A Royal Surprise: ( BWWM Romance )

by Tiana Cole

  Part of the night came back, and he could hear her words in his head. Even muffled by time and booze they were clear enough. They weren’t exactly the words she told him now, and he wasn’t so sure she had wanted to call it a night, not seriously, but the gist was right. He’d definitely wanted to keep the evening from ending.

  “So I decided we get married?”

  “We were in a casino, playing machines here and there, and we came across Elvis. I was still telling you I needed to get home so I could work the next day. Suddenly you got the bright idea that if we got married, I wouldn’t have to work. My job would be to make you happy, and we could spend the rest of our lives screwing. When I suggested that might take some thinking about, well, you told me that you are a doer, a person who makes things happens.”

  “I am. Most of the time that’s a good thing.”

  “So you did make things happen. You said that a thing like that, getting married so we could have endless sex, had to be done tongue in cheek. I guess you had an attack of whimsy, and since it was all about having a good time, you decided Elvis was the perfect minister, although I’m not a huge fan of the late singer.”

  “And they videoed the ceremony?”

  “You paid extra for that option—as a memento of this solemn occasion.”

  “Do they keep a copy?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  He turned to her waving the DVD. “If this is the only copy, then I can destroy it and no one will ever see it.”

  She shrugged. “Except that you gave old Elvis permission to upload it to their website. While we watched, they added it to their playlist of happy couples they joined in matrimony.”

  “I told him he could that?”

  “Your words were, ‘Hell yeah. Go for it, Elvis.’”

  “So now it’s on the Internet, where anyone can see it.”

  “Yup.”

  The enormity of what had happened fell on James like a failed business deal. If Liang saw that video… “I wonder if I can get it taken down.”

  “It wasn’t that bad, you know,” she said. “The video, I mean. We kinda slurred our ‘I do’s and all, but otherwise it was just cornball.”

  “Cornball? Disaster is the word that comes to my mind.”

  She looked surprised. “What’s the problem?” He heard a note of real concern in her voice and when he looked at her, he could tell that she had no idea what the problem was.

  “I came to town for business. Yesterday I pitched a business deal to a very conservative man and tomorrow he is supposed to tell me his decision. No matter how this abrupt wedding came about, it doesn’t show conservative judgment on my part.”

  “He isn’t likely to run across it, especially before tomorrow. That doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d spend his day trolling through wedding chapel videos.”

  “No, but I have competitors who would happily point it out to him.”

  “How would they find it?”

  “Any number of ways. It’s common enough for companies to have interns who spend their day searching for their competitor’s names just in case something comes up that they can use for leverage. Or it could be…well, I’m still dealing with what happened last night to have time to create scenarios about what might happen.” He sighed. “If my name is attached to the video, they’ll probably find it and make sure he sees it.”

  She was looking more nervous now. “It isn’t like you did anything illegal.”

  “It’s about character. I doubt Shen Liang would consider a man who married a woman he’d just met, with Elvis presiding over the ceremony, was serious enough, was the kind of person he wanted to be in business with.” He rounded on her, feeling his anger building. He’d fucked up, big time. He had trouble believing he’d drunk enough to go off his rocker like that, but apparently he had, and there was a video to prove it. If his head hadn’t been pounding so much, maybe he could sort this out, turn his anger into something constructive, but that wasn’t the case.

  The girl he found in his bed this morning was partly to blame for all this. Maybe she hadn’t made him do anything, but she’d been the inspiration. Besides, there wasn’t anyone else to focus his anger on. “You encouraged me,” he told her. “You enticed me.”

  “So now I’m evil because you found me sexy?”

  “You didn’t have to go along with it.”

  She laughed. “You are allowed to exercise what you are calling bad judgment, but I’m not? Why can’t I be stupid too? And if you didn’t want to marry me, you didn’t have to suggest it and you could have stopped it at any point.” She looked away.

  “Maybe it won’t be a total disaster. I wonder if these marriages are made public anywhere besides the government archives and Elvis’s website.”

  She frowned. “I don’t remember the name of the casino, but the chapel you picked is affiliated with that big one that has a circus in it. I noticed that they post the names of the bride and groom and clips from videos on a screen in casino to attract more business. That’s where you first saw it, how you knew about it.”

  James dropped his face in his hands and let out a low groan that combined pain and frustration. That was the casino Liang was staying at.

  * * * *

  Deja was a lousy liar. Lousy by temperament and lousy due to a lack of practice. She’d never gotten away with lying and didn’t like lies or liars, so she was just as glad. Most of the time that removed any temptation to do it. She preferred saying only things she believed to be true. It was okay to be wrong about something, but not to lie. For most of her life she’d considered that an asset. Everyone who knew her quickly learned that when she said anything, she was telling. As a result, she had no poker face at all.

