Legally Wedded (Legally in Love Book 3)

by Griffith, Jennifer

  “If this is how you do serious, I’m all for it.” He didn’t miss a beat, leaning over her to kiss her some more. “I’ll take serious all day every day.” And he went back to his work, this time on her ear, until her stomach growled, and he stopped for a moment. She’d only had a single bite of her bagel before their distraction. “You didn’t get to eat yet, though. I’m being selfish.”

  The truth was, she probably couldn’t eat a bite, not with all her chemistry mixing the way it was right this moment, but she took the breather to say, “I have a present for you, too.”

  This present would take courage—much more courage than she ever planned on mustering before she’d gone on that Tuesday afternoon’s shopping trip to the bridal section of the department store with Tory—who’d pressured her and pressured her until Morgan finally snapped and bought the daring thing. She’d told herself she’d only give it to him if she was statistically confident he would accept. Morgan wasn’t statistically sure he would, but she was sure he was more likely at this moment than he may ever be. She heard herself emitting a high, nervous laugh, even as she went upstairs to retrieve the present. She’d bought him some cologne, a kind she knew he would smell amazing in, but she’d give that to him later, and from the deepest recesses of the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, she extracted the small gift that said Josh on the tag in her best handwriting. Her skin was buzzing. Would he understand the implications? Would he accept them? Or would he take her aside, apologize, and let her down easy?

  Whatever the outcome, she knew she had to take the risk. She glanced up at the huge portrait of the two of them hanging over the bed. We’re right together. We have been all along. And it steeled her nerves. Bring on the rejection, if need be, but she had to know. She peeked inside the lid of the box and saw the lace of the bridal garter. Would he even get what she was giving him? What if she had to explain it to him? Nah, he’d get it. Her breathing was shallow. If he rejected her, he rejected her. But he might take what I’m giving. And then her whole life would change. One more cleansing breath for courage and she turned on her heel to go make her present and face her fate.

  But the doorbell rang. Dang it! Horrid timing! She hung back, courage draining away, clarity coming back to her that this was too risky, that she was jeopardizing their whole friendship, everything they’d built. And then she heard Josh’s voice float up the stairwell as it exclaimed—

  “Brielle?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Josh stood rooted to the spot, cold wind blowing into the house, chilling his face, his body, and his chemistry. He reflexively wiped the side of his mouth where he knew raspberry lip gloss probably lingered like a petroleum spill. He could still taste Morgan on his tongue, feel the ghost of her in his arms. And yet, this other ghost he’d almost forgotten now stood before him.

  “Joshua! Merry Christmas! I’m here! Home!” She smiled wide and stepped into the foyer in her tall boots and her suede jacket, curls jutting out from beneath her winter hat. Her arms were laden with packages, and Josh took a few as they toppled from her arms, catching them before they fell. “Thanks, Josh. Good catch! Man, I’m so glad I finally tracked you down. Weren’t you living in that place closer to the beach when I left?” She craned her head back to gape at the ceilings, the walls, the large kitchen. “What’d you do, win the lottery? This place reminds me of one of the palaces of the Bavarian prince I met while I was in Germany. You must be doing very well for yourself. You get a new job or something?”

  In no time, her jacket was off and draped over a chair. Brielle set her bags down on the long table with Morgan’s frog on it as decoration, narrowly missing the half-eaten bagel spread with purple cream cheese that he hadn’t let hungry Morgan finish because he was too hungry for her. Now he thought he might never eat again, his throat and stomach were so tight.

  “Uh, no. I’m, uh, still working at the water treatment plant.” He took a nervous glance up the stairs to where he figured Morgan was still getting his present, possibly hearing this whole conversation, and set the remainder of Brielle’s things on the kitchen counter.

  “You took a second job, then? Like, as a bookie? Because this place is beyond, way beyond.” Brielle was walking to the china cabinet, opening it and fingering the gold-rimmed dishes. “I mean. Wow, Josh. When you said you were going to prepare for when I came back, I had no idea you’d go so lavish for me.”

