“Mira?” His voice is gravelly and rough with sleep. Confusion laces his tone. I suck in a deep breath and turn to meet bleary hazel eyes struggling to focus on my face. “What are you doing in my bed?”
I squirm against him, acutely aware of my exposed breasts and the fact that the sheet covering our lower halves sits so low on my hips you can almost see my mound. The movement draws Griffin’s attention from my face down to my body, and the multi-hued hazel of his eyes turns molten. I feel his perusal as if it was a physical caress. His eyes make hungry sweeps of my body, lingering on my peaked nipples and the rapid rise and fall of my chest, which makes my breasts bounce slightly. When they dip lower to find his hand flexed, half-covered by the sheet, inches away from my pussy, he lets out a strangled sound. As if he’s finally registered the position we’re in.
“Mira.” His gaze jumps to mine. “Shit. I don’t… I don’t remember what happened last night. Did I… Did we…?”
“Have sex?” I try to smile, but it must come off as more of a grimace because Griffin takes his hand off my stomach like he’s worried he’s hurt me. He drags the sheet up my body to cover my breasts. Worry creases his brow, and I want to reach out and smooth my fingers over the lines. “Um, I’m not sure. I don’t… I don’t think so?”
He winces at that, studying my face, for what? “But we’re naked. Are you sure? Oh god, Mira, I’m so fucking sorry, I?—”
“Hey, I was involved in this situation too,” I say quickly, needing to interrupt his panic. Whatever happened last night, it’s not all on him. One thing I distinctly remember is talking him into drinking more alcohol when he was ready to call it quits. So really, if anyone’s to blame for our current predicament, it’s probably me. “But I’m pretty sure we did more than get naked.”
Griffin’s frown deepens. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” I swallow and try to keep the maelstrom of nerves in my gut from making me puke all over my… husband.
Oh. God.
I take one deep breath, then another. My left hand shakes as I lift it in the air for him to see. “I think we…” I clear my throat when the words come out as a croak. “I think we got married.”
GRIFFIN
I think we got married.
I think we got married.
I think we got married.
The words echo through my foggy, pounding skull again and again, but I can’t seem to make sense of them. Nor can I make sense of the plain gold band clinging to Mira’s ring finger. In what feels like an out-of-body experience, I lift my own left hand to find a wider matching gold band.
My ears ring.
“Griffin?” Mira’s voice slices through the haze. She sounds panicked. Like she’s ten seconds away from freaking the fuck out. I mean, join the club, but I hate the idea of Mira spiraling. It makes my chest ache.
“It’s okay,” I say, propping myself up on one elbow so I can look down at her. Mira stares up at me with wide, glassy green eyes. Like I have all the answers. She stares at me like I can fix this.
I have no fucking clue how to fix this. Not only have I potentially messed up my friendship with this woman who has become such an integral part of my life in three short months, but I also may have ruined my relationship with the best friend I’ve ever had. Because if Maddox finds out I married his little sister during a drunken bender in Vegas, he will kick my ass, then never speak to me again. Not to mention the fact that, even if we didn’t have sex, I spent the night spooning her naked body with mine. A fact my dick seems pretty excited about, but he’s a goddamn idiot.
Mira’s not the only one panicking, though I do my best to keep the terror zinging through my body from showing on my face. Pressure isn’t anything new. Every day on the ice, I’m faced with impossible shots and potentially dangerous hits.
I can figure this out. I can help her calm down.
“How is any of this okay?” she asks, clutching the sheet to her chest as she sits up. I sit up too and try not to focus on the naked expanse of her back and the swell of her perfect ass. “We’re naked and wearing wedding rings, Griffin.Weddingrings!”Mira’s voice pitches higher. “Can you remember getting married last night? Because I can’t.”
Rubbing my forehead, I try to recall the night before. I remember dancing with Mira, drinking a double shot of something that burned like hell going down, and then watching some guy drunkenly propose to his girl at the fountain. Then, somehow, we got to talking about Elvis? Everything else is a blur.
“I don’t remember much from last night, if I’m honest,” I tell her with a wince. Even that small movement makes my head pound and my stomach churn.
“Maddox is going to kill me.” Her green eyes are full of panic. “And I don’t want to be the reason your friendship ends. How could I have been so reckless?” Mira’s chest starts to heave and her breath comes out in shallow little puffs. The color drains from her pretty face as she grips her messy dark hair with her left hand and holds the sheet to her body with her right. “What do we do?”
Something cracks inside me at the sight of confident, fiery Mira looking so lost and scared. I hate it. I want to wipe the fear from her eyes.
“Hey.” I angle my body toward hers and gently cup her cheeks. “Look at me, Mir. Look at me.” She does as I say, though her chest still rises and falls too quickly. Her breathing is still too shallow. “Everything is going to be all right. We’ll figure this out.”
“Right.” She nods her head, but I don’t drop my hands. The rhythmic slide of my thumbs across her cheekbones seems to be calming. She sucks in a breath. “We can figure this out. This doesn’t have to be the end of the world. People get drunkenly married in Vegas all the time, right? We just need to talk to a lawyer and get an annulment.”
“Um, I’m not sure it’ll be quite that simple,” I say, glancing down at our naked bodies. “Doesn’t, uh, consummating the marriage sorta make it legally binding? We can’t be sure we didn’t have sex.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. A deep red flush blooms along Mira’s chest, up her neck, and across her cheeks. “Oh, my god. So we get a divorce, Wright. We pretend like this never happened, we tellno one, and we get a divorce. No one ever has to know that we were married for all of a week. We can pretend this epic fuckup never happened.”
