Married to Eli. She smiled to herself. Wasn’t that the best joke ever?
Chapter Seven
The Day After
The problem with waking up married is that you’re married. Wedded bliss. Or in the case of Eli, the biggest clusterfuck of his life.
He swallowed down an aspirin and glanced across the king-size hotel bed to where his new wife slept. Marlee was a helluva lot of Vegas fun, evidenced by the state of their motel room and his likely inability to walk.
He was a Las Vegas idiot with spotty memory and a wife.
A wife.
Sonofabitch.
A thin sheet covered him. She had the no-tell-motel-grade comforter burritoed around herself. Their clothes were… Well, they weren’t on their bodies, that was for certain. He lifted the sheet to be sure, and no, he hadn’t brought his pajamas to this sleepover.
He glanced at Lothario curled up in his own love nest made of Eli’s shoes.
Eli’s extremities went numb, and his lungs let out a breath seemingly on their own accord while he flipped through the mental film of the night before. There’d been a dare, there’d been a jilted bride, there’d been the caterer—that would be him—and there’d been twist-tie wedding rings and a ceremony.
He got the heart tattoo. They went back to the penthouse and the other girls passed out. He and Marlee got to talking. They had drinks. They decided to take Sadie up on her dare and go through the motions of a wedding ceremony for the photos. Just for the photos. Because wouldn’t it be so funny?
Then they’d signed the papers because they were both too drunk to think straight.
Then there was the afterparty that was only between the two of them.
He was screwed tighter than the cap on a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s.
A screwed man with two choices. One, figure out a way to rewind time and rethink his choices from the night before. Or two, wake up Marlee so they could get to work on the annulment that needed to happen. Preferably before anyone else found out what they’d done.
The bridal suite—and he used that term ever so loosely—had come with the discount just-off-the-Vegas-Strip wedding package they’d purchased in a fit of drunken dare. In their mutual alcohol-induced stupors, he and Marlee had opted for the palm paradise room after they’d been married by a man in a Liberace costume. Eli hadn’t known who Liberace was before the wedding. Why they’d chosen to stay at this place instead of in Marlee’s suite at the Bellagio, only drunk Eli could say. And he wasn’t around anymore.
Responsible Eli was now in control.
And he was married. The green twist tie Marlee had stuck on his left finger said so. He grabbed the stack of papers from the nightstand where he’d tossed them at some point the night before, searching out the marriage license. He said a prayer that they hadn’t both signed it and his rusty memory was wrong.
Nope. The God of Vegas Marriages hadn’t come through for him. Two signatures graced the dotted lines. Two signatures that looked remarkably sober given their state the night before.
He groaned. They’d both signed it. They weren’t supposed to sign it. They were supposed to pretend to sign it. Under no circumstances were they supposed to use their real names.
Then again, they weren’t supposed to have had marital relations, either. His reflection in the gold-framed mirror on the ceiling over the mattress taunted him, so he turned away. That wasn’t much better. The walls were painted with an overgrowth of palm leaves. A one-dimensional toucan gave him the side-eye from over the dresser and a stuffed monkey swung from a vine over the television. Marlee’s bra was draped beside him, where he had tossed it the night before.
The Marlee he’d known from their teenage years was not the same woman who turned out to be a wildcat in paradise. That Marlee was reserved and polite. His wife? Well, she wasn’t reserved, that was for sure.
“Eli?” Marlee asked with a just-woke-up confused twinge in her voice.
He turned to her, adjusting the sheet to cover his lower half. “Hey.”
She peeled open her eyelids and stared at him. “Tell me this is a dream.”
They’d gotten a license. They’d hit up some chapel off the Strip. This was not a joke. This was not a drill. This sucker was the real deal.
“Not a dream, Mar.” Running a hand over his face, he was about eighteen hours past a five o’clock shadow. About six hours into his marriage with Marlee. And a solid thirty minutes before the aspirin kicked in.
“Shit.” She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids.
Yep. He agreed with that sentiment.Never, he’d sworn he wouldneverget married.
