“You will?”
“If you do it after five-thirty, yeah.”
“Okay, great. If we have to wait twenty-hours and that’ll put us around four-thirty, another hour won’t kill us.”
“No if. Twenty-four hours or that marriage is void. Twenty-four hours. No less, not even by a minute.”
“Okay,” Xeni said, fully admonished. She didn’t want to see what Deborah was like when she was losing at poker. “We can do five-thirty. We’re doing it at Silas and Liz McInroy’s hou—”
“I know where they live.”
“Okay. We’ll see you then.”
“See you then.”
Xeni tripled checked that she had all of their paperwork, then practically skipped back out to the car. She waited until she was behind the wheel before she texted Mason the good news.
Deborah’s gonna do it!
We just have to get married after 5:30.
Mason responded right away with a gif of Rocky and Apollo Creed frolicking in the ocean. Xeni snorted and almost reconsidered his dinner invitation. Almost.
* * *
Fresh from the shower, Mason tossed his towel on his broken recliner and then stretched out on his bed, ass naked. He had to be up early the next morning, like every morning. Breakfast rush waited for no man. Usually after a long shower at the end of a long day, he was asleep before he hit the mattress, but now he was wide awake. And he only had one thing on his mind.
Well two things, but one person was the reason behind all of it.
He knew Xeni had a lot on her plate, things more demanding than his asshole of a father, but he wished she had come by for dinner. Like a fool, he kept listening for Silas’s doorbell to ring while they all watched Palila make a mess of her peas and mashed potatoes. Xeni was smart and resourceful. If she changed her mind, she’d find her way over to their farm house.
But she didn’t show. And why would she? Along with being smart and resourceful, she didn’t seem like a bullshitter. If she said she was busy, she was busy. And if she has something to handle, something to do with her mother and Ms. Sable? Well that he could definitely believe. He should have offered to help her. He didn’t know the ins and outs of Ms. Sable’s private business, but he had been to her home dozens of times over the years, spent hours with at her piano.
He at least had a sense of her house and two pairs of hands were better than one.
He reached for his phone and pulled it off his charger. It wasn’t late, but he wasn’t sure what her sleep schedule was like, especially after the last few days. He decided to text her instead of calling her.
Me and my dreamy accent missed you at dinner, he typed. “Maybe a little much,” he said to himself before he hit send anyway. It was the truth. Why shouldn’t he tell her the truth? Something about her sparked something in him. A few women had expressed interest in him since he’d moved to New York, but for some reason he kept his distance. Now he was lying awake, trying to get to know a woman who had no interest in him, beyond a financial one.
He didn’t take her comment about his accent to heart. He got a lot of comments about it. For the first year he was here, some customers would ask him to repeat some word or phrase for their amusement at least three times a week. One day he started to say no. It felt good, the simple refusal, but people still commented on the way he spoke and playfully mocked it from time to time. No one had ever called it dreamy, even if they were only joking.
He clicked around his apps aimlessly, then went back to their conversation.
Any luck finding what you were looking for?
Xeni replied.
Oh that accent. *drool emoji*
And not yet. I’ll keep looking for it
after our super rocking wedding.
Are you excited? A hot wife and one hundred grand.
That’s quite a deal.
Mason smiled at his phone and tried to think of a witty comeback. He failed and settled for a gif of that Jamie lad from Outlander telling some other Scotsman he was a lucky bastard. When Xeni responded with a crying laughing emoji, he knew he’d made the right choice.
