Page 51 of Bound To Be Mine

Then I switched from my post to my tagged photos and that’s when I saw the videos.

There were two that kept appearing. People had tagged me over and over in both of them and based on the view counts they had taken on a life entirely their own. I clicked on the first one.

I had seen this video before. It featured a small bar with a small stage. It was a little place called Dirty Shirley’s, with a karaoke setup with one of those old-school screens showing the lyrics. The video was vertical and a little shaky, clearly shot by someone in the audience. Someone that might have been as drunk as we were.

The piano introduction made my stomach flip over. Wise men say, only fools rush in…

And there was Briggs. Not the stone-cold attorney. That was Briggs the Viking. A man. A very hot man.

Briggs was standing at the microphone with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, one hand loosely holding the mic and the other holding a drink. His hair had come loose from whatever product kept it in place. He was grinning. The drunken grin was very boyish and yet somehow ridiculously sexy. He looked ten years younger.

And he was looking directly at me.

I watched myself on screen, sitting at a small table with a drink in my hand, laughing and clapping. Even through someone else’s slightly shaky phone camera I looked happy. I looked like a woman who was having the best night of her life.

I played it again.

Then again.

He got to the chorus and the grin softened into something else. He was looking at me the way Victoria’s groom had looked at her when she appeared at the end of the aisle in the chapel. Like there was no one else in the world.

Take my hand, take my whole life too…

I paused the video.

I’d spent the last week being exasperated by Briggs Blackwell. He irritated me. Pissed me off like no other person had been able to. Just thinking of his name had me grinding my molars.

But this man on screen? This man was not a problem. This man was the reason a perfectly sensible woman with a fully functional brain had apparently agreed to marry someone she barely knew in an Elvis chapel in Las Vegas.

How did I end up married to him? That was the question I’d been asking myself since I found a wedding ring on my bathroom counter.

I knew how I married the man doing his best to sound like Elvis. The man in that video? I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

Which was a terrifying thought.

If only there was some way to bring out the man in that video.

I chewed on my bottom lip, thinking. He was in there. I’d seen the evidence with my own two eyes. I couldn’t remember meeting that guy, but the internet didn’t lie. Okay, it lied all day every day, but that video was authentic.

Whatever armor he wore on the daily hid the man who sang Elvis at a karaoke bar. That was the man I wanted to meet—while I was sober preferably.

I clicked on the second tagged video, anxious to see what other songs he’d serenaded me with.

“Oh no,” I groaned.

It wasn’t Briggs at the mic. It was me. I heard myself sing all the time when I was in the shower or in the car. I didn’t need to see it in living color and neither did millions of people. But that was exactly what happened.

I made a sound like a dying animal. Or maybe a horny one trying to produce some kind of mating call.

“Oh good Lord. Who let me do that?”

I wasn’t even singing the right words. Singing was a very generous term. Screeching was more accurate. The person filming was clearly trying very hard not to laugh based on the snorting and phone shaking.

And through every single off-key catastrophic second of it, Briggs was watching me like I was the only person in the room.

I paused it again on his face. His chin was resting on one hand and his elbow was on the table and he was just looking at me. Soft. Open. The kind of look that didn’t have any strategy or armor in it at all. He was looking at me like a man in love.

And I knew that couldn’t be right. There was no way.