Tackled by the Team

by Sierra Sparks

  I hold onto the pumpkin necklace around my neck, nervous that we won’t make it on time and grateful that Nikki is reminding me. When I look back at the Prince, his fiancée is no longer there. One of his friends has his arm around him and is talking to him as he leads him over to the bar for a drink.

  “Must be a lover’s quarrel,” I murmur under my breath.

  “Or else maybe they broke up and he’ll be looking for a new Princess,” Sharon suggests. “If so, I volunteer.”

  “You’ll have to beat Sheila and Gloria away with a stick,” I tell her scornfully. “Their whole plan was to try to steal the Prince away tonight and him breaking up with his fiancée would just make it all the that much easier for them.”

  “No offense but— b-but— I don’t know what Paul was thinking when he hooked up with Sheila,” Sharon says, slurring her words and sounding a bit tipsy. “I know you think she’s so pretty but it’s just because she ha-has some strange power over you.”

  Yeah, the power of ruining my life forever and my not being able to do anything about it, I think.

  “B-but, well, she shouldn’t, because you’re wa-way prettier than her and you have a much better personality too,” she continues, sloshing her drink around. “It’s definitely Paul’s loss. You’ll find someone wa-way better.”

  “Thanks, Sharon,” I tell her.

  I know she’s drunk and she just means well. But I don’t want to think about Paul, nor do I want to think about my step sisters hooking up with this Prince even if he did just have a falling out with his fiancée. On that note, I decide they’re probably done in the bathroom now, so I say I’m going to head that way.

  But the line for the bathroom in the Ballroom is incredibly long and I don’t want to spend my last hour and a half standing behind a bunch girls who are asking each other— or, God forbid, me— if their hair became too frizzy and if that guy over there is looking at them. So, I make my way out to the hotel’s main lobby.

  Even though I grew up in Denver, and this resort isn’t too far away from where I live, I’ve never been here. It’s way too fancy for my budget and I don’t know anyone who could afford it. I know there has to be a bathroom in here but I don’t know where. I wander around until I see a lobby bar where I figure there has to be one.

  As I turn the corner, I step down some stairs leading to the bar area and run almost right smack into Prince Charming himself. His hair looks disheveled as if he’s been running his hands through it and his eyes are red as if he’s been crying, or maybe just drinking too much. In fact, the bartender had just brought him a drink but she scurries away when she sees me approach, probably because she erroneously assumes that we’re together.

  I look up into the Prince’s grass-green eyes and then lower them but then I’m staring right at his scorching hot body, wishing that the bartender’s assumption had been correct. Even though it’s nothing at all like me, I seem to be spellbound in the Prince’s majestic presence.

  How I wish I was marrying this guy tomorrow, instead of just dressed up like Gothic Cinderella, getting ready to hurry back to my evil step mother and step sisters. If only my life really was a fairy tale.

  Chapter 9 – Gregory

  There are quite a few things a groom might expect to hear from his best man on the night before his wedding. Things such as “I’m so fucking happy for you, Dude,” “Thank you for having me by your side,” or, if he’s the sentimental type, maybe “I’m so glad I can support you in this journey.”

  Hell, some best men that double as jokesters, like my best man Kevin is known to be, might say something like “How’s it feel to be living the last free day of your life?” Or “Let me know how you feel about her after she becomes your old ball and chain.”

  There’s one thing you really don’t expect your best man to say on such an occasion, though, and that would be what Kevin just told me.

  “I fucked your fiancée.”

  Of course, he didn’t say it exactly like that. He was more hesitant and self-preserving about it. The prick.

  What he actually said was: “Gregory, pal, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not to tell you this, buddy. People have advised me not to. But it’s been eating me alive and I figured it’s better to tell you now rather than later. Meredith and I slept together.”

  “What the fuck?” I’d exploded.

  I would’ve hit him on the head if there weren’t so many people around. That’s probably why he timed his little confession to be in public, even if the occasion was my rehearsal dinner party.

  “You slept with her? How could you? And when?”

  He gave me a deer in the headlights look, as if he wasn’t anticipating follow-up questions to his bombshell announcement.

  “Which question should I answer first?” he finally asked.

  “You’re so fucking unbelievable,” I said.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” he sputtered. “You know how it is. We were all on that trip for your singles’ tour around the States…”

  “No, I don’t know how it is,” I’d told him. And then I said, “Wait, back up. That’s when it happened? Way back then? And that’s where it happened?”

  “Well,” he’d stammered, and from the way he was responding, it dawned on me that I’d been asking the wrong question. Maybe I should have asked where didn’t it happen.

  “So, this whole time, ever since then, she’s never told me that after she hooked up with me she also hooked up with you, but then she stayed with me and had a really good weekend with me? Fuck!”

  “I guess,” Kevin answered, looking down at the floor like the pussy that he is. “I mean, it didn’t exactly stop right then…”

  “What?!” I exploded all over again. “How long did it last?”

  “Well, you know I had to come here on royal business a couple months ago…”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You’ve seen her more recently than I have?”

  “Yeah,” he continued. “And then we got here, you hit the sack early, so…”

  “What the fuck!”

