20. Elise

20

ELISE

His mother engulfs me in a hug. “It is so good to finally meet you.”

“And it is a delight to meet you,” I say, enjoying that we don’t have to pretend for his family—his mother knows the score. Even so, my brain lingers on one word. Finally. Everything has happened so lickety-split, I don’t know why his mother would feel like we’re finally meeting.

The three of us take seats at the outdoor café that overlooks the harbor, and we order a round of champagne. She clasps her hands under her chin and fixes a steely blue-eyed gaze on her son. Her cheekbones are carved, and I can see where Christian’s blond good looks come from. “Tell me everything about the ceremony that you didn’t let me attend this afternoon.”

Christian rolls his eyes. “Because I’m sure you’ve been dreaming of watching me get married at city hall.”

She swats his elbow. “I don’t know why you didn’t let me go.”

He gives her a look.

I smile, loving the ribbing that they give each other, but especially loving that I get to witness it. I like that he’s so open with his family, that his mom knows what we’re up to. Mostly I love that he wanted me to meet her.

“It wasn’t that kind of a ceremony.” He looks across the table to me, his eyes holding mine for a beat that extends longer than I expect it to. “Besides, it was just between us.”

My heart does something that feels like it’s rolled over, flopped on its back, and put its legs in the air. Dog that it is, I tell that organ to sit up and focus.

“Be that as it may,” she says, looking to me, “I am delighted to meet you, Elise. Now, tell me everything about the wedding.”

I laugh, then give her the sparse details about our brief and perfunctory ceremony and show her the rings.

She sighs happily, shielding her eyes from the bright afternoon sun reflecting off the harbor. “Thank you for allowing me to experience it vicariously. He didn’t let me go to his first wedding either.”

I tilt my head, surprise hitting me hard. “You didn’t?”

Christian shakes his head. “We were married in the United States. Vegas, baby, Vegas.”

“You eloped,” I say, as if the plot is thickening.

“Sort of,” he says, laughing as he points at his mom. “Anyway, she gave me hell then. No need to do it again.”

“That’s my job. To give you hell.” She snaps her gaze to me. “Although, I do hope you’ll pick up the slack when I’m unable to give him hell. You have free rein to give him a hard time as much as you want.”

“I appreciate the maternal blessing, and I will do my best to follow the directive,” I say as the waitress arrives with three flutes of champagne.

His mother raises her glass, and we follow suit, clinking. “To the brilliant plan my sons hatched, and to the brilliant woman who’s making it all possible.” Her voice lowers. “My father—their grandfather—had the softest heart, but perhaps not always the most realistic expectations. I appreciate you making everything right for my Erik. I feel terrible for what happened to him.”

“It’s the least I can do,” I say, and I’m glad this deal has been beneficial for both of us, or else I’d feel like some sort of martyr to the cause. But Christian has already prepped loads of business analysis and insight for my upcoming meeting with the travel client. His market analysis was spot-on and seems like something of a secret weapon.

“It’s not nothing. It’s everything.” She glances at her son. “And maybe when you knock her up and have a baby, you’ll at least let me come to the birth.”

I nearly choke on my champagne. Bubbles shoot up my nose, tickling it, and a cough bursts from my throat.

“Mum, you’re incorrigible,” Christian chides.

“And where do you think you learned to be incorrigible from? The master.” She smiles at me, a hint of wicked delight in her eyes. “Just teasing about the baby,” she says playfully, then drops her voice to a whisper. “But not really. If he puts a baby in you, I’m not going to sit out the birth. I’ll follow you around till you pop.”

I laugh because there’s nothing to say to that. There will be no baby, no popping, and no true mommy/daughter-in-law bonding. Even so, I think I love her already, and since she’s been so blunt, I decide to assuage my own curiosity. “I have a question for you. Why did you say finally about meeting? Has Christian been telling you about me?”

“A year ago, he mentioned he’d met a woman on the boat tour and was very much looking forward to seeing her. And when he ran into you again at the garden bar, he called me and said , ‘You’re never going to believe it, Mum, but the little mermaid popped back into my life.’”

I rein in a grin as I make a check mark in a mental column of pros and cons about this man— told his mother about me the night we met again . Definite pro.

Christian slaps a hand on the table. “This conversation really ought to stop right now. The two of you are thoroughly embarrassing me.”