  At the moment, that lack made her situation somewhat dangerous. Not that she was in any physical danger, at least she didn’t think she was, but if James asked her the right questions, the truth would probably all come pouring out, along with tears and recriminations and massive regrets. If he probed, it wouldn’t take him any time at all to realize that she’d skirted the facts, never quite lying, except by omission. That was why she mostly let him work out the story himself. It gave her a chance to skip over things that she didn’t want him to know. It wasn’t telling the whole story and she couldn’t let him know the whole story—that would end her chance to do what needed doing. It would all have been for nothing.

  But it galled her. Living a lie, even if she wasn’t actually lying, was a balance beam she didn’t much like walking. She didn’t want to get good at skirting the truth but she needed to do it well now—for an entire week. That was the deal.

  She couldn’t lie, but she could lead him to the conclusions that suited her. Because he was a strong man, a person who made things happen, it was easy to convince him that he was responsible for most of what happened. That he insisted on them happening. While that was true to a large extent, the whole truth, as they said in court, was that there was more to it than that. She had urged him on. She had helped spin things to her advantage and helped him reach the conclusions she wanted him to reach, and make the decisions that wound up with them married. She’d deliberately manipulated the man.

  She exaggerated her own foggy thinking. She hadn’t had more than a few sips of alcohol during the entire evening but had made him think she was drunk. She didn’t much care for alcohol, and doing her job was hard enough with her head clear. Part of the truth was that she’d known his judgement was impaired. When push came to shove, if she hadn’t been working him, she wouldn’t have married him. Saying no would have been rather simple.

  Now, hearing his concerns, she realized she’d been lied to. There had to be a lot more going on that evening than she’d known about.

  The problem was that everything she knew about James and what was going on came from Alan McCabe. He’d met her at the hospital when she was waiting for the nurse to finish with Barbara. He came up to her and acted profoundly sympathetic, especially about her need for mone
y. Then he’d said they could help each other.

  “It’s a prank,” he’d said.

  “How can I help you with prank?”

  “My buddy is in town. He’s working on a business deal, but he’s working far too hard. It’s going to ruin his health. Some of his other friends and I think he needs a wakeup call. He needs to learn a lesson about that kind of overdoing. See, it will affect his judgment, and sooner or later he’ll want to blow off steam. Who knows what will come of that?”

  “What sort of lesson?”

  “We let him see what happens in a controlled way. We want to show him what could happen if he doesn’t slow down. And you, my lovely, are the key to the prank. You will seduce him, and get him to marry you. I’ve got it all worked out.”

  “Marry him?”

  Alan’s smile wasn’t reassuring. “Yes.”

  When he spelled it out, the plan sounded innocuous enough. The basic idea was to have James wake up, finding himself married. “It has to be a real marriage,” Alan pointed out. “He’ll check.”

  The next morning, Alan would pretend to sympathize, and his friends would give him contradictory advice, while they had big laughs at his expense. To ensure that he got the message, she would need to stay married to him, keep him from finding out about the prank for seven days. The point was to watch him thrash about, trying to figure out how to extricate himself. She was supposed to make him think she wasn’t going to go away quietly. They wanted him to sweat.

  After a week of that, they’d let him in on the joke and the marriage would be annulled. He’d learn his lesson; what was done would be undone, and life would go on.

  “You need fifty thousand dollars, don’t you?”

  There had been no sense in denying it. “Yes.”

  “That’s what I’ll pay you.”

  “This prank is worth that much money?”

  “It is. I’ll give you a thousand dollars the next morning, and the rest at the end of the week.”

  It was wrong, but being so desperate for money kept her from examining the ethics of the deal too closely. All she could see was getting the money. That she’d have to agree to sleep with a man she’d never met bothered her, but not having the money bothered her more. How could she turn her back on the only solution to her problem?

  Now things didn’t seem so simple. Hearing that their insane marriage threatened a major business deal told her she’d been kept in the dark. There was far more to things than Alan had told her.

  Some of what Alan said had been accurate. He claimed to be James’s friend and they’d come in the club together. Later James had told her the same thing. In fact, everything Alan had said about James seemed to fit. He admitted he was a workaholic. He did need to cut loose.

  But Alan had neglected to mention a business deal that he certainly had to know about. That set off alarms. If she was being used to skewer James…well, she liked him, and that was a terrible thing to do. It might even be criminal.

  Business law wasn’t something she knew anything about, or cared to know. Then, she’d thought he was drunk, but in the light of day, seeing him come back to himself, as it were, she wasn’t so sure that’s all it was. And his sexual stamina didn’t fit either.

  Worse, regardless of Alan’s motives, regardless of whether it had been intended as a joke or a business ploy, she felt guilty as hell. She’d participated in a con and she felt a powerful rush of shame for what she’d done. Yes, James had been all over her that night. He’d been incredibly horny and eager—he’d wanted to fuck her. She’d told the truth about all that. What pained her was that she hadn’t mentioned how she’d encouraged him. She left out the fact that she’d made a point of exciting him, brushing her hip and ass against his crotch when they danced, and blown kisses at him.

