8. Leo
LEO
Leo’s head was so fuzzy that it was hard to understand exactly what was happening.
He clearly remembered meeting Olivia last night.
He remembered gambling with her as his lucky charm, winning, and kissing her.
He’d half-hoped that the night might end with them in bed together, but this wasn’t at all how he’d pictured it.
For one, they were both fully clothed, so it was clear that nothing had happened.
For two, they were handcuffed together. And for three, he couldn’t remember anything of how they’d gotten here.
Not the handcuffs. Not deciding to go to bed.
Not anything about the night before — apart from meeting Olivia and kissing her.
Olivia was staring at him, which brought Leo back to the present.
Her green eyes were wide. Leo took a moment to notice that, even with her hair all smushed on one side, a pillow line on her cheek, and her clothing rumpled, she looked gorgeous.
Her pink lips were full, and her eyes were bright.
One strap of her dress had slid off her shoulder, revealing an expanse of soft-looking skin. Then he focused back on what mattered.
“What are we doing here?” he asked. His brain was still fuzzy.
“I just asked you the same thing,” Olivia replied. “Like I said, I don’t remember much from last night”
“Yeah.” Leo rubbed his eyes. “Me neither.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Olivia asked.
“We were in the casino together,” Leo said. “You?”
“I remember…” Olivia’s cheeks flushed a light pink, and she shook her head. “I remember being in the casino, too. But the important thing is that we get out of these handcuffs.” Olivia pulled on her link again, rattling the chain. “I need to get to the airport.”
“Are you supposed to leave today?”
“Yeah. I need to get back to Seattle and start looking for a job.”
“I didn’t know you were looking for a job. Or that you were from Seattle.” He really knew very little about this woman he was handcuffed to.
“Can we focus?” Olivia gestured at the handcuffs. “Do you have the key, or not?”
“Not,” Leo said. “I’m sure these aren’t mine. I don’t own handcuffs, and I don’t own anything leopard print. Could they be yours? This is your room… right?”
Olivia gave him a look. “They aren’t mine. This is my hotel room, but I definitely don’t own handcuffs. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have handcuffed us together.”
“Me neither,” Leo agreed. They stared at each other for a long minute.
“Okay.” Olivia shook her head and used her free hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Maybe the key is in the room somewhere. Let’s look.”
“Good idea.”
They both tried to roll out of the bed at the same time, Leo to the left, Olivia to the right, and were jerked back together by the handcuffs hard enough that they bonked into each other. Leo rubbed his head, which had slammed into Olivia’s shoulder.
“We may need to use a little teamwork,” Leo said, hoping to inject some lightness into the situation.
“Maybe so.” Olivia met his eyes, and for a fraction of a second, they smiled at each other.
A memory came back to Leo — he’d been holding Olivia’s hand and looking into her eyes as she’d smiled at him, just like this.
Her curls had been framing her face, and there had been…
a flower in her hair? He reached for the memory, hoping more details might appear, but nothing.
“Let’s start at the desk,” Leo suggested. “We can get out on your side.” He scooted over, and they stood in unison. Leo headed for the desk but stopped when he saw that Olivia had frozen.
"Everything okay?”
“Leo…” There was a strange note in her voice. “Do you see what I see?”
“I see a view of Las Vegas out the window, a suitcase, and a beautiful woman handcuffed to me,” Leo said. “Not necessarily in that order.”
“Focus. Look.” Olivia bent down and picked up a piece of paper from the floor. It was made of thick, heavy cardstock and bore signatures and an official-looking seal. What caught Leo’s eye were the words at the top, though: Certificate of Marriage.
His gaze dropped to the names, and he saw that he and Olivia had both signed. Apparently, her last name was Keller. And apparently, they were married. Or at least this certificate said they were.
“Leo,” Olivia said, her voice low, “this is a joke, right?”
“It must be a joke,” Leo agreed, “because there’s no way we’re married.”
“No way,” Olivia agreed. “This must be one of those funny fake wedding things.” She looked up at him with wide green eyes. “Right? Just pretend?”
“Right,” Leo said, but he wasn’t so sure. Vegas was known for being glitzy and fake, but the marriages were certainly real. With luck, though, this one wouldn’t be. “Anyway, there’s no way we can get to the bottom of this until we’re out of the handcuffs.”
“You’re right.” Olivia put the marriage certificate down gingerly on the desk, as though afraid that it might bite her. “There’s no need to panic until we know if it’s real.”
