The children were all mesmerized by animated ridiculousness on the big screen, so I strode over to where Nina was standing in the dark theater, talking to her colleagues.
“Mr. Ashford, hello,” Beth Greely said.
The junior staffer took a step backward like she was afraid of me.
Nina turned around and widened her eyes when she saw my expression. “Is everything okay? Noah’s in the front row with the rest of his gang, do you want me to go get him?”
For a moment, I forgot why I was there and strained to find his blond head in the front of the theater. My son now had agang? My little loner had made friends?
I shook that off, reminding myself to focus on the issue at hand. “No, I need to speak to you. Now.”
I turned on my heel and walked out, expecting her to follow immediately. Instead, it took a few minutes for her to emerge.
“What’s with the drill sergeant stuff?” Nina frowned as she walked over to me. Thankfully, the grand lobby was empty.
“Everyone knows now,” I said through gritted teeth. “About our Nésion mistake.”
She grimaced. “I was afraid that might happen.”
“It seems Noah doesn’t have a great grasp of the idea of ‘private.’ Did you hear him telling the other kids?”
Nina shook her head. “A few kids overheard me talking with him when he gave me the marriage license, but I was hoping they wouldn’t manage to piece it together. I guess they told their parents?”
I snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, and one of them congratulated me after my farewell toast tonight, in front of a packed ballroom. I’m sure it’s already making the rounds on social media.”
Her eyes widened. “Already?I mean, you’re well-known, but you’re not like, royalty or anything, Logan.”
Was she trying to neg me in this critical moment?
“You clearly don’t understand the cruising community. They’re obsessed with the high seas and all the drama that happens out here. This is catnip for a certain sector, and if the media gets wind that the cruise line’s CEO had a drunken mistake during a child-centric cruise, I’ll be sunk.”
I started pacing, trying to psych myself up for the ridiculous plan I was about to pitch to her.
Dread trickled through me. Yes, the plan was ridiculous—but it was also the only option. And now I had to get her to see that.
“We need to play along,” I finally said. Nina’s face went white. “We’ve got no choice. We need to stay married until everything dies down.”
“What?” She shrieked, so loudly that I waited for people to run out of the theater to see if something was wrong.
“It’s the only way to keep everything on an even keel.”
“You’re not making any sense.” She looked more bewildered than upset. “How is a sham marriage going to keep things steady? The status quo is for us tonotbe together. So shouldn’t we try to get our legal status to reflect that as quickly as we can? It was a mistake, and it’ll be just a memory when we get back.”
She realized as she said it that neither of us had many memories of the event itself, which was what had gotten us into this mess.
Now that she was just a few feet away, I was reminded how hard it was to focus when she was close.
“That’s not an option anymore,” I said in a tone that I hoped conveyed the seriousness of the situation. “The story of our marriage is out there now; we can’t make that go away. All we can do is try to control the way it spins.”
Nina wrapped her arms around herself. “What does that mean?”
“If we play happy couple, at least for the time being, then it looks like a feel-good story:couple finds love on a family-friendly cruise. Nothing shocking or scandalous, so it won’t hold the public’s attention for more than five minutes.”
“And if we don’t?” she asked.
“Then it becomes a scandal, and that keeps us in the public eye for a lot longer. Just picture it: the CEO of a new family-friendly cruise shacks up with an employee during the maiden voyage before promptly divorcing when they got back to port. People would eat that shit up.”
Nina cocked her head at me. “So we have to stay married just to avoid some gossip? Doesn’t that seem a little extreme?”
