“Do you remember anything from last night?” she finally asked, bringing those soft, hungover eyes back to mine. “I don’t. Not much, anyway.”
“I remember some of it,” I admitted. “There are flashes, but they’re pretty blurry and vague.”
“Are there any flashes of our wedding?”
I shook my head. “Sadly, not many.”
“Sadly?” She cocked her head a little, those eyes drinking me in like she couldn’t stop staring. “Why are you sad about it?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I would’ve liked to remember you actually saying yes to me.”
Her cheeks flushed, but then our food came and we were both too ravenous to keep talking. Eventually, between bites of Pancake Mountain, she looked up at me again. “What was your first wedding like?”
I pushed my eggs around the plate. “It wasn’t really a wedding. We went to the courthouse and signed the papers. That was it.”
Her face fell just a little, worry or maybe guilt flickering across her features. In the last couple weeks, I’d gotten to know her a little better, enough to know that right now, she was worried about me. About how I felt and what all this might be dredging up.
I reached across the table and took her hand before she could curl in on herself. Her non-pancake-eating hand. Both rings were on her finger, the real one and the cheap Vegas disaster, and I smoothed my thumb over them, over the soft skin of her knuckle, too.
“This was way more fun,” I told her, and I meant it. “I don’t have to remember it all to know that. We had a damn good timetogether last night. So good that we decided to move up the wedding.”
Her palm turned under my hand, her fingers sliding between mine. I folded them around hers, holding on tight as I looked into her eyes. She held them for a beat before the tiniest smile ghosted across her lips. “I suppose it’s better we did it the way we did, huh? At least this way, it’s a cool story.”
I nodded, watching as her gaze dropped to our joined hands. She stared at them for a moment, then slowly lifted those eyes back to mine like something important had only just occurred to her.
Somehow, she managed to pale and flush at the same time, the apples of her cheeks turning beet red but the rest of the color draining. “Did we, uh, did we… you know, sleep together?”
My entire body locked up, but I scanned every corner of my foggy brain and every broken shard of memory from last night. There was laughing. Gambling. Her blowing on dice. My arm around her. A chapel. A vows-that-I-probably-slurred moment. Carrying her across the threshold into our room.
But nothing more.Thank God.
Seeing her like this, however, with her hair wild, her face soft, and wearing my shirt, made that want I’d been fighting back surge so hard it hurt. It’d been hurting for days, actually.
Weeks. Since before I’d even kissed her in the damn stable, but drunk or not, there was no universe in which I’d taken her to bed and then forgot it in the morning. I knew that with absolute certainty.
“We didn’t,” I said quietly, looking right into her eyes. “We woke up fully clothed. I think sleep was the only thing we did in that bed.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief—or disappointment. I wasn’t sure which.
CHAPTER 27
CHARLOTTE
We spent the rest of the day nursing our hangovers by the pool, which was the only place on earth that didn’t hurt. Trent had claimed a lounge chair under an umbrella, sunglasses on, hair damp from swimming, one hand holding his phone while he scrolled through his credit card statement without even flinching.
I really hoped that meant we hadn’t gone absolutely feral at the casino last night. I’d half expected to wake up to an alert from my bank sayingcongratulations, you are now the proud owner of a small island.
But no. Trent didn’t look horrified. Just mildly baffled.
Meanwhile, I was floating in the pool with my arms hooked over the warm concrete edge, my cheeks burning every time I dared glance over at him. Which was often. Too often.
The man looked unbelievably good in nothing but a pair of black swim trunks, his body bronzed, and ripped, and stretched out like temptation I wasn’t allowed to touch.
Why does my husband have to be so hot?
This hangover was brutal. Clearly, it had migrated into my moral compass and rewired my brain, because all I could thinkabout was the line of muscle down his stomach and what his hands looked like resting on his thighs.
He’d told me earlier that we were leaving for Dallas in a few hours. Apparently, that had always been the plan, but hearing it and knowing it meant we’d be going back to that big house of his, all alone as a married couple, had made something knot low in my belly.
