Page 6 of Slapshot Bride

She looks down at her lap. At the dress. At her hands, now trembling again, fisted in tulle that probably cost more than my first contract bonus. When she speaks again, her voice is so small I have to lean in to catch it.

“Easton…”

And then, slowly, like she’s afraid I’ll move away, she reaches across the center console and lays her hand on top of mine on the gearshift. Her fingers are still cold. Still shaking, just a little. But she leaves them there. But in the next minute, they’re gone. She looks away.

“I don’t… I have no idea where to go. I did it all out of reflex.” She laughs, but it’s humorless. “I can't… I can’t go back. I don’t have my credit cards, and I can’t go to my parents. He’ll find me. They’ll…” She stops. Her eyes find mine, and I see the fear in them.

“Stay with me.” The words are out before I can process them.

I look at her. The woman I’ve only known for forty minutes, who has somehow roped me into the middle of her falling life. And I know I can’t say no. Not when every part of me is viciously screaming to find Preston fucking Sinclair and rip him a new one.

2

RILEY

Not a Serial Killer

The Sinclair’s Runaway Bride. A title I’d rather wear than be called Mrs. Sinclair.

A few hours ago, I was supposed to be walking down an aisle in front of three hundred and forty people, on the arm of my father, toward the man who picked out my wedding band and my china pattern and the song the string quartet was going to play during the first dance.

Now I'm being driven up into the Hollywood Hills by a stranger I climbed into his car at a red light.

The math of the day doesn't feel real.

Easton offered. I want to say I thought about it. I didn’t, really.

The list of places I could not go ran through my head in the same five seconds it took him to say the words. My mother. She’d dial Preston before I made it out of the driveway.

My father would lecture me about how public a scene I’d made and then dial Preston.

My friends, Madison, and Rachel, the ones I used to laugh with before Preston started finding reasons each of them was toxic or too much or not good for me. I haven’t spoken to most of them in over a year, and reaching out from inside a wedding-day catastrophe would feel like sending up a flare over a house I haven’t visited in a decade.

I have my brother, Mason. He would believe me, but Preston knows about Mason, and Mason’s apartment will be the second place he checks, if he doesn’t already have someone parked outside it.

A hotel would have been the obvious answer for a normal person. Except every credit card I own is linked to a joint account in Preston’s name.

I have no money. I have a dress that costs twenty thousand dollars and one shoe, and that is what I have.

Six years.

Six years of letting him handle everything, because he was so good at handling things, and every time I tried to handle something myself, he found a small, clever way to show me I’d done it wrong.

I gave him the whole of me and didn’t notice I was emptying out.

I press my forehead against the cool window and watch the city drop away under us.

“We’re here.”

I lift my head. The road has narrowed to a private drive. A black iron gate comes into view, with a keypad. He punches a code without looking at it. The gate slides open.

The house at the end of the drive is glass and pale stone, with the kind of clean modern lines that magazines call understated and the rest of the world calls expensive. A long, low sweep of it tucked into the hill like it grew there.

The neighborhood, what I saw of it on the way up, was the kind of quiet that costs money with gated entrances, discreet landscaping, and houses set back from the road behind walls you can't see over.

Whatever Easton does for a living, it pays well.

Really well.