  Every word from her mouth was a harder punch in his gut.

  He pulled an anemic smile when she sauntered toward him. “I’m impressed,” she said, lifting an eyebrow. “Now, be serious about how this happened. I saw the word Hyatt over the front door, so I know I’m in the right place. What happened, did Bronco not only write you back into the will and give you a lump sum up front to buy this mansion? Like two million dollars? Because this palace didn’t come cheap.”

  Was that how much this real estate was worth? He’d never dared try to put a value on Seagram’s Campus House, but leave it to Brielle to appraise its price immediately. He shook his head. “No, Bronco and I are still barely on speaking terms.”

  Brielle laughed. “Oh, it’s moved to barely now, has it? Well, that’s a giant step forward.”

  Yeah, all thanks to Morgan and her magic. Josh felt himself turning into a wet rag being twisted, twisted, and twisted dry.

  Brielle came and draped her arms around his neck. “I have to know. This is killing me. You were crazy rich all along and holding out on me, weren’t you?” She pressed her nose against his chin, then against his cheek, the way she always used to for signaling she was ready to kiss him.

  Josh needed at least a minute before he was ready to kiss Brielle, though. He cleared his throat, backing away a little and letting his arms drop. “This place belongs to a friend of my mother’s. He’s letting me—” Josh almost said us “—live here for this semester and next.”

  Brielle’s eyes did a double-pop. “Wow, generous.” She looked around some more, apparently not daunted in the least by his casual snub of her affections, but that was true to type for Brielle. “Too bad it’s not permanent. A girl could get used to digs like this. Super generous.”

  “Right? I was shocked when he offered.” At least that part was true. He went to the table and took a bite of the bagel, which lodged in his throat. Josh wasn’t sure where in the house was safe to go with her—so many touches of Morgan were everywhere. Confusion had him on the rack, at high-speed stretch.

  Brielle’s phone rang in her jacket pocket. She checked the face of it. “Sorry. Gotta get this.” She spoke into it, saying, “Fröhliche Weinachten, mein schatz,” and she made kissy sounds in German. It gave Josh a chance to think.

  What he wanted to do was run upstairs, tell Morgan everything was going to be okay, to not worry, and he would take care of everything. But then his head said, Dude. This is everything you’ve been waiting for. Brielle was here, affectionate, happy, bringing presents. She came to him for the holiday, sought him out even when he knew he was hard to find. She finally, definitely wanted him. He’d waited three long years for this moment and had jumped through more flaming hoops than a circus dog did in a year.

  Well, he assumed that was why Brielle had come—to make things right with him.

  It was such crappy timing. Just when yesterday happened, just when he finally knew what he was going to do about (and with) Morgan, which direction he’d take at the crossroads, kaboom, Brielle came and exploded the whole intersection, giving him a concussion and a ringing in his ears. Maybe a little vertigo.

  Over by the kitchen counter, Brielle spoke in animated German into the phone. Her curls bounced as she nodded, her tiny frame wiry and strong against the stone countertop, her fingers drumming. Always in motion, always on high. Brielle. She was intensity incarnate.

  And she had come back to him.

  It shouldn’t surprise him so much, he guessed. The day she’d left him in the airport, she’d been a little evasive, but she’d never been vague about her l
ong term plans with Josh—she’d wanted him, the grown-up version of him that she saw through her periscope to the future. The lens of her life was always a hundred percent in focus, and Josh’s had been, too, when he’d looked through hers. It was only when he started living with Morgan that he’d picked up a wide-angle lens and started seeing other things come into view.

  Josh could tell Brielle’s phone conversation was winding down, even though it was in German and he didn’t know anything but ja and nein. She was pacing back and forth, and suddenly he noticed she didn’t return to the kitchen but took a beeline for the library, where the Christmas tree and all the filming setup was still in place. When she saw it, she about dropped her phone and had to bobble it against her ear. She signed off the call fast.