“Exactly. No need to panic.”
They nodded at each other, then descended onto the desk frantically, opening all the drawers and tearing through the papers in search of the key.
Leo could think of much worse people to be married to than Olivia, apart from the fact that he barely knew her.
The real problem was that he didn’t want to be married at all.
He never had. Work was his priority and always would be.
But with any luck, the marriage would turn out to be as fake as the pyramid in downtown Vegas, and they’d go their separate ways in just a few minutes, sans handcuffs.
Even if the marriage were real, there would be no need to panic.
This kind of thing could be solved through a little bit of paperwork and problem solving, as most things could.
At least, he was trying to be that rational.
“Found anything?” Olivia asked.
“Not yet. Should we try the bathroom?”
“Yeah.”
They hurried into the bathroom and tore it apart, then Olivia’s suitcase, then the bed and side tables. Pretty soon, the room looked like it had been trashed by a rock band, but they hadn’t found a key or anything like it.
“Maybe the handcuffs will break if we just pull on them,” Olivia suggested.
“We can try. One, two, three — pull!”
They jerked on the handcuffs, but nothing. For their flimsy appearance, they were surprisingly strong. All Leo got was a pain up into his shoulder for their troubles.
“Maybe we can break the chain,” he reasoned. “There’s a letter opener on the desk.”
“So, what — we stab it?” Olivia bit her lip. “I’m not sure. Maybe I can try to pick the lock with a hairpin.”
“Do you know how to do that?” Leo asked, impressed.
Olivia looked down, her cheeks tinging pink. “Um… no. But we could try.”
They went into the bathroom and found a hairpin. Olivia poked experimentally around the lock, but nothing seemed to happen. Then Leo had a try, though he was no more successful. He had no idea what he was doing.
“I’m ready to try the letter opener,” Olivia said.
“Me too.”
They returned to the desk, walking in careful unison. Leo grabbed the letter opener, and they headed out onto the balcony, where Olivia positioned the chain of the handcuffs on the metal railing.
“Ready?” Leo asked. She nodded, so he stabbed the chain. Nothing happened except a loud sound as the letter opener pinged off the railing and almost flew out of his hand.
“I’m starting to have a bad feeling about this,” Olivia said.
“Starting?” Leo managed a smile. “I had a bad feeling the moment the handcuffs didn’t break when we first pulled on them.”
“What were we thinking?” Olivia asked. She looked mournfully down at the leopard-print cuffs. “And why didn’t we keep the key?”
“Maybe someone else put them on us,” Leo suggested.
“That’s much creepier.” Olivia sighed. “And we’re wasting time. We need to figure out what’s going on with the marriage license, and I need to get to the airport. I don’t have time to try to break handcuffs.”
“What do you suggest?” Leo asked.
“Oh!” Olivia straightened from her previously slumped position. “We could put lotion on our wrists and see if the cuffs will slide off.”
They hobbled back to the bathroom and poured a full container of the hotel’s mini lotion onto Olivia’s wrist (since her hand was smaller).
Then she pulled and wiggled while Leo leaned against the counter, rubbing his temples.
His headache was getting worse with every passing minute of wakefulness. Nothing.
“This isn’t working,” Olivia said.
“I hate to suggest it, but maybe it’s time to ask for help.”
“From whom?”
“The hotel must have a handyman,” Leo said. Olivia’s green eyes widened, and she shook her head.
“Oh, no. Please, no. I will absolutely die of embarrassment if some strange guy sees us locked up like this. He’ll have lots of questions, and we won’t have any answers, and it’ll just be a huge mess.”
“Well, at the moment, I’m afraid the choices are either to die of embarrassment or to starve to death because we can’t get unlocked and won’t leave the room,” Leo joked.
Olivia chuckled and sighed. “You might be right. Isn’t there anything else we can try first?”
“I’m out of ideas.”
Olivia nodded stoically. “All right, then. Let’s call the handyman.”
They returned to the bed, where Olivia sat next to Leo and reached for the phone. She dialed the front desk and pressed the speakerphone button. A friendly masculine voice picked up after the first ring.
“Carlton Hotel, how can I help you?”
“This is Olivia Keller in room seven-zero-two,” Olivia said brightly. “Is there a hotel handyman we could see?”
“Certainly. What’s broken?”
“I… um…” Olivia looked at Leo in a panic.
