by Lisa Alder
“Yeah. I have to admit we were thrilled with the coverage. When we thought up the idea to try to get more business, we really weren’t sure how well it would go over.”
Lilah opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She stared at Jake her mouth opening and closing like a stupid fish.
He took pity on her and distracted Cat Woman. “I don’t usually anything without my lawyer.”
Jake had a lawyer?
Cat Woman waved away his concerns. “Oh, it’s all just standard legal forms. Like I said, mostly for tax purposes making sure you agree to pay the taxes on your winnings.”
Jake scrawled his signature on the dotted line.
Cat Woman relaxed a little bit. “This is Steve. He’s going to take a few pictures of you two while you’re on the carriage ride.”
“More pictures?” They couldn’t take any more pictures. Someone from Bloomington might see them. Lilah could already be in trouble. She tried to think. Did anyone in town get the Times-Picayune? She truly wasn’t sure.
Maybe Marion.
Cat Woman grabbed up the forms. “Wow. Louisiana and California. So where are you two going to live?”
“We haven’t decided yet,” Jake said smoothly. “Right now I’m spending some time in Louisiana.”
Lilah looked at him. He was? Oh no that was all wrong. He had to go back to California. Her night of wildness was over. She couldn’t have him around reminding her of things she needed to bury again. She panicked.
“What?”
Lilah didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until both Steve and Cat Woman gave her strange looks.
Jake wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a long, slow kiss on the lips. Then he smiled but there was a warning in his eyes. “You are such a kidder.”
Lilah caught on. Perhaps there was something in the contest where you really should be engaged. If they had entered under false pretenses, then they might be liable for the cost of the hotel room. She didn’t even have her handbag with her. And maybe Jake couldn’t afford the cost of the room.
Not to mention all the other things they had used. Lilah blushed. She could play along.
“Gotcha.” She giggled nervously.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Steve and Cat Woman both visibly relax. She thought they were taking this whole contest just a little too seriously. After all, it wasn’t like it was for real.
Lilah decided to take advantage of the fact that she still had a little wild time left. And she kissed Jake again.
“Okay, love birds. Time to go.” Cat Woman led them through the massive French doors and out onto Orleans Street.
To their left, the giant statue of Saint Louis stood sentinel over the street and the park behind the Cathedral. Early morning sounds echoed in the air, the whine of garbage trucks picking up the remnants of the previous night’s revelry, the clip-clop of horse’s hooves along cobblestone streets, the hiss of water washing down the sidewalks.
An open carriage drawn by a single horse with a little straw hat and a floppy red carnation waited for them.
“How darling,” Lilah exclaimed.
An older black man, with a wrinkled face and a wide, yellow-toothed smile held out his hand. “Pierre, thanks you ma’am. My name is Philippe and I’ll be your guide this fine August morning.”
Lilah placed her hand into Philippe’s pink-skinned palm. She could see Cat Woman giving Steve last minute instructions. And then Cat Woman turned to Jake.
“Oh by the way. It should take about six weeks for the state to process everything, once they get the blood test results from California and Georgia.”
Why would they need blood test results?
“Where do you want me to have them send your marriage certificate?”
Marriage certificate? Lilah’s shoe caught on the last step. She stumbled. Her cheek hit the seat with a solid thwump. She skidded across the cracked leather and then plunged to a stop at the scalloped edge of the backrest.
They were married? For real?
SEVEN
Jake vaulted into the carriage to help Lilah. “You okay?”
“Just peachy,” she said faintly. “Clumsy me.”
Jake pulled her to her feet. She was shaking and white as a ghost.
Lilah whispered, “Did she just say we’re married?”
“Okay guys. Give me a nice, happy smile.”
“Looks that way.” Jake turned toward the photographer and gritted his teeth, curling his lips. They were married. For real. “What a mess.”
“You have no idea.” Lilah’s smile looked as plastic as his felt.
“Scoot a little closer together.” Steve stood next to the driver and motioned with his hand.
Lilah edged closer to Jake, not coming too close. “Aren’t there supposed to be witnesses?”
“We had about two hundred,” he returned drily.
“Oh, yeah.”
He knew she must be upset for her to use such lax language.
“Put your arm around her.” Steve lifted up the giant camera and started clicking away.
Jake slung his arm around her too tense shoulders.
“You two aren’t looking like the picture of wedded bliss.”
“Lilah’s feeling a little blue about being married by Elvis.”
“Hey. I thought that part was great. Pretty cool that a Justice of the Peace also can rock like the king, huh?”
“Oh my gosh.” Her eyes grew wide and round.
“Okay, everybody sit. It’s time for the tour to begin.” Philippe’s raspy old voice interrupted Steve’s explanation of their for real marriage.
Christ.
The carriage started to roll. Over the clop-clop of Pierre’s hooves, Lilah turned to Jake and said desperately, “Maybe no one will find out.”
“Hey, Steve.” Jake leaned back against the cracked leather and gave the photographer a friendly, laid-back smile. The one he used when negotiating a better rate with his suppliers. “What’s the circulation on the Times-Picayune?”