  “Josh! Look at this place. It looks professionally decorated. What the heck? It’s gorgeous. It looks like a woman’s touch has been here.”

  “The housekeeper helped.” Helped Morgan, his wife, he should say. But he wasn’t sure even whether it needed to be brought up, let alone how to broach the topic. This whole scenario with Brielle dropping in unannounced wasn’t in the plan. The plan was Brielle would reappear exactly when Josh and Morgan were ready to annul the marriage at the end of the school year and no harm would be done, and Brielle either wouldn’t need to know, or else she’d admire him for his scheming ingenuity, especially when she found out he’d been faithful to her throughout the sham marriage. That was how it was supposed to play out. Not Brielle showing up just after Josh had gotten all hot and bothered over Morgan in that tight blue sweater and put his mouth all over her skin and smeared his whole face with her raspberry lips to the point he was ready to chuck the whole idea of the sham marriage, of the foreign diplomat life with Brielle, of even remembering Brielle’s name, and make the fake marriage a real one.

  Either this woman had the worst or the best timing ever, depending on how things turned out in the end. Either this was a crisis averted between him and the woman he’d always envisioned for himself, or a crisis created between him and the woman he might be discovering he was really falling for. Getting serious about, Morgan had said.

  The fight or flight instinct ratcheted to ten now. “What do you say we go for a drive? I have a new car.”

  “That, too? Nice upgrade. Bronco Hyatt’s son shouldn’t be driving a junker.” Brielle followed him out through the kitchen’s door to the garage where she had a series of spasms over the Land Rover and Morgan’s vintage De Tomaso Mangusa.

  “Housekeeper, mansion, two car garage of luxury vehicles? Josh! You’ve been holding out on me. Why didn’t you write and tell me all this good news?”

  Josh let her in, and then he went around and slid into the driver’s side of the Land Rover, even though she clearly was salivating over the Italian sports car.

  “You told me not to,” was all he could say. He would have said, I did write—about thirty times. The letters are upstairs in my desk, but he wasn’t sure about them at this precise moment. Also upstairs was Morgan, and she had prepared a thoughtful gift for him, and he had been waiting for it with almost held breath. He gave a last glance at the door to the house as he pulled out of the garage, signing a silent apology to Morgan, not sure what was going to happen next.

  “Oh, pish. You should have found a way. At least an email, man.” She pushed his arm, and they rolled out of the driveway, away from the house where he could breathe again, and off to where he hoped a drive down the coast would reset his vision. What was he going to do?

  ***

  Morgan chucked the box at the back of her closet, tempted to go and stomp it just to make sure it would die—just like her self-confidence and her dream of finally being something real to Josh Hyatt. Tears burned her eyes, and a stinging hit every nerve in her sinuses. She had to swallow hard not to hiccup as she inhaled against the impending crying.

  Where had that woman come from? Worst Christmas surprise of all time. Far worse than the Christmas surprise when Mom had told them Dad had left. Even at six, Morgan had seen that coming and almost felt relieved by it, knowing she wouldn’t miss Mom’s crying because he was so inconsistent in his support of them.

  Morgan stepped into the bathroom and splashed cool water on her face, hoping to lower the chance of tears, but it was useless. They were coming, and her eyes were rimmed red, making the blue of them all glossy.

  Ugh. And she’d even put on raspberry lip gloss for him this morning because he said he liked it. The tube still sat on the countertop, and she tossed it in the trash, where she hoped he’d see it, accusing him.

  She paced the room in her bare feet, wishing she’d hear him slam the door and yell through the front window at that girl, “And don’t come back, you hear?” Then Josh would come loping up the steps, take her in his arms and say, “Darling, I was only waiting until I’d told that wench where to go, so I could finally give you all of me.”

  But it didn’t happen. Instead, after a few minutes, she heard the door to the garage open and shut, and then she heard a car pull out. A glance out the window of her own bedroom showed Josh driving away in his new jeep thing with Brielle Dupree at his side (what Morgan could see of her), the girl all animated and making happy hand gestures as they went.

