"Everything?" I heard myself ask, pulling myself out of the watching-him-eat trance. Surely, he couldn't mean everything.
Somewhere deep in the dregs of my memory, an image of his tongue traced along the back of my knee. Little goosebumps trailed there, up, up, up?—
"Yeah." He shrugged.
I shook off whatever that was in my brain. I couldn't think about getting turned on by my husband. A totally off-limits husband because if we did it again, it would complicate the entire situation.
Ask me how I know?
"There's a lot of everything we'll have to go through to get out of this mess," I said. "So much everything that all the everything is totally overwhelming."
His lips twitched, and he looked like he wasn't sure what to do with me. Nothing new, I got that a lot.
Though he recognized my lack of humor because he locked down any residual lip twitching.
"Let's start with the simple everything," he suggested, continuing to eat his breakfast like it was no big deal, and he wasn't a hot football player in flannel, eating eggs with his accidental bride. "What's the first thing on your mind?"
Other than the tongue thing? Or the sexy eating?
"We got married," I said, figuring I should just keep practicing the words so when I had to say them again, they wouldn't sound so funky.
"We did." He nodded. "Seemed like a good time. What do we do after breakfast?" he asked, carefully, like this conversation had entered minefield territory.
"I'll have to call Warren, so he'll meet us at the courthouse on Monday morning."
"Warren?"
"My favorite Clark County clerk."
Sloan set his fork aside and folded his hands under his chin. "You have a favorite clerk here?"
His phone rang. He glanced at the screen, his expression unreadable. Then he tapped out a message.
"Sorry. Work stuff." He met my gaze across the table.
Then his phone rang again. He glanced at the screen again. Tapped out something else. Then more.
This appeared as if it might take a bit, so I blew out a breath and practically inhaled my pancakes. Then I arranged the slices of bacon so they were ready after my dose of carbs.
"You look like you're thinking really hard over there," he said, done with his phone stuff.
But his phone chimed again. He glanced at it… again. And he frowned at it… again. Then some kind of dawning brightened his eyes.
I couldn't quite vocalize it, but I was pretty sure I wouldn't like what came next.
CHAPTEREIGHT
SLOAN
Elliott and my management team were already at work that morning in one of their let's-fix-Sloan's-problem meetings, which meant Elliott was bombarding me with ideas. He didn't want my opinion. But if he looped me in, then I couldn't claim I didn't know. This was all part of how he worked.
But I had bigger issues to sort, and he had to wait.
A lock of hair fell loose around Maya's forehead. I forced myself not to reach out and push it back. She may have been my wife for the moment, but I didn't have the permission to do that.
Instead, I focused on her amber eyes and not the Elvis lookalike grabbing coffee or the Dolly lookalike filling a plate of pancakes.
"Someday," she said, pursing her lips. "God, as my witness, I'll have a wedding that I get to plan, a wedding night I get to enjoy, with a husband who will last longer than two weeks. Do you even know how pissed my mom is going to be that she missed another Maya wedding? So pissed. There's no getting out of it." She took a deep breath and continued, "You've got to quit doing this to us." She mimicked what had to be her mom's voice. "Like they're the ones suffering." She pointed at me with her fork. "They aren't. They probably don't even have a headache."
