Chapter 12 Logan
LOGAN
We’d made it to the final night in one piece, thankfully.
Nearly everything on the maiden voyage had gone smoothly, accidental marriage not included.
The news from my home team about customer feedback and media reports had been overwhelmingly positive, so I could breathe again.
I was due to make a brief speech at the farewell champagne toast for the adults after the family dinner, thanking everyone for joining us on this extraordinary voyage and putting in a subtle plug for the rest of our cruise lines.
After all, these young families with children also had older parents who might enjoy our more staid voyages.
Not to mention, we had a whole array of packages of other destinations for the kid-friendly program.
Once everyone was gathered around me with stemware in hand, I grabbed the microphone and spoke from my heart about my love for ocean travel and my great joy of getting to share it with the group.
I raised my glass to hearty cheers. Dinner had been pretty wine-soaked, so everyone was feeling extra festive.
“And cheers to you,” a woman called out from the crowd. “Congratulations! What a wonderful surprise.”
“Thank you,” I smiled as I spoke. “This voyage has been wonderful in so many ways.”
I wished I could lock eyes with Nina because thanks to her, Noah had really turned a corner. But of course, she was with the rest of the kids hosting a farewell movie party in the activity center.
“No,” the woman laughed. “Not the trip, even though it was amazing. I’m talking about your marriage to Miss Nina! My daughter said your son Noah was talking about it this morning.”
I froze as a wave of overloud applause rippled through the group.
There was no way…
“Oh, I, that’s not,” I stuttered. I forced a smile on my face because I saw raised cameras pointed at me. I finally tipped my head to the crowd. “Thank you.”
“We love Miss Nina,” someone shouted out, and everyone laughed.
“She’s uh…she’s quite a woman,” I managed with a small nod, still wearing a fake grin.
I needed to get the hell out of the ballroom and into triage mode immediately.
I thought we’d be able to keep our little mistake under wraps until it could be annulled, but thanks to my son, I was now facing a PR nightmare.
Fuck.
I managed to pull it together to shake hands and small talk my way out of the room, but it was hard to keep from grimacing when I was also forced to accept hugs of congratulations for my “big news.”
There was no hiding it now. It was out and recorded for all the world to see. Time for major damage control.
I stormed down to the theater formulating a plan that made zero sense, but at the same time seemed to be the only way out of the mess.
The children were all mesmerized by animated ridiculousness on the big screen, so I strode over to where Nina was standing in the dark theater, talking to her colleagues.
“Mr. Ashford, hello,” Beth Greely said.
The junior staffer took a step backward like she was afraid of me.
Nina turned around and widened her eyes when she saw my expression. “Is everything okay? Noah’s in the front row with the rest of his gang, do you want me to go get him?”
For a moment, I forgot why I was there and strained to find his blond head in the front of the theater. My son now had a gang? My little loner had made friends?
I shook that off, reminding myself to focus on the issue at hand. “No, I need to speak to you. Now.”
I turned on my heel and walked out, expecting her to follow immediately. Instead, it took a few minutes for her to emerge.
“What’s with the drill sergeant stuff?” Nina frowned as she walked over to me. Thankfully, the grand lobby was empty.
“Everyone knows now,” I said through gritted teeth. “About our Nésion mistake.”
She grimaced. “I was afraid that might happen.”
“It seems Noah doesn’t have a great grasp of the idea of ‘private.’ Did you hear him telling the other kids?”
Nina shook her head. “A few kids overheard me talking with him when he gave me the marriage license, but I was hoping they wouldn’t manage to piece it together. I guess they told their parents?”
I snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, and one of them congratulated me after my farewell toast tonight, in front of a packed ballroom. I’m sure it’s already making the rounds on social media.”
Her eyes widened. “Already? I mean, you’re well-known, but you’re not like, royalty or anything, Logan.”
Was she trying to neg me in this critical moment?
“You clearly don’t understand the cruising community. They’re obsessed with the high seas and all the drama that happens out here. This is catnip for a certain sector, and if the media gets wind that the cruise line’s CEO had a drunken mistake during a child-centric cruise, I’ll be sunk.”
I started pacing, trying to psych myself up for the ridiculous plan I was about to pitch to her.
Dread trickled through me. Yes, the plan was ridiculous—but it was also the only option. And now I had to get her to see that.
“We need to play along,” I finally said. Nina’s face went white. “We’ve got no choice. We need to stay married until everything dies down.”
“What?” She shrieked, so loudly that I waited for people to run out of the theater to see if something was wrong.
“It’s the only way to keep everything on an even keel.”
“You’re not making any sense.” She looked more bewildered than upset.
“How is a sham marriage going to keep things steady? The status quo is for us to not be together. So shouldn’t we try to get our legal status to reflect that as quickly as we can?
It was a mistake, and it’ll be just a memory when we get back. ”
She realized as she said it that neither of us had many memories of the event itself, which was what had gotten us into this mess.
Now that she was just a few feet away, I was reminded how hard it was to focus when she was close.
“That’s not an option anymore,” I said in a tone that I hoped conveyed the seriousness of the situation. “The story of our marriage is out there now; we can’t make that go away. All we can do is try to control the way it spins.”
Nina wrapped her arms around herself. “What does that mean?”
“If we play happy couple, at least for the time being, then it looks like a feel-good story: couple finds love on a family-friendly cruise. Nothing shocking or scandalous, so it won’t hold the public’s attention for more than five minutes.”
“And if we don’t?” she asked.
