Chapter 7
No matter what, accidentally finding myself married in Vegas, for the third freaking time, sucked.
I cleaned myself up. Sloan cleaned himself up. We both got some Tylenol and fluids on board, so the hangovers subsided a little. Then Sloan and I did what two people do when they wake up married and want to avoid reality a bit longer—we checked out of the hotel before going off to find breakfast.
While he settled up with the front desk, I checked in once more with Angela and Emily. I didn”t mention my situation, and I sure as hell didn”t offer to call. Nope, I just slipped my phone in my purse and pretended it didn”t exist.
Then Sloan found us a restaurant, and I walk-of-shamed my way through the buffet line before plopping my ass down at a table to wait for him.
I added a pat of butter to my plate, smearing it to cover the entire top pancake before adding a touch of syrup. Then I pressed my fingertips against my temples to relieve the residual headache.
It didn”t work because that wasn”t a hangover cure.
Even more super sucky? If I knew myself, and I knew myself, those tears I dreaded were due to fall soon.
”Maya Mitchell, don”t you cry,” I said to myself as I blinked back a crap ton of wet. Not when it would only make the headache worse…and make my eyes puffy…and draw attention to me. I wanted zero of those things.
The plate in my new husband”s hands landed on the table with a thunk that sounded like a thunderclap to my aching brain.
Of course, it didn”t lightly clink. The plates at this buffet weren”t glass; that would be entirely too good for two idiots who got drunk and got married. We deserved to eat our breakfast off of loud restaurant melamine.
Sloan sat across from me.
”Maya,” he said my name like an apology. He shifted a bit in his chair. ”It”s… uh?—”
”Where did you find French toast?” I asked—okay, it sounded like an accusation, and that wasn”t at all what I meant. I closed my eyes, reset, opened them, and said, ”I didn”t see any when I went through.”
His French toast looked way more appetizing than my pancakes.
He subtly pointed over my shoulder with his fork. My gaze slipped over to the buffet where, yep, I’d missed the French toast bar.
”Oh.” I hiccuped. Still, I refused to all-out cry. I was a strong-ass, independent woman, dammit. ”I didn”t go that way.”
Sloan opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then he cleared his throat and forked his toast. I understood he was likely cautious with words after the drama I’d tossed around when we’d woken up.
Betcha he seriously regretted his inebriated choices as well, given how he kept looking at me across the table like I was a bomb that might explode.
”Do you want some?” He totally offered me a bite of his French toast served up on the tines of his fork.
Time sort of stopped spinning in the right direction, and it felt like everything in the room paused. Everything but his fork lifted as an offering and his eyelids blinking over his brown eyes.
I may as well have been Alice falling into the rabbit hole of Wonderland with no control over anything.
And that was it.
That tossed me right over the edge into the land of tears.
One led the way down my cheek, and then another took off after.
Seriously, I tried to stop them, but between the tears, the hiccups, and the fact that I had pancakes when I really wanted French toast—it was basically a free-for-all dance party in my tear ducts.
”Hey.” He set down his fork. And, dammit, he had the look of a guy who was going to do something sweet and try to comfort me. Which, for the record, would make things that much worse. With some flannel-wrapped comfort, the tears would really roll.
”I just…need…a…” I did my very best to rein in my emotions. ”… second.” I waved him away while I shoved all those heavy feelings deep, deep down.
There. Much better.
”You”re handling this so much better than me.” For a first-timer, this whole sitch was entirely too easy for him.
”I have an idea,” he said, and, honestly, I didn”t totally dig the way he said that because some kind of echo in my memory flitted through. A memory where he said that same thing, and then his mouth was on my navel, his teeth scraping along my belly button, down to?—
I squirmed in my chair. I did. It happened.
The nerves along my abdomen purred at an inappropriate-for-breakfast memory.
”Let”s just figure out what comes next.” He lifted a forkful of eggs to his mouth. ”That always makes me feel better when shit goes sideways.”
Eating eggs was the least sexy food a person could eat. No matter what, eggs weren”t an attractive food. And yet… I didn”t mind Sloan and his eggs.
They weren”t sexy, for sure. But they did nothing to diminish his hotness quotient at all—something truly surprising and definitely worth noting.
”You ready to sort everything?” he asked, oblivious to the amount of hot guy energy he tossed around just sitting there eating.
”Everything?” I heard myself ask, pulling myself out of the watching-him-eat trance. Surely, he couldn”t mean everything.
Somewhere deep in the dregs of my memory, an image of his tongue traced along the back of my knee. Little goosebumps trailed there, up, up, up?—
”Yeah.” He shrugged.
I shook off whatever that was in my brain. I couldn”t think about getting turned on by my husband. A totally off-limits husband because if we did it again, it would complicate the entire situation.
Ask me how I know?
”There”s a lot of everything we”ll have to go through to get out of this mess,” I said. ”So much everything that all the everything is totally overwhelming.”
His lips twitched, and he looked like he wasn”t sure what to do with me. Nothing new, I got that a lot.
Though he recognized my lack of humor because he locked down any residual lip twitching.
”Let”s start with the simple everything,” he suggested, continuing to eat his breakfast like it was no big deal, and he wasn”t a hot football player in flannel, eating eggs with his accidental bride. ”What”s the first thing on your mind?”
Other than the tongue thing? Or the sexy eating?
”We got married,” I said, figuring I should just keep practicing the words so when I had to say them again, they wouldn”t sound so funky.
”We did.” He nodded. ”Seemed like a good time. What do we do after breakfast?” he asked, carefully, like this conversation had entered minefield territory.
”I”ll have to call Warren, so he”ll meet us at the courthouse on Monday morning.”
”Warren?”
”My favorite Clark County clerk.”
Sloan set his fork aside and folded his hands under his chin. ”You have a favorite clerk here?”
His phone rang. He glanced at the screen, his expression unreadable. Then he tapped out a message.
”Sorry. Work stuff.” He met my gaze across the table.
Then his phone rang again. He glanced at the screen again. Tapped out something else. Then more.
This appeared as if it might take a bit, so I blew out a breath and practically inhaled my pancakes. Then I arranged the slices of bacon so they were ready after my dose of carbs.
”You look like you”re thinking really hard over there,” he said, done with his phone stuff.
But his phone chimed again. He glanced at it… again. And he frowned at it… again. Then some kind of dawning brightened his eyes.
I couldn”t quite vocalize it, but I was pretty sure I wouldn”t like what came next.