“And she looks like a princess,” he said in an awed voice. “I think she’s the prettiest lady in the world.”
I cleared my throat. That made two of us, bud.
“I’m glad to hear that you like her so much. You have to remember that Miss Nina and I need to make sure we like being married. If not, we might decide to tear up the license.”
“No! You can’t, Daddy!”
I could see him already starting to tense up. I reached over to rub his back, to center him in the current conversation instead of allowing him to catastrophize the future in his imagination.
Another Nina tip.
“We’ll figure it out, Noey. Don’t worry.” I bit my lip, still rubbing his back. “For now, though, Miss Nina and I want to try out being married in private, so it would be best if you didn’t tell your cruiser friends.”
His expression remained troubled. “Why?”
“You know how usually when people get married, they have a big party?”
He nodded. “Yup, like Uncle Harry and Aunt Gwen!”
“Exactly,” I nodded. “Well, Miss Nina and I didn’t have a wedding yet, because we want to make sure that being married to each other is the right thing for us. So for right now, it’s private, just for the three of us to know.”
I was digging a hole that just kept getting deeper and deeper. I was feeding into a delusion that there was a chance Nina and I would end up together. But it was keeping him calm in the moment, and Noah would have all of the distractions on our voyage to keep him from dwelling on the possibility.
Hell, there was a chance he’d totally forget about it.
Noah was looking down at the marriage license.
“Does that make sense?” I asked him.
He nodded, not tearing his eyes from the document.
“Can I talk to Miss Nina about it?”
I weighed the question before responding.
“Maybe a little, but not when anyone is around. When you’re at the Club, you need to focus on your activities and your friends, not chatting with Miss Nina.”
“Okay. But she’s really fun to talk to.”
I smiled at him. “You’re right. She is.”
Yeah, I knew firsthand that there were plenty of ways to have fun with Nina.
“Here,” Noah said.
He held out the certificate reluctantly.
I smiled at him as I took it. “Thank you. I’m going to put it away, then we can go down to breakfast.”
I checked the time as I walked back to my suite. We were now running fifteen minutes late, which made me instinctively bristle. But I reminded myself that Nina was right, and I’d been too strict trying to bring normalcy to Noah’s life. Small deviations from his schedule were fine.
I was coming to realize that Nina was right about plenty when it came to Noah.
The marriage might be fake, but the benefits of having her in our lives were very real.
Now all we had to do was survive the rest of the cruise without word of our mistake leaking, and we’d be fine.
“We need to get moving, bud,” I said as Noah pulled more from his backpack. I wondered what other sorts of contraband he had in it. “Pack it up, please.”