I smile and laugh, meeting her gaze with the sort of look that says embarrassing him is what a mother and a daughter-in-law should do, and in this moment, we are indeed bonding. As I drink my champagne, I’m happier than I should be that he’s introduced me to his mother.

I’m even happier that she’s known about me from the start.

On the spectrum of things I’ve never expected, stepping into a marriage of convenience would be at the top of the list. Spending my wedding night at an amusement park would be a close second.

The spinner ride whips precariously high and my stomach rises in tandem, lodging in my esophagus. The giant gold eagle we ride in flips over, leaving us hanging upside down, high in the sky. I scream, a blood-curdling noise. The sound turns into a screech as the eagle rights us again, then sends us downward in a fast, wicked whoosh. One exhilarating, heart-pounding minute later, the ride slows, and soon, it crawls to a stop. The world is still wobbly, but the bar rattles loose and lifts up.

Christian sets his hand on my arm, steadying me as I stand, emerging from Aquila, the golden eagle ride at Tivoli Gardens. I grab my purse from the locker and slide on my glasses.

He rubs his ear. “You are loud, woman.”

“So are you,” I say, as the attendant opens the exit gate, and we pour out along with a few dozen other sky warriors who braved the thrill ride.

Christian, still wearing his suit but with his tie gone and stuffed into his pocket, shakes his head. “No, I wasn’t. I was stoic and tough.”

I laugh as we walk the pathway that weaves through this festive park in the heart of the city. “You practically squealed like a little girl the first time the eagle soared upside down.”

He stares at me, his brow knitted. “Little girl? I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”

I pat his very firm bicep on his very strong arm and go along with him. “Yes, you’re right, dear husband. It must have been someone less manly and less tough.”

He smiles at me, mischief tap-dancing across his blue eyes. “Exactly.” He bumps his shoulder against mine and whispers, “Hey.”

That one syllable comes out sweetly, affectionately, and I add another pro in his column. That chart is weighted so heavily to one side, it’s toppling over. I should find a con. It’ll make the next three months easier. Not that I need to worry about that too much. It doesn’t matter how many pros I find, this has an expiration date.

I am resolved .

“Hey to you,” I say softly, then want to kick myself because that tone of voice won’t help me find a negative in him either.

He raises a hand, adjusts an errant strand of my hair that was stuck in the arm of my glasses, and slides the offending lock over my ear. “Are you doing okay?”

“Are you going to keep asking me that for the next three months?”

“I might.”

I stop, rise on my tiptoes, and kiss the corner of his lips. Oops. No luck finding a con there either.

“What’s that for?” he asks.

“Just marking you.”

“You want to pee on me next?”

“I might. Beware,” I say in an over-the-top nefarious tone as we pass the gift shops that edge the small lake, making our way to the Ferris wheel.

“Elise,” he says, his tone letting me know he’s serious.

“Yes?”

“Earlier today, during the ceremony, did you think about . . .?” His voice trails off as the unfinished question hovers like thick smoke.

“It’s hard not to think about Eduardo. But mostly, I thought about how incredibly different this is because we’ve been so open about everything. What about you? Did you think about Hannah?”

He doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he scrubs a hand over his chin as if in deep thought as we reach the steps of the Ferris wheel. “I don’t know if this makes me sound totally calloused, but I so rarely think about her.” I pump a virtual fist because surely that’s a con, that he doesn’t even think about his first love. “Sometimes it feels like what happened between us was so long ago, it’s like it was another lifetime.”

“And you were a different person?”

He nods as he holds open the gate at the top of the steps for me. “I think I was in some ways.”

The ride attendant says hello and gestures to one of the Ferris wheel cars. We go inside. “What’s the biggest difference between the Christian of today and the twenty-one-year-old you? Besides nine years,” I add, since I bet he’ll go for some sort of age punchline. Could that be a con? Maybe he’s not too serious about anything. Yes, that will definitely keep the chains up high around my heart if he’s simply a shallow fellow.

He wiggles his eyebrows and punches his stomach. “Abs are still chiseled.”

“I knew you were going to say something like that.”

He loops his arm over my shoulders. “But they are. Chiseled.”

I pat his belly. “Yes, and I like them. But I’d like you if your belly was soft.”

“You would?”

I laugh and tap his temple. “I like the upstairs. That’s what entertains me. So entertain me. Tell me something else.”

