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Shane
Icould probably write a briefing about the fifty ways in which this is an error in judgement.
There’s the questionable wisdom of lying to my boss before I even start working for him, followed by lying to my best friend, and then there’s this truth…
Ruthie, whom I’ve been training myself to ignore for years, looks absolutely fucking gorgeous. She’s in a cream-colored dress with a simple cut that hugs her tits and hips and ass, with sequins and embellishments designed to bring a man’s attention everywhere it would naturally be inclined to go. Her dark hair is down around her shoulders, wavy, as if from being compressed in my fist, and her lips are painted a bright red, her eyes as blue as the Carolina sky.
Rule Number One. Rule Number One. Rule Number One.
She’s a dream in that dress, and I can lie to everyone else but not myself. When I backed her into that corner, it wasn’t because I wanted to scold her or was looking for an opening to give her the ring she should have already had. It was because I wanted an excuse to touch her. Because a fucked-up part of me wanted to lay claim to her right there in the courthouse. That same part of me took pleasure in putting my ring on her finger even though I’d promised myself that I’d never do any such thing with any woman, ever.
I’m usually not the kind of man who changes his mind.
It’s these last few months. They’ve been like a truck that keeps mowing me down and backing up so it can do it again. My impulses aren’t as controlled as usual, because they’re not in service to a greater cause. I’m a man in need of a purpose, and five minutes ago, my dick thought breaking Rule Number One might be the very thing.
I’m in trouble.
But I’ve backed myself into a corner as surely as I just backed Ruthie into one, and sometimes the only way out is through. Freeman needs me to have a wife, this wife, and if I lose Freeman, then I don’t have a Plan B other than to wait for the shit to hit the fan with the Burkes’ case. That could take months, though, and months of inactivity is unacceptable.
If you’re not growing, you’re withering, and I don’t want to sit at home doing nothing, letting depression seep in and try to tug me down. So I open the door to the courtroom, Ruthie beside me, my awareness of her blistering through me, throbbing and real and undeniable.
The officiant, Dena Rothschild, is at the front, looking at her watch. Shit.
Ruthie wasn’t wrong about me. I don’t care to make bad impressions on people I might have to work with in the future. Or, at the very least, am liable to run into.
We walk past Ruthie’s friends and also Josie, who’s scrolling on her phone and ignoring us. She’s wearing an off-white dress—a disrespectful choice for a wedding, or so I gathered from a former client whose mother-in-law wore off-white to her wedding. She said it should have been her first sign something fucked up was happening, but he’d proposed on Mother’s Day because he figured it would be the ultimate present to his mother, so I’m guessing there were red flags snapping through the air right along.
A weird sensation rocks me as we walk past Josie. It’s what my mother would call a goose walking over your grave.
While I don’t believe some psychic woo-woo led this woman to the courtroom at the right place and time, something did. She has unspecified plans and information she shouldn’t have. That’s a dangerous combination. And, fine, I don’t like that she told me I was going to get married months ago, and here I am, about to sign a license legally binding my life to someone else’s. Sure, it’s not a real wedding, and most psychics probably tell everyone they’re going to get married. But it’s undeniably strange, and I dislike things I can neither understand nor predict. It’s in those zones of uncertainty that bad things happen.
Without warning, I get a flash of the worst moment of my life. I can smell the overturned sauce pot, see my father’s look of surprise as he slumped over. My mother’s screams ring in my ears.
My teeth are pressed together as we approach the front of the court room. Dena gives me a suspicious look.
I nod and force a smile. “Let’s get going.”
I hear Ruthie snort beside me. “This is everything I’ve ever dreamed of.”
“I knew your imagination was lacking,” I snipe back. Shit, I shouldn’t have said that.
Dena clears her throat. Her eyes on Ruthie, she asks, “Are you sure you’re ready to move forward?”
I can imagine what this must look like to her, and it’s not good. I nod. “We’re ready.”
“Yes,” Ruthie says, her mouth curling into a red-lipped smile that promises I’m going to suffer. “I can’t wait to strip that suit off him. You know, he insisted on saving himself for marriage. Nothing I could say or do would persuade him.”
I give her a flat look. She wants to embarrass me? Fine, two can play that game. I’m tempted to say something equally outrageous, like Most people still consider anal sex to be sex, but I’ll have to see Dena again, so I don’t want to go too far down that road. “We wrote our own vows,” I offer instead.
“Uh, okay,” Dena says, her gaze darting from us to Josie the Great in her veil, to the elderly couple Ruthie has befriended despite her terrible pay at the diner. “Will anyone else be joining us? Your parents, perhaps, Mr. Royce?”
I have another flash of that dinner, of my father—talking one second, telling one of his stories, and the next…
Wincing, I grind out, “No.”
Ruthie doesn’t correct the supposition that Eden and Charlie are her parents, not that I blame her. Her parents are drunks, her father is who-knows-where, and I’ve helped her mother out of legal trouble a couple of times as a favor to Danny.
Ruthie’s giving me a sharp look, as if to say, you may think you got me good, but I’ll prove how wrong you are. I hope she does. This feels like an extension of our game, and I need that now. I didn’t realize this experience would be so…unsettling.