“‘Bout 150,000. Of course, where we really got the publicity was on the website.”
“Website?”
“Yeah. It’s really cool. They have these cameras around the town. I think y’all were on the KaraokeCAM.”
“Oh my gosh.” Lilah turned her head to look at Jake. Their mouths were mere inches apart, separated only by the bill of the baseball cap. Jake breathed in the warm, female scent of her. “What are we going to do?”
“It’s not a disaster.” He lost himself in the depths of her ocean blue eyes. Jake faintly heard the click and whir of the camera as they talked in low tones. “We’ll take care of this. We’ll get an annulment,”
“We most certainly cannot. We…you know,” she whispered.
“Lilah.”
“I won’t lie.” Her brows puckered into a frown. “It’s a sin.”
“Christ, Lilah. It’s for a good cause.”
“What cause?”
He looked straight at her. “I don’t want to be married.” He didn’t. It was true. After his fiancée had left him, he realized getting married was wrong for him. It would never be right.
When hurt flit through her eyes, Jake squashed the guilt. It was her idea to enter the stupid contest in the first place.
“Here’s a news flash, Jake,” she said fiercely. “I don’t want to be married to you either. You’re all wrong for me.”
The barb struck home. Jake flinched inside. No one wanted him.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to be married to you, specifically. Marriage isn’t a good idea for me.”
Lilah frowned at that. Fortunately for Jake, the driver interrupted their heated quiet discussion.
“Most people don’t realize but even though they call this the French Quarter, most of the buildings are actually Spanish in design. The old quarter burned down in the year of the Lord, 1794.”
Philippe waved at a shopkeeper sweeping the sidewalk in front of his tobacco shop. “This
here’s the finest Tabanac in the city. Been in business since before the fire. Old John’s great-great grandpappy started that establishment.”
“A grand morning it is,” Old John called out. “Congratulations!”
They turned the corner and another shopkeeper stepped out of his doorway to wave at them. “Morning, Philippe.”
“Morning. This here’s the happy couple.”
“Ho there. Congratulations!”
And the ride went on. Steve snapped his pictures and everywhere they went, people congratulated them. They paused in front of Café Du Monde. A small Korean woman came running out and passed a bag of warm beignets to Jake. “Congratulations.”
“Does the entire city know we got married last night?” Lilah asked.
“Yep,” Steve answered cheerfully.
“Oh.”
Jake bit into fried heaven covered with powdered sugar. Damn these things were good. He glanced over at Lilah. She had the oddest look on her face. Jake held out the beignet. “Have some.”
“I can’t.” She eyed the beignet as if it were a snake.
“They’re really, really good.” He tried one more time. “Take just a bite. Come on. You’re on your honeymoon.”
Lilah looked as if she had an internal struggle going on. “Just one bite.” She opened her mouth reluctantly.
When her lips closed around the fried dough, Jake tried not to groan. When she chewed slowly, as if milking every last drop of pleasure from the one taste, he nearly did groan. And when she closed her eyes as she swallowed, with a look of pure pleasure on her face. He couldn’t help himself.
Jake leaned over, licked the powdered sugar off her mouth, and nibbled at her lips. After all they were married. At least until they got divorced. Jake’s eyes popped open.
He spoke against her mouth. “You’re not morally opposed to divorce, are you?”
Lilah’s eyes blinked open. “What?”
Jake pretended to nuzzle her ear. “If we can’t get an annulment, then we’ll get divorced.”
A sudden suspicious thought speared him. She couldn’t have engineered this for money. Could she? “Is this a ploy for money?”
“Pfft. I don’t want money. I want respectability.” Lilah dismissed his wild accusation without pause.
“Then I’ll call my lawyer and have him start working on it.”
“I wonder how long that takes.” Lilah fretted. “How long is an acceptable time to be married before you get divorced?”
“Twelve hours,” Jake quipped, trying to find humor somewhere in this.
“I’m serious. I need to do serious damage control,” she murmured. “This can’t adversely affect my job.”
“How could this affect your job?”
“Don’t you know what I do?”
Jake didn’t have a clue. “No.”
Great, Jake had no idea what her job was. “I’m a social worker. My specialty is counseling teens. Young, impressionable teens who are more likely to get pregnant, because they think they love some guy and drop out of school. I can’t be setting a bad example.” Like sleeping with a man seven hours after she met him. That was a bad example.
“Marrying me is a bad example?”
“Marrying you, then leaving you in a day is a bad example,” Lilah said patiently.
“I’m leaving you.”
“It still sets a bad example,” she insisted. “I’ll pretend to be madly in love with you.” A dubious look crossed her face. Jake tried to ignore the little stab of hurt at that look.
“You can leave right away. After all, you have no reason to stay in town. I’ll say we’re doing the long distance romance thing until we can straighten out where we’re going to live.”
She bit her bottom lip, as she analyzed all the angles. “In a few months, we can get divorced.” Lilah’s outlook brightened. It just might work.
“It won’t work,” Jake said flatly.
“Why not?”
“I’m not leaving right away.”
“You have to.”