“We’re handcuffed together and lost the key,” Leo said. Olivia gestured at him in horror, but Leo just shrugged. He figured it was better to be honest and hopefully get help, than to lie and make the whole situation more difficult.
“I understand. Our handyman is in his office on the first floor, so the fastest way would be to go to him. I can send him to your room, but it might take a while for him to get you free, especially if he doesn’t bring the right tools.”
Olivia sighed again but nodded. “We’ll be there in a minute.”
She hung up and turned to Leo.
“Why did you tell him?”
“This kind of thing must happen all the time in Vegas,” Leo pointed out. “The receptionist didn’t seem fazed. I bet people getting locked together is just as common as people losing all their money to slot machines or getting food poisoning from strip-club buffets.”
“Or getting so drunk they wind up married to strangers?”
Leo pointed at her. “Exactly. Now you’re getting it.”
Olivia laughed. “I guess so. Maybe. I just… I never expected today to go like this.”
“If it helps, neither did I. Now, let’s get free so we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming.”
“Agreed.”
They stood and headed for the door. Before they left, they each took a moment to smooth their clothes and hair as best they could with one free hand — then they stepped into the hallway.
To Leo’s relief, it was empty. He hadn’t seen the point of lying to the receptionist, but he didn’t relish the thought of trying to explain the leopard-print handcuffs to strangers, either.
They headed to the elevator and pressed the button. After a moment, the doors opened with a ding to reveal an elderly couple with gray hair and neat clothes. They took in Leo and Olivia, and their expressions narrowed.
“We’re married,” Olivia said. “It’s our honeymoon.”
“We are married,” Leo agreed.
They stepped into the elevator and headed down.
The elderly couple got off first, exchanging pointed glances as they did so, and Olivia and Leo followed.
At first, they tried to go in different directions, unused to walking together in a large space.
The movement tugged awkwardly at the handcuffs, and Leo started to think that people might be watching them.
“We should hold hands,” Olivia suggested. “It’ll make the handcuffs less obvious.” Leo nodded, taking her slender hand into his grasp. After that, they were able to cross the lobby to the handyman’s office down a small staff hallway.
Leo tried to ignore the warm, soft feeling of Olivia’s hand in his.
Still, her touch brought back memories of the kiss, one of the last things that was clear in his mind before the blankness of alcohol-induced amnesia.
That had been some kiss. Leo wasn’t going to forget it anytime soon.
And he couldn’t help wanting to repeat it, even in his current hungover and blurry state.
“Here we are.” Olivia pointed to a door marked Handyman then rapped on it with her knuckles. There came the sound of footsteps, and the door swung open. On the other side stood a middle-aged man in a neat uniform. He looked from Olivia to Leo, then to their handcuffs, and smiled.
“Come on in. I know the right bolt cutters to use.”
“Thank you,” Olivia said. They entered the office, and the handyman gestured for them to sit in a pair of folding chairs before heading to a wall of tools.
“Do you get this kind of thing a lot?” Olivia asked.
“More than you’d think,” the handyman said. He returned with a large pair of bolt cutters, which he slipped between Leo’s wrist and the metal of the cuffs. Leo’s eyes widened, but with one quick click, the handcuffs fell away, and Leo rubbed his wrist.
Olivia was next. The handyman cut off the cuffs just as easily.
“You’re good to go,” he said. “But do you mind if I keep the cuffs? I have something of a collection going.”
Olivia and Leo exchanged glances. Olivia’s cheeks were pink, but there was laughter in her eyes.
“Sure,” Leo said.
“No problem,” Olivia agreed.
“Want to see the collection?” the handyman asked. They both shook their heads in unison.
“Sorry, we have some urgent business to attend to,” Olivia said.
“Oh, yeah.” The handyman grinned and nodded slowly. “I bet you do.”
“Oh, no, not like that,” Olivia protested, but he was already winking at Leo and escorting them to the door.
“Have a nice morning!” he called after them. “Enjoy your urgent business!”
“We need to get to the wedding venue,” Olivia said. “Let’s go grab that certificate — and then we can see if this whole wedding business means anything.”
Leo nodded. “Let’s go.”
Strangely, despite his lifelong aversion to marriage or commitment, Leo wasn’t as panicked at the idea of being married to this beautiful stranger as he would have expected. Still, he was just as curious as she was to find out exactly what had happened between them last night.
And what would happen next.