  And then, when he put her back against the wall and kissed her, just as she told him, she had reached down to unzip his pants. Leaving that out put it all on him, but when he’d hiked her dress up, she’s already taken his hard cock out of his pants and was stroking him. And when he buried his face in her neck, she’d hissed in his ear that she wanted him to fuck her. And he had. It had been exciting, almost sinful the way he took her against that wall.

  But she’d encouraged him, wanted him to fuck her because of the money, and that made it shameful. That lovely money, the money she had to have, changed what might have been a wonderful night into a job.

  If the girl Alan left with that night was a hooker, and Deja was quite sure she was, she hadn’t been the only woman taking money for sex. What Deja had done with James wasn’t any different at all. This morning, when so many truths were coming out, the realization that she’d played whore hit her full force. She’d pretended that wasn’t what it was, but what it all came down to was deliberately seducing him because she’d been paid to. Her head games didn’t matter. That she’d managed to convince herself that she wasn’t doing that at all didn’t change the reality, and it didn’t even matter that before she had sex with him, she’d already decided she liked him.

  Confronting that particular truth made her feel sick. Her motive, getting Alan’s money, tainted everything. It even poisoned the memories of the wonderful sex they’d had after they were married. She’d only agreed to do all this because it was supposed to be a prank, but now she didn’t seem to even have that to shield her judgment of herself. All of it was fake. Every last bit of it.

  And she had to maintain this falsehood.

  Having the truth come out would be a relief. Deja was almost as bad with secrets as she was with lies. They hurt people and she didn’t like having to keep them, even when they were well intended, like for a surprise birthday. Still, here she was, being paid to act out a lie. Even if she wasn’t telling one, the lie and the secret around it seemed to be getting darker.

  The pain of realizing that she’d married a man she didn’t know was intense. As absurd and surreal as the entire night had been, as much as it wasn’t supposed to be serious, she’d ended up legally married. They had gone through a legal ceremony and consummated the marriage. Annulling it later on didn’t make that much difference. She, Deja Fontaine, had gotten married.

  Her conscience screamed at her to tell him the whole story—put all her cards on the table and be done with it. Even if he hated her for what she’d done, having the truth out there, not having to pretend about any of it, she’d stop feeling bad about herself.

  The problem was the damn money. She needed it. It was a matter of life and death. Fifty grand was so little to these people. All she had to do was stay married for a week.

  Regrets were a waste, not to mention painful, but now she wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t stayed after he’d fallen asleep. What if she’d gotten him back to the room, let him screw her, then taken her clothes, the souvenir marriage folder, and every other sign she’d ever existed and disappeared. Then, after the week, she could show up and tell Alan to pay her.

  But she knew Alan wanted the world to know about the marriage. Something in his plan required they publicly humiliated James.

  And now she had to ask herself if there was a truth she hadn’t known. That it was all about a business deal and had nothing to do with a prank on a friend.

  She’d already realized that she was in over her head, and the prospect of it being part of a fraud sent a chill through her.

  Someone who couldn’t keep secrets or tell a lie had no business embarking on a life of crime, even white collar crime. No business at all. But when you stumbled into something like this, how did you back out?

  Looking at James’s face showed his distress clearly, and she was responsible for it. Was it even possible to make things right when they’d gone so wrong?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Making the call to Kieran Oliver was a frantic and, on reflection, ill-advised thing to do. It was stupid to call him while he was still upset, still unable to think clearly. And doing it while the woman was in the room listening probably hadn’t been his best
idea. He was going to talk about her, after all. Her presence would make an awkward call almost impossible.

  As he heard the phone ring, however, James felt that, given some of the decisions he’d made in the last twenty-four hours, making this call was nowhere near the worst. Not even in the same league.

  The painful part of making this call would be admitting to Kieran he’d been an ass. He’d have to explain how he’d accidentally gotten married. He had no reason to think the man would be sympathetic.

  And he wasn’t.

  “I think there is something terribly wrong with this connection. I can’t be hearing what I think I heard. Please repeat what you said. You did what?” the Irishman asked.

  “I got married.”

  Kieran’s laugh was hollow. “Married? What brought on that happy event, may I ask?

  “The truth is I’m not quite sure.”

  “You aren’t sure.”

  “It’s a bit of a blur and my head isn’t working.”

  “But you managed to find a woman willing to put up with your shitty manner long enough to get through dinner, and one you liked well enough to take to the altar. She must have low standards.”

  “We didn’t have dinner.”

  “Oh, well that explains everything.”

  The sarcasm stung. “We met last night, dancing.” He glanced at Deja and she nodded, being decent about him not remembering. “I was drunk.”

  “I would never have guessed. So you went drinking and dancing and wound up married to someone you don’t know.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Serves you right.”

  “Okay, I fucked up, Kieran.”

  “This part about you going out drinking and getting polluted? That isn’t like you. I mean, drinking a little, picking up a girl at a dance club and taking her back to your room for a nice shag…that I’d expect.”

  “None of this is like me. This deal I’m here to negotiate was going well.”

  “With Shen Liang?”