“Lilah. I can’t.”
“Why not? You’re the town bad boy, everyone will believe it.” It wasn’t true, of course. He was actually a nice guy. He’d indulged her and look where it had landed him. In a huge mess. But he couldn’t possibly care. He’d always been the bad boy. And he’d left.
“Of course they’ll believe it. In a small town like Bloomington, you never outlive your youth.”
With that one sentence, he stopped her. He had to be wrong. You could change people’s perceptions of you. Wasn’t that what she struggled to do every day? To change the perceptions of others, to live up to the standards her father and aunt had drilled into her from day one. Then, his words penetrated.
“You do care what people think of you.”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
But he did. He didn’t deserve the label he had, and here she had gone just assuming things about him. Maybe she was assuming the wrong things. Maybe he had come home to change the town’s impression of him. “Why can’t you leave?”
“I promised my mother I would clean out their old house and get it ready for sale.”
Not the town. His mother. Oh, how she envied him. “Are you very close?”
Jake laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “No.”
He had to stay because of a promise he made to his mother. His mother with whom he wasn’t close at all.
Dear Lord, she’d screwed up his life.
It was okay, well not okay, exactly, when she screwed up her own life, but now she’d messed up Jake’s life. She had to come up with a way to help him.
“You need to stay in town.”
“Yeah. At least for a few weeks.”
Philippe pointed out Jax Brewery, formerly a brewery and now a giant shopping mall, and Lilah plotted how they were going to help each other. She studied Jake.
He glanced at her and she remembered how intense his eyes had been when he’d been about to fill her body with his. He’d been a forceful, passionate lover.
They could work with weeks. She could make the town see that he wasn’t a bad boy any longer. Then when he left, he could come home again.
“I know what we can do,” Lilah said slowly. “Actually it will solve two problems.”
“Christ, we have more than one?”
Lilah ignored him.
“What’s our second problem?”
“I don’t have a place to live.”
“What?”
“I was getting married.” Lilah realized she was supposed to be getting married today. In six hours, to be exact.
“And,” Jake prompted.
“I was moving in with Tom. As a matter of fact, I’d already moved all the possessions I wanted to his house.”
For a moment, Lilah flashed back to the last time she had seen Tom. A fresh stab of hurt pierced her organizational fog. How could he?
“Stay on the subject.” Jake’s voice was harsh, but he took her hand in his and squeezed her fingers gently.
“I rented out my aunt’s house to Peggy and her husband, Peter.”
Jake said, “So un-rent it.”
“I can’t do that,” Lilah said. “She’s about to have a baby.”
“Aren’t there more bedrooms?”
“She has three kids who are going to share the other two bedrooms.”
“Sleep on the sofa.” But he didn’t sound harsh, he sounded desperate. And his fingers were stroking her hand with long, slow caresses.
“Her mother’s coming to stay with her before and after the baby. There’s no room for me.”
“You have nowhere to live,” Jake said flatly.
“I can live with you.” She replied in a bold, confident voice and hoped he couldn’t see how nervous she was.
“You want to live with me?”
“Well it would certainly make my plan seem more credible.”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
Lilah turned to face him and saw amusement in h
is eyes not fear.
“What plan?”
“We’ll show the town you aren’t a wild boy anymore. Then when you leave, it will be okay for you to come back again.”
“I don’t care what the town thinks.” Besides, after he took care of the house, he wasn’t coming back again.
“Of course you do.”
Jake thought about arguing but it didn’t seem worth it. He was not going to live with her. Not even for an hour. When they got back to town, he’d make her see reason.
“And besides, this will help me.”
“How will this help you?”
“I’m not sure exactly yet. But I’ll have a place to stay and it shows I didn’t run off with you on a wild impulse.” A radiant smile lit her face. “It’s a good plan.”
Jake wasn’t about to mention that she had run off with him on a wild impulse. But her face told him he wasn’t going to get rid of her. He really didn’t want to cause trouble for Lilah. And he didn’t want to hurt her.
They rocked to a halt behind the Saint Louis Cathedral and in front of their hotel.
“So what do you think?” Lilah waited with her hands clasped, just as she’d waited last night for Jake to agree to sing. The event that had spiraled their entire history out of control. He should say no. He should.
But then he looked into her eyes and knew he was lost. He couldn’t say no. Not to her.
“Okay.”
“Great.” She grabbed his hands in hers. “You won’t regret—”
“Okay, guys. Give us one last smooch for the camera and we’re done.”
“—this.”
Jake bent his head intending to make it quick and light. Kissing Lilah was not good for his peace of mind. It would also make it difficult to get out of the carriage with a hard on as big as the statue behind them.
But, when his lips touched hers, he forgot everything and lost himself in her. Her arms came up to circle his neck and she threw herself into the kiss.
Jake knew there was a reason why this was a bad idea. But he couldn’t remember why just right now.
“Great, that’s a wrap. Thanks, guys.”
Steve’s words effectively doused the flame between them. Lilah pulled back from him, her eyes still heavy with passion. Jake wanted to groan. He wanted to swear. How was he ever going to live with her?
***