Page 1 of Accidental Vegas Vows

Chapter 1

Olivia

Icould barely hear the roar of applause or the words spilling from the wiry man’s mouth over the incessant, unending thumping of my heartbeat.

There were eighteen of us left — interns, all of us, straddling our seats as though they would somehow ground us.

One more would be chosen to give their presentation.

And I needed it to be me.

Dear God, I needed it. Needed the attention of the higher-ups, needed the security of a full-time job out the other end of this in three months. And the only way to get that was to be noticed. But the chaos of the room, filled to the brim with clients, employees, management, and board members of Blackwood Energy Solutions, was making my anxiety almost too much to bear.

I swallowed down my fear as the intern at the podium stepped down.

To my right, a girl I’d only seen in passing a handful of times crossed her fingers in her lap beneath her binder. The lanyard around her neck clipped into her dangling ID card. Kelsey Somers. I’d heard about her, heard of her determination and loudness, and for what might have been the first time in my life, I actively wished for someone else’s demise. However badly she needed to be chosen, I needed it more.

My stomach churned. Okay, Liv. Maybe don’t wish for others to fail.

Sound slowly filtered back in, and in the now deafeningly silent room, the heavy steps by the podium boomed and echoed against all four walls. Last chance.

Turning my attention to the sound, though, might have just been the worst thing I could have done.

The large, hulking frame of a man who stepped up to the podium wasn’t the same as the one who had been presenting in between interns — no, this was someone new, but someone I recognized, someone who even from here took up far too much space and demanded attention.

Damien Blackwood.

Oh my God, I’m going to be sick. The CEO of the company, the owner, was up on the stage, staring straight into the group of interns. My pulse hammered again, blocking out the noise.

He was far, far too attractive in person.

His height struck me first. It was something I hadn’t been able to glean from the staged photographs in the lobby, but here, in full fucking color, it was obvious — he must have been somewhere between six foot and six foot four. His hair, meticulously styled with little black and gray strands hanging beside his face, was the only true indicator of his age: forty-five, according to Forbes in their January issue. A playboy by nature, according to the tabloids, and the likelihood of him even giving someone like me the time of day was unheard of.

He was far too sexy to be running a company. His face should have been plastered on billboards, projected in movie theaters, or printed by fashion houses. But even with all of that, it wasn’t the wrinkles beside his eyes, the close-cut facial hair, or the shocking blue of his irises that grabbed my attention.

I was far too focused on his hands.

One large, ring-laden hand wrapped around the microphone and for a fleeting moment, I forgot entirely about my project, about my pitch, about everyone else in the room. The light glinted off the watch on his wrist and my breath caught, but not out of fear, not because my mouth had gone dry and my throat was closing in. Instead, my mind drifted far too close to the sun, imagining the way that same hand would look around my wrist, the way it would curve around the swell of my breast, the way two fingers would disappear inside of my?—

The eruption of applause yanked me back down to reality so harshly I almost forgot to breathe.

Kelsey stood up beside me, beaming as if the world was her Goddamn oyster, and clutched her binder to her chest. Did I miss something?

“Excuse me,” she said, her knees practically bumping mine as a request to move past.

The others around me clapped with tight lips as I shifted in my seat to allow her through. I joined them almost robotically, the reality of the situation slowly sinking in, forcing bile up my throat to make room for the rocks that filled my stomach.

I wasn’t picked.

I wasn’t fucking picked.

My breathing picked up as I watched her climb the stairs. Mr. Blackwood reached out a hand for her and she took it gleefully, her fingers so small as they rested gently in his palm for leverage in her heels. Her black hair, curled and tucked behind her ears, bounced as she approached the podium.

But I didn’t hear the echoing sound of her nails tapping against the microphone, didn’t hear the laughter from the crowd when she asked, “Is this thing on?”

Instead, two words pinged around inside of my mind, filling the space, doubling, tripling, quadrupling until the words blurred and became meaningless as they seeped into my bones, becoming me, entangling themselves with me.

I failed.

---