  Now he could stop telling me the answers to my questions, I’d thought. Apparently, I didn’t really want to know all of that.

  “I had motion sickness from the plane!” I protested. “I had to go lie down.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess she was kinda bored…”

  “You are the worst friend I’ve ever had,” I told him. “I can’t believe you agreed to be my best man when you are fucking my fiancée. She seems almost as much your fiancée as mine by this point!”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Kevin said, sheepishly. “I wasn’t even quite sure that you’d… you know, like, care? Remember when we shared that girl on our backpacking trip throughout Europe?”

  “That was completely different,” I told him. “We were nineteen fucking years old. We were never going to see that girl again.”

  “Well, that’s all I thought that this is going to be, too,” he said. “It’s not like you’re the type to settle down so I was even planning to tell you about it and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, she’s the one, she’s my new princess!’ and I was like, thinking, ‘well, now I sure can’t fucking tell him.’”

  “Well you sure kept doing it,” I told him. “You didn’t feel that bad, you didn’t have much of a guilty conscience… to just, like, fucking stop.”

  “True,” he said, wringing his hands. “But, still, I mean, you know… This is all just some fake thing. It’s not like you really love her anything.”

  That’s when I looked in his eyes and did my best to refrain from punching him, or crying. But the truth of the matter is: Kevin was right. I didn’t love her. I’ve never loved anyone. I was just doing this to make my family happy. I guess she was just doing it to be a princess. As I’d already said, who wouldn’t?

  I suppose I got caught up in trying to prove to my mom that I had made the right choice in someone to marry, when clearly, I hadn’t. This is probably a good thing thi
s didn’t last.

  Except, what am I going to do about tomorrow? My mom will be so hurt if I don’t go through with this plan to make our family look good for the rest of the Kingdom.

  After that unpleasant exchange, I went and found Meredith and had an even worse one with her. She seemed to think it was all fun and games, and that she was free to do whatever until we were officially and royally hitched.

  “Fuck that,” I’d told her. “When did we ever say that? How do I know you wouldn’t keep running around after we had gotten married?”

  “What are you saying, Gregory?” she’d asked me, tears welling in her eyes, starting to beg me. “I was going to give up my whole life for you. My acting career. To move to the middle of nowhere to be your wife…”

  “Yeah, well it’s not the middle of nowhere,” I’d told her. “For the tenth time, it’s off the coast of Latvia and Estonia, in the Baltic Sea. And you are so full of promises of what you were going to give up for me, but you’re also full of shit, because you couldn’t even give up not fucking my best man. Get out of here before I tell everyone in here what you did to me.”

  That worked. She clearly cared what people thought, just like my mom, but not enough to not screw around on me. She’d left and I was standing there alone like an idiot but I didn’t even care because I was glad she was gone.

  George, one of my groomsmen, took me to the bar to buy me a shot, but I was still in a blind rage. That was a few minutes ago, and I’m still feeling that way. I also need to figure out what I’m going to do.

  So here I am by myself wanting to have another drink but in a secluded bar, never wanting to go back to see all of those people again. I especially don’t want to have to see my mom right now.

  I sip my whiskey sour while I think about what to do. I can’t let down my mom, my poor sick dad, and the whole royal family tree. Possibly the whole fucking country, as small and obscure as it may be.

  I need to figure something out, some way to fix things. I sit my drink down and order another one because I know that sooner or later I’ll have to go back and face reality and I might as well do it with some liquid courage.

  I decide I have to go through with things anyway. No one even knows what my fiancée looks like. Tonight was a fucking costume party. She’s never been to my country and we were very careful to keep pictures of us from being splattered all over the tabloids when we were together. I agreed to it as part of the deal with my mom. And I hate the damn paparazzi anyway.

  So, I just have to find a girl. A replacement bride. A pretend princess.

  I’m sure that just like Meredith wanted to, almost any girl would jump at the chance to be a princess, even if it was a fake princess of sorts. That’s what Meredith would’ve been anyway.

  I just need to find a girl. Any girl will do.

  And as the waitress returns with my next drink, one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen climbs down the stairs in a funky dress that looks half dirty and half sparkling gorgeous, and she runs right into me.

  That’s my girl, I think to myself, and I revise my earlier plan in my head. Not just any girl will do. It’s clear to me now.

  Looking at her hourglass shaped figure and her gorgeous blue eyes, I know that it has to be this girl. She’s going to be my fake bride. My princess. I just have to convince her to stand in at my royal wedding, which is set to occur in under twenty-four hours.

  Chapter 10 – Gregory

  “Are… are you okay?” the gorgeous stranger in the funky dress asks, looking into my eyes. “Did something happen?”

  I’m taken aback at first, thinking, how does she know something happened.

  And then I remember I’m the fucking Prince of Ambrosia, who is the guest of honor at this party, and everyone probably saw me fighting with the other guest of honor, my fiancée. Make that ex fiancée.

  Of course this girl knows who I am. Of course she’s asking if something happened, since I’m at a bar alone instead of on the dance floor with my fiancée at our fucking rehearsal dinner party.

