” he stopped talking to glance around, then lowered his voice, “the thingy. You know what I mean, right?”
Noah wiggled his eyebrows at me, and I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been so worried about him accidentally spilling the news.
I took my seat beside him. “Yes, I do know what you mean. But remember what we just talked about, on the way down to breakfast? About our cabin?”
We were interrupted when a server came over to deliver Noah’s usual orange juice. Noah grinned up at him. “I want strawberry Danish, please! And chocolate babka!”
The server chuckled and shot a look at me. “Is that okay with you, Mr. Ashford?”
“That’s a lot of sugar, buddy,” I cautioned.
“But it’s vacation,” he whined. “You said the rules are different, and I can have as much fun as I want, no matter what.”
I had said that, in a moment of desperation when he was breaking down the night before the trip. It was hard to pump the brakes now that we were in the middle of it, even though I could already hear my housekeeper, Josie, scolding me for encouraging bad eating habits.
“Fine, but once we get home, you’re going back to healthy stuff, okay? You’ll have to eat whatever Josie makes.”
The server gave a nod. “Good compromise. Strawberry Danish and babka, coming right up! And for you, sir?”
My stomach was macramé at this point. “Just coffee, thank you.”
“You can have some of mine,” Noah offered.
I smiled at my son. This was the child I knew. Sweet, generous, loving.
Deep down I knew that I had Nina to thank for a lot of the shift.
An older couple I recognized from the opening night party stopped by our table. They’d brought their son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter along, and they were the exact type of passengers I knew I could make repeat cruisers on our other vessels, so I mustered up my brightest smile.
“Mr. and Mrs. Crosby, good morning. How are you enjoying the journey so far?” I asked.
“Oh, everything is perfect,” the woman answered. She glanced down at Noah. “Are you having fun, young man?”
He stopped messing with sugar packets to answer her, beaming. “Yes, because good surprises are happening!”
His eyes slid to me, and my heart sank when I saw the glee in his expression.
“Oh? And what sort of surprises?” the woman played along good naturedly.
“Uh, Noah’s talking about some of the exciting activities we have planned in the Kids’ Club. There’s going to be even more cupcake fun in the kitchen coming up. And some art projects as well.”
“And other stuff,” Noah added, rocking back and forth manically.
I ground my teeth together.
“Well, our granddaughter Madison is having a wonderful time, and I bet she’ll tell us all about the fun you’re planning.”
“Maybe,” Noah said mysteriously. “But sometimes special surprises are just for three people. Right, Daddy?”
I was absolutely screwed.
“I’m sure Madison will have plenty of exciting stories for you,” I replied, ignoring my vibrating son.
There was no way Noah was going to be able to hold onto news this big. But still, I had to try.
We watched the couple walk away, and the moment they were out of earshot, I leaned closer to Noah to whisper in his ear.
“Bud, look at me,” I said in a low voice.
He stopped wiggling to take me in with wide eyes. He could probably tell by my expression that I meant business.
“Cabin only. No hints about the license, or jokes, or anything, okay?”
“I know,” he said innocently. “I’m good at following the rules.”
I gave him a nod, but my heart sank when he started singing Nina and Daddy, sitting in a tree…