“If Dixon what?” I asked. Then it struck me, with an almost physical blow. I turned my gaze onto Dixon, who had evidently arrived at the thought well before me. He looked wary, and hesitant, and aroused, all at the same time.
“Not many men could pull off that expression,” I told him quietly while Melody announced what a good idea it was. “But you do it in spades.”
“I feel like I was hit upside the head with the De Dion,” he admitted.
“The question is,” Roger said excitedly, “which lady will Dixon marry?”
I stood up straight and glared at Roger. “Excuse me?”
“Well,” he said with a wave of his hand, “I thought he might like to have a choice.”
“Of course he has a choice. He has all the choices in the world,” I said airily. “There is no pressure, none whatsoever.”
To my intense discomfort, Dixon was silent for at least a minute. “You are talking about a pretend marriage, are you not?” he finally asked, gesturing toward Tessa and Max. “The same they had on their show?”
“Yeees,” Roger said slowly, an odd light in his eyes. He pulled at an earlobe while he clearly thought the idea over. “Although the viewers would go crazy for... Kim!”
One of the production assistants who had traveled with us snapped to attention and bustled over with her clipboard. “Yes, sir?”
“Find me someone to officiate a wedding. Not a real officiant, one of those crackpot people who belong toweird religions. Dixon’s brother is one of them, but we couldn’t get him here fast enough.”
She grabbed the interpreter and began grilling him.
“Wait. What? You want us to have a wedding? A real wedding?” I blinked fast, my insides squirreling around. “I’m not sure... I don’t think... I mean, I like Dixon a lot—”
“We do not want a real wedding,” Dixon said smoothly, cutting across my incoherent babble. “Not even for your show, Roger.”
A little spike of pain bit deep inside me. I looked at Dixon from under my eyelashes, knowing full well how he felt on the subject of weddings. He’d never had the one he had wanted, and now here he was going to have to pretend to be married to me. Did I really want to put him through that? Did I want to risk whatever our tenuous relationship was just for the sake of the show?
I would leave it up to Dixon, I decided, and accordingly took him by the arm, pulling him to a corner of the room while telling Roger, “Give us a couple of minutes.”
“I know what you’re going to say,” Dixon announced when we were cloistered from the rest of the group. “You don’t want to get married, least of all to me, and I want to reassure you that I’m of the same mind.”
Now that hurt. I had to swallow back the pain, remembering that he was grieving a lost love. “I can honestly say that marriage isn’t uppermost in my mind,” I said after a moment’s thought. “But a pretend one—one that is just for the show—is something different, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not at all the same thing as what you and your late fiancée planned, so it’s not like you’re betraying her memory.”
He looked like he wanted to be sick. “No, of course not. You are completely different from Rose. And as forthe wedding we didn’t have... I tried to tell you the other night about that...”
“It’s decided, then,” Roger announced, clapping his hands and calling us back. “Dixon, Paulie, we’ll film an impromptu wedding just as soon as the officiant arrives, no later than noon. That will put us three hours behind schedule, but it can’t be helped, and the resulting excitement around the show should do wonders for ratings. I’ll do a brief on-camera piece explaining that you and Dixon fell in love during the race across the States and that you decided to marry before another day passed.”
“That seems rather deceptive,” I commented, returning to the group with Dixon. “I don’t like lying, and saying flat out that we’re madly in love is doing just that.”
“Youarespending your nights together,” Roger said dryly. “I assume there is some form of affection between you.”
I blushed like mad, while Dixon looked mildly furi-ous.
“Our relationship is no one’s business, certainly not yours,” he said stiffly.
“On the contrary, it’s very much my business when it affects the show, as you will have noticed in article fifteen of the contract you signed,” Roger said tersely, then lightened up to add, “It’s all a moot point, isn’t it? Whether or not you two are in love, you are fond of each other, and that’s all we need for the cameras. Kim! Are you done finding the officiant? We must consult with the hotel venue to see if we can conscript one of their ballrooms for the wedding. Let’s look lively, people! We have less than four hours to plan and film this wedding...”
Dixon and I stared at each other as Roger swept the production team, interpreter, and airport officials before him, casting orders hither and thither.
“Congratulations, I think,” Melody said with a wry smile, and stuck out her hand for Dixon to shake. “Welcome to Team Suffragette.”
“Thank you,” he said, clearly a bit overwhelmed. I stopped him when he was about to follow the others out to claim the cars and drive to the hotel, where we would have a few hours to get into costume before the next stage of the race began.
“Dixon, if this makes you uncomfortable, we can simply tell Roger no. There must be some other way we can keep you in the race. Maybe you and Anton can both ride with the Esses...”
“Do you not want to do it?” he asked, hesitation in his eyes when he put his hand over mine. “It’s playacting, true, but if it seems a bit too real to you—”