  This girl immediately puts a hand over her beautiful full lips and says “Oh, I mean, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just…”

  “You didn’t expect to find me here, in this state,” I finish for her and then I reach out and take her hand.

  It’s a bold move but it feels right so I just go with it and she doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Exactly,” she says. “I thought you’d be in there with your…”

  At this point she pulls her hand away from mine, as if remembering the purpose of tonight’s gathering.

  “My ex fiancée?” I ask her, unable to resist a smile.

  What just went down was a shit show, but seeing this stranger’s pretty face makes everything feel better. I guess I feel a bit relieved, like I’m out of the trap that I was just in.

  I don’t know what my plan will be from here – my mother will obviously be expecting Meredith to come back to Ambrosia with me soon – but I’ll fucking figure it out. I feel that having this gorgeous creature’s bright smile flashing at me right now makes everything okay.

  “Ex fiancée?” she asks, her face crunching up into a look that says get out of here. “Since when?”

  She probably thinks I’m some douchebag trying to cheat on my fiancée for one last night of freedom before my wedding. That might have been the old me— I used to be a douchebag player— but unlike Meredith, once I’d gotten engaged I’d intended to honor my commitments, and I had. Too bad— or maybe not, I think, as I look at this stranger’s impressive cleavage— she couldn’t do the same.

  “Since our very public fight I’m sure you and everybody else in there witnessed,” I tell her. “It’s over. Whatever we had, and I guess it wasn’t very much, is gone for good.”

  “I don’t understand,” she says, and I signal the bartender to bring another whiskey sour.

  “Join me for a drink,” I offer. “I’ll explain everything.”

  She hesitates and I realize she was probably on her way to the bathroom. Why else would anyone be wandering around here instead of at the party? I feel stupid.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m sure if you have business to attend to, you could always go and then come back…”

  Fuck. How awkward. How do you tell a girl she can go piss and then come back to hear the story about what your evil fiancée did to you on the night of your wedding rehearsal party?

  But she laughs and sits down in the booth. She’s obviously expecting me to sit down across from her but I sit down beside her, my leg almost touching hers.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I was just wondering what time it is.”

  “Ten thirty,” I tell her. “You came out here to look for a clock?”

  “No,” she laughs, and I love the way her soft chuckle sounds. “You were right the first time. I was on my way to the restroom but I think it was just to get out of that place for a while. I mean— “There’s her hand to her lips again, a gesture that I’m really digging because it’s so damn cute, and also sexy because it’s where I wish I was— “I didn’t mean that to sound that way at all. I really liked your event celebrating your… Former engagement…”

  At this, we both laugh, because it’s fucking hilarious.

  “It’s just that I’m not the most social person and sometimes I need to just go wander around by myself for a while.”

  I look to my side to meet her eyes, and wink.

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  I take her hand under the table and the bartender brings her drink.

  “I’ve never had one of these before,” she says, laughing.

  Something in the way she says it lets me know there’s a lot of things she hasn’t done before. And I want to be the one to change that.

  “Well, if you don’t like it I’m happy to help you drink it or I’ll order you something else, whatever you’d like,” I tell her. “But I figured the least I could do since I’m unburdening myse
lf upon a beautiful, unsuspecting girl like you, is to order you a drink.”

  I squeeze her hand and she squeezes mine back so I take the liberty of placing my hand on her thigh. Her leg jumps a little bit, but in a good way, like she’s happy and antsy for something else to happen, and so am I.

  “So, when you said that she and you never really had anything…” she continues, taking a sip of her drink. She pauses and a smile crosses her face. “This is good.”

  “I know about a lot of good things,” I tell her.

  She takes another sip and then says, “So, is this like an arranged marriage gone bad?”

  She shakes her head and then adds, “I didn’t even know those things are allowed to go bad. But I guess they naturally might. I don’t know how any of this works.”

  “Me neither,” I tell her. “This was a kind of fake arranged marriage, yeah, you could put it that way. But I had some choice in the matter of who I picked, not really when though. So, I figured why not pick the one who’s the life of the party? But now I see I should've gone for someone more like me. A bit more private than that. Someone who wants simpler things.”

  “Simpler things?” She chuckles, nearly spitting out her drink. It’s so damn adorable. “You’re a prince.”

  “I know,” I blush, because it was a stupid thing for me to say. I hold her chin by its little dimple in the middle and move it up so that her eyes look at mine. “But just because I’m a prince doesn’t mean I don’t want certain things.”

  “What kind of things?” she asks.

  “This,” I say, and our lips so are so close that I can almost catch her breath with mine.

  “This what?” she presses.

  “Oh, a girl that I really want to be with instead of one that I have to marry,” I tell her.

  “So why do you have to marry her?” she asks.

  Without moving my face, I signal to the bartender to order two more drinks.

  “In case you’re wondering,” I tell her, in a near whisper, because I’d heard it was a real problem in America, and everyone was always asking me how I was getting home whenever I went out and had drinks, “I’m staying at the hotel, so I don’t have to drive anywhere. And, I don’t even know how to drive anyway since I’m a Prince and someone always gives me a ride.”