  She knew if she threw up, it would only be dry heaves, since she hadn’t eaten. Nothing was worse than dry heaves. She couldn’t let herself get that upset—even though the emotion of this eclipsed the time her mother informed her about the reception and Morgan hurled at Dr. Carol’s class.

  The prof had accused her of being pregnant. Ha. The single syllable laugh came out bitter, reflecting how instantly her own husband had rejected her the very second his old flame came waltzing in. He’d left Morgan so much colder and more alone than he’d found her, since now she knew the meaning of heat and having someone in her life. Someone real.

  Or someone she’d thought was real.

  From somewhere in the house, she heard her phone chime a text. Dragging herself to find it, Morgan exhaled. It was from Tory.

  What happened when you gave him the surprise? Come on, tell me. It changes everything, right?

  Morgan sighed one of those shuddering, post-crying sighs. Everything had changed, all right, but not in the way Tory meant.

  Morgan could feel her tongue tying in a knot, her soul hollowing out, her mind sinking into the Conversation Coma. Even if Josh came right back, she knew she’d never be able to talk to him, to tell him the things she was thinking.

  Writing something down might help her sort things out in her mind. She couldn’t write well, but at this point she could write better than she could speak. She knew the kitchen pretty well by now, and that there was nothing to write on there other than the backs of envelopes in the cupboard for bills. She began a search of the master bedroom for something tucked away. Nothing was in any of the dresser drawers or the cabinet. She checked her own bedroom and found a small pad of sticky notes in the desk, but those wouldn’t work. The next two bedrooms had nothing useful, either. It felt awkward, but Josh’s room had the biggest desk in the whole upstairs, so she sneaked in and tugged at the center drawer. Nice pen. She snagged that. The right side drawer had a good stack of stationery, and she slipped a leaf of it out of the sheaf. Then her eye landed on another stack of papers just behind it, bundled with a string.

  Morgan knew she should tear her eyes away from the top page. Nothing on earth sanctioned the reading of someone else’s private letters, especially when they were tucked at the back of a drawer. Her hand trembled and her fingers dropped the pen, while her other hand gripped the stationery too tightly, crinkling it.

  My love.

  That’s how the letter started.

  I think of so many things we’ve experienced together, from laughter and kisses to heartache and stress, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather go through them with than you.

  Sledgehammers slammed Morgan right between her eyes and square in her gut simultaneously. This was exactly what she deserve
d for prying into private documents—pain, excruciating pain. Tears she thought she’d cried out, sprang anew, like a geyser, pouring down her cheeks. She slammed the door shut and fled to her room, put on her shoes and grabbed her car keys. For the first time since Siggy offered her the car, she was grateful it was something with incredible power because she needed to slam that gas pedal to the floor and scream down the coastal highway, away from here, away from all this pain.

  ***

  “It’s so pretty here in winter.” Brielle threw her arms wide, as if embracing the whole landscape of the ocean and forest. “Stuff is still green and blue and pretty and—ugh. The snow in Germany fell and basically turned sooty immediately, at least in the part of the city I was in.”

  “What city were you in?” Josh didn’t even know that much. He had them touring down the coastal highway, heading south through the small towns. He might stop somewhere, but for now it felt safer for him to keep driving past the several scenic overlooks of the Pacific.

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? The East Berlin office. Huh, I could have sworn I read you in on all of that.”

  “No.”

  “Well, never mind. It’s just so great to be here. It’s a feast for the eyes. Want a granola bar?” She fished in her purse for a bit and pulled out two packages, offering Josh one. He shook his head. “It’s great to see the scenery, but it’s even better to see you. You can’t possibly guess how much I’ve missed you.” She rested her hand on his arm. Her fingers were cold and their temperature radiated into his skin, to his bones.

  Josh kept his eyes on the road. “That’s good to hear.” Her statement didn’t exactly quantify how much she’d missed him, but he didn’t press her. She was acting like he could have contacted her, and vice versa, had the occasion arisen. “Tell me about Germany.”