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“I now pronounceyou husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
Those words echoed in my ears the whole goddamn night. And the kiss. The motherfucking kiss.
Fiona, although drunk, looked shocked and terrified at the prospect of the kiss in front of our small audience. Both of us had known it was coming. Both of us were of sound mind when we made this decision.
Well, I think she was, at least.
I couldn’t say my mind had been sound in about… five years. Suffice it to say, I was sober when I made the decision. Painfully so.
Sure, I’d had a beer or two in me the night I proposed the wedding, but the days after, thinking about it, I’d known I was serious. And if Fiona showed up at my door wanting to get married, I’d do it.
And she did show up.
Looking like I was holding a gun to her head.
As she’d looked pretty much the entire day. She strutted down the aisle as if she were preparing for battle, her bouquet her weapon. Her chin was held high in defiance, and she’d made a concerted effort not to look at me.
That had been my plan too.
Except you couldn’tnotlook at her. She’d forgone the traditional white—as I’d expected. This was far from a traditional wedding, and Fiona wasn’t exactly the puffy white dress kind of woman.
She went with red. Like a flame coming out. Her blonde hair was down in wild curls, framing the delicate face, the full lips, the electric eyes. The dress clung to her every curve. And fuck, were those curves impressive. I’d spent months drinking them in, wondering what it would be like to see her naked, taste her nipples, her pussy. What it would feel like to be inside her.
Which had been the problem. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the women I fucked. I usually singled them out on the night in question, did some smooth-talking, took them home, fucked them, and forgot them before they even left the bed.
Yeah, the feisty Australian was dangerous. I’d tried to fuck her, of course, because I couldn’t help myself. But she wasn’t interested. A good thing for the both of us.
I’d done well flirting with her and pretending it wasn’t her face I thought of when I jerked off, but then I had to go and agree to fucking marry her.
I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to fuck her. And the surefire way to do that, in my fucking warped mind? Marry her.
She needed a Green Card. I needed my mother to stop calling me, and then my sister to stop calling me to tell me how much Mom was worrying about me. I needed my father to stop sending me fucking emails about my ‘responsibilities’ that made me throw my computer across the room. I needed my whole goddamn family to get off my back.
The marriage solved a problem for me. I wasn’t just doing it out of the goodness of my heart. Yeah, I’d seen the fear and panic in Fiona’s eyes that night in the bar, and I didn’t want a woman to feel that fear. I especially didn’t wantFionato feel that fear. In fact, I had a fleeting moment of rage toward whoever the fuck put that fear in her eyes and a need to kill them.
That passed quickly.
It had to.
I didn’t have strong feelings like that.
Not for a long time.
Selfish reasons.
That’s why I was marrying her. Nothing else.
“Interesting ceremony,” Rowan said as he sidled up to me. I was nursing a whisky and watching Fiona down yet another glass of champagne, taking a chunk of our wedding cake with her bare hands and shoving it in her mouth. I guessed we weren’t doing the whole ‘cutting the cake’ thing. We’d already gotten a handful of pictures we would use for the lawyer and our little couple album. Though I had the suspicion that Fiona was scowling in all of them.
“You could say that,” I replied, still watching her. “You know me. I don’t do things traditional.”
“Your last wedding was pretty traditional.”
The words hit me like bullets. Every cell in my body tensed up. I gripped my glass with enough force to shatter it.