And yes, there it is. I’ve found it. Christian is entertainment, pure and simple. He’s fun and games. That’s a pro, but in the end, it’ll be a con when he can’t take things seriously. When he can’t take me seriously. And a good con, because it’ll protect me. It’ll keep the lemon gumdrop center of me from melting. Besides, peeling away his layers is wise. The more I know, the less likely I can be taken advantage of again. Knowledge is power.

“Tell me something I wouldn’t recognize about you nine years ago,” I add.

The car cranks loudly, making its first circle as he taps his chin. “I was more wound up then. Like I was turbo-charged and caffeinated.”

I squint, trying to picture a manic Christian. “I can’t see you that way at all.” He has a relaxed ease about him. Perhaps that’s because he’s a true man of leisure. Young retirees can come and go as they please.

“I was like a coiled spring when I was twenty-one. I worked non-stop. I wanted so much. I think the fact that I’d had so little focus in uni for a while changed me. Once I had it, I was filled with the need to do things. To make money, to buy and sell, and keep flipping investments into bigger investments,” he says, as the car whirs higher in the air then stops as more passengers get on below.

“And all that ambition played a part in your marriage not working out?”

He nods. “We didn’t want the same things in life. We didn’t want the same things from the marriage. I suppose that’s similar to what happened to you.”

I scoff. “Safe to say we wanted very different things.”

The car ascends to the top of the wheel, rising in the twilight sky above the top of the other rides. The panorama of the capital city comes into view—palaces and canals, and all the twinkling red, white, and green lights of the park below us.

“But really, the hardest part of my marriage not working out was reconciling that I wasn’t like my father,” Christian adds, and I jerk my gaze back to him. This is the first time he’s mentioned his father.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s been married and divorced three times. I think that’s another reason my grandfather was so specific about marriage in the details of his company handover. He didn’t want us to wind up like my dad, especially since Dad hurt my mum so much.”

The picture of him fills in, details and angles becoming crisper and clearer, and another pro reminds me of its existence—the way Christian cares for his mom. Hell, the woman herself is a pro in the list; she’s a doll, and I love her. “He was looking out for you, and for his daughter, in a way.”

Christian nods as the ride circles low then rises once more. “He didn’t like the way our dad treated our mum. He wanted to see us all happily together forever like he was. I think Erik got that from him.” He hums, a sad little sound. “And look at us, all split up, just like dad. But it’s for the best, for me at least. I’m completely content with my single life.”

There.

That’s it.

The big con.

He’s married to his lifestyle, and that’s exactly what I needed to know. And what I wanted to hear, in fact. It’s better this way. Knowing he’ll never fall in love makes it easier to enjoy the pure entertainment value of Christian Ellison. Who cares if he has so many pros? They won’t ever amount to anything that can hurt me, since we’ll never truly get close enough.

He grabs my hand. “And I’m pretty content with our arrangement so far. With one exception.”

Oh. Perhaps there’s an even bigger con. A girl can hope. “What’s that?”

When we reach the top once more, the ride slows as it begins letting people off below us. “It’s our wedding night and we’re not screwing right now. Instead, we’re talking about our previous marriages. That’s backward.”

I laugh. That is indeed a drawback, but it’s easily rectified. “In our defense, screwing is an inevitability.”

Sex with Christian sounds delicious, and a clear pro. In fact, it sounds so delicious, I’m pretty much done with the fun and games of Tivoli, especially since I know this marriage will be like this park—just fun and games, no matter how many times he’s thoughtful and asks how I am.

As the Ferris wheel chugs down, I tug him close, and whisper, “Want to get out of here?”

He lets out a dirty groan. “It’s all I want. To get you back to my house and show you exactly what a wedding night should be like.”

We exit the ride and practically race past the sparkling lights in the center of the park. This might not be the field of flowers I dreamed of as a little girl, and it’s not the vineyard where my family toasted with Eduardo and his friend. Instead, I’m at an amusement park, with a husband who hardly asks anything of me, but the glittery setting is a fairy-tale land in its own strange, unexpected way.

Do fairy-tale heroines have hot sex?

Of course they do.

Especially if they get married to save the hero’s brother’s company.

A fresh urgency powers us as Christian takes my hand and guides me through the park. We have to weave through the carnival games to reach the closest exit, marching past a group of rowdy teens playing basketball.

They’re having a blast, and I am too.

Until someone shouts duck and a basketball slams into the back of my head, knocking me down.