“Then it becomes a scandal, and that keeps us in the public eye for a lot longer. Just picture it: the CEO of a new family-friendly cruise shacks up with an employee during the maiden voyage before promptly divorcing when they got back to port. People would eat that shit up.”
Nina cocked her head at me. “So we have to stay married just to avoid some gossip? Doesn’t that seem a little extreme?”
“It’s not just gossip. The consequences are a lot more concrete.
This is a family-friendly program. If word gets out that it’s not so family-friendly after all—if people start associating it with scandal and tabloid rags—then our booking numbers will fall off a cliff.
What do you think that’ll mean for the staff? ”
She’d been in this business long enough to know exactly what it meant, which was layoffs. I didn’t know how close she was to the rest of the crew, but she had to have made some friends on the voyage. Would she really be able to stomach the idea of potentially being the reason they lost their jobs?
Her expression shifted to fear.
“Hold on. Are you serious?” Nina asked.
“I don’t joke about business,” I replied. “A mistake like this wouldn’t be a huge deal on one of our younger, more party-oriented cruises, but not here. And especially not on the first voyage, when the world is watching and waiting for any sort of slip-up.”
I watched her process what I already knew was irrefutable fact. The shock and disbelief faded until she finally resigned to the truth of the situation.
“Fine,” she finally replied. “How long?”
“It’s not like I’ve done this before,” I began. “But I’m thinking at least a few—”
“Weeks?” Nina offered with hope in her voice.
“A few months,” I finished. “I’d say six months at least.”
She let her head drop back and heaved a sigh. “This was not on my bingo card.”
“No kidding,” I replied, though some tension left my shoulders when I saw she wasn’t going to argue anymore. For better or for worse, we were in this together. We needed to be on the same side. “Let’s figure out the parameters of everything.”
“Definitely,” she agreed. “For starters, what happens after we leave the boat? I was supposed to have a week to tidy up my life before reporting for duty as Noah’s nanny. But I’m guessing we can’t be seen leaving in different directions.”
“Yeah, that wouldn’t work,” I sighed. “But you don’t have to actually move in right away if there’s stuff you need to take care of.
Come home with us that first night, and take your time packing things up.
Your work won’t start for a week, as we discussed.
When we’re home, you’ll just be performing your nanny duties as outlined, but any time we’re out in public we need to appear as though we’re—”
“A big, happy family?” she suggested.
“That too. But I was going to say we need to appear as though we’re a couple.”
She tilted her head. “Okaaaay. What does that mean, exactly? You want me holding your hand and staring up at you with lovey-dovey eyes?”
I considered it and had a flashback to our night on Nésion. I knew exactly how it felt to have her doing those very things to me, and even though my memory was hazy, parts of the evening were crystal clear.
I knew how soft her skin was. How perfectly my palm fit on the curve of her hip. I also knew how it felt to press my lips to hers.
I cleared my throat and forced myself not to let my mind wander any further off course. Our night together was a hazy memory, but the aftershocks popped up every now and then, reminding me that we’d made magic between the sheets, and everywhere else in that suite.
“If you think you can pull it off without cracking up, go for it,” I finally offered.
She threw back her head and laughed. “Okay, I’ll try.” Once she got her giggles out, her expression softened. “We’ll make it work,” she assured me. “There’s no way that I want to let one stupid night sink this ship and all of the employees on it.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Any questions for me about how we’re going to run this?”
We both turned when we heard laughter and chatter heading our way. It was a group of parents from the cocktail party arriving early to pick up their children from the movie.
“And there’s the couple of the hour,” one of the tipsy moms in a sparkly dress shouted at us. “We were literally just talking about how cute y’all are!”
“I guess we’re on,” Nina whispered to me as they stumbled closer. “Opening night of our big show.”
I gave her a brisk nod and moved closer to slide my arm around her shoulders. She looked up at me and smiled so brightly I nearly believed it was genuine.
“We had no clue,” one of the other women sang out as the group came to a stumbling stop in front of us. “You really kept it under wraps, you sneaky lovebirds.”
Nina giggled. “It sure wasn’t easy. This guy is magnetic.”
She wrapped her arm around my waist and gave me a squeeze.
“We didn’t want anything to distract from the voyage, but it just got too hard resisting the pull between us,” I added. “I saw my chance on Nésion to make her my bride, and I grabbed it with both hands.”
I noticed that the two bleary-eyed men with them were staring at Nina, which was probably such a regular occurrence for her that it didn’t even register.
But I noticed. Even though she was my fake wife, I couldn’t help but feel protective of her. I cleared my throat loudly so they’d tear their eyes away and recognize that they were leering over another man’s wife.
Okay, maybe not exactly. But still. Their wives were literally right beside them, and it was rude to ogle.
“Wow,” the taller woman sighed. She shot a look at her husband to force him out of his trance, then smiled warmly at Nina. “That’s really romantic. You’re one lucky lady.”
Nina rested her head against my chest like she was a blushing bride. “Thanks. I happen to agree.”
“We should leave them alone,” one of the guys slurred. “It’s their honeymoon, they got important business to take care of. You know what I mean? The wink-wink, nudge-nudge stuff.” He paused. “I’m talking about bedroom business.”
“Oh my God, Michael, I can’t take you anywhere,” the woman groaned as she tried to pull him away. “Sorry about that. Go have fun, you two!”
We watched them stumble toward the theater doors.
“And so it begins,” Nina mused. “Our own little bit of theater.”
Absolutely. Because that was all it was—theater and nothing more. No matter how right it felt to have her in my arms.