Page 72 of Accidental Vegas Vows

“My brother is the one that informed me,” I challenged. “I made up some lie about it being a weird initiation thing for new hires, but I don’t think he believed me.”

“Initiation?” She asked, her nose crinkling with distaste. “Damien would never do that.”

“I didn’t know what else to say. How the fuck do you explain something like that away?”

She sighed, her shoulders sagging. “No idea. But I don’t think your lie will work, and if it does, it won’t last long. I can raise it with the higher ups in PR but…”

“But what?”

“It’ll draw attention to it in the meantime,” she explained. “Though I guess that’s bound to happen anyway if it’s doing the rounds on social media. You should speak to Damien.”

“He’s not in his office. I know he was taking Noah to his first day of school, but maybe he got called into a meeting or something. I don’t know,” I sighed. “What I should do is call my parents and tell them what I told James before they can even see it.”

She shook her head ferociously, her blonde bun nearly coming loose, and looked me dead in the eye. “No. Nope. Absolutely not, Liv. You’ll raise questions and you’re a terrible liar. You will wait, you will speak with Damien, and you will hope that no one else sees it. That’s all you can do right now.”

“But what if that news site gets its hands on a copy of our marriage certificate? What if they come out with shit I can’t disprove before I can get a jump on this?” I urged, pocketing my phone with a shaky hand. My stomach was starting to twist again, and I swore I could still smell the lingering scent of banana on her. “We need this fucking annulment now. I don’t understand what the hold up is.”

She sighed and shrugged her jacketed shoulders. “I don’t know. This stuff isn’t always instant. You need to speak to Damien.”

Chapter 26

Damien

Watching Noah be so absolutely excited to run into his new school and make new friends after what had happened last week was enough to crack my fucking chest.

He didn’t even seem phased by the seizure. He was back to himself the next morning, and when I’d nervously brought up the topic of him starting at the private school I’d shelled thousands out for, he surprisingly seemed more than keen.

I’d spent hours in meetings with his teacher, the principal, and the school nurse — I wasn’t about to let anything go unchecked or a single set of eyes to be off of him. Not after the seizure. If something happened, I needed to know that people would be on hand immediately.

It only helped a little bit that the school was directly next to a hospital.

“Remind me of the rules,” I said, pop-quizzing him as I white-knuckled the steering wheel. My Audi, the one I barely ever drove, idled beneath us.

“Dad, I know them,” Noah groaned, his head flopping back dramatically into his carseat.

I stared him down in the rearview mirror. “Then remind me.”

“Call you or Olivia if I need a thing,” he started, his pointer fingers coming together as he started to count them off. “Don’t be… what was the word?”

“Blasé.”

“Don’t be blasé when I say that Mom is dead. No fighting. No back-talking Mrs. Thatch. Ask for the nurse if I feel bad and tell them to call you.”

“And the sixth one?” I grinned, turning to look over my shoulder instead. He beamed back at me.

“Oh yeah! Have fun.”

————

Liv’s message lit up my phone in the middle of the meeting. For a split second, my heart skipped a beat at the first words: need to talk to you ASAP. Thank God she’d followed it with a heads up that it wasn’t about Noah, because I was two seconds from leaping out of my chair and ignoring the lashing I was getting from the shareholders.

I replied to her the moment we finished up and let her know that I was heading back to my office. I’d barely made it before her — I had about enough time to sit down in my chair and open my laptop before the door clicked open and her panicked form rushed through.

“Fix this,” she said, her phone in hand as she crossed the expanse of the open layout. Her wavy brown hair looked a little unkempt at the roots as if she’d been pulling at it, her eyes just a little too wide, a little too stressed. She wore one of my favorite outfit combinations of hers — a loose, flowing white button-up tucked into a pair of wide leg black slacks, cinching her in at the waist.

“Fix what?” I asked. “No hi, how was dropping off Noah this morning?”

She glared at me as she held her phone out. The screen was filled with a photograph, and the moment I took it from her, I realized exactly what photo that was. I could remember the flash of light as we left, could remember kissing her temple like that, drunkenly assuming it was a chapel photographer and not some random passerby. Shit. “Hi,” she deadpanned, the sarcasm dripping from her tongue. “How was dropping off Noah this morning?”

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