One nice young lady wearing black horn-rimmed glasses showed me to the back kitchen and found a chilled bottle of champagne and two flutes.
“Bless you. You are the best,” I assured her.
She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “You’re right. I am, and I could get in so much trouble for asking you this, but could you maybe give me an autograph?”
“I don't have a pen. How about a selfie? Have you got a phone?”
Her mouth opened into a huge “o”, and she pulled one out of her pocket. Then she held it out in front of her while we smiled until I heard the soft click of the photo being taken. Then I thanked her again and made my way to the wedding night bedchamber.
Butterflies flitted around in my stomach. This was supposed to be a temporary marriage of convenience, but that didn't mean we couldn't have a good time.
Especially on our wedding night.
I was looking forward to peeling that dress off Honoré, kneeling between her legs, and consummating our marriage. Nick was right. I might as well enjoy my bride.
Yes, we had talked about getting an annulment and the sex might complicate that, but I had a feeling it was going to be worth it.
When I opened the door to our room, I called to her, “Honoré, I found the champagne.”
There was no response.
She wasn't in the living room.
I peered into the bathroom as I walked by. She wasn’t in there either.
I grinned to myself. Did my little bride already go into the bedroom without me?
That little vixen. Maybe this marriage wasn’t going to be all that bad after all.
And just outside the bedroom door I heard it.
That funny little noise I’d heard in the car earlier.
I walked into the bedroom and over to the bed where the new Mrs. Barnes laid curled up, still in her dress, snoring.
7
Leo
Our first stop on the honeymoon tour was Cairo.
I’d never been to Egypt before, so I was looking forward to it.
The previous night we got in late, and since we had the entire crew for Honeymoon with the Royals with us, it wasn't a shock that Honoré and I got separated at the airport.
I assumed she wound up getting in a different van than I did.
We hadn’t talked much on the plane ride over, because I slept the whole time.
Even though it was a farce of a wedding, the stress of it wiped me out, and when I got to the room at the hotel, I crashed again.
So this morning when I woke up, I lifted my head, expecting to see my bride.
But she wasn’t next to me.
I rubbed my eyes, got up, and searched the suite.
Where the hell was she?
Frustrated, I picked up my phone and called my assistant, who answered on the first ring.
“Hey, how's my wife?”
“Honoré?” Arnold asked.
No, my other wife I wanted to say, but I refrained. “That's the one.”
“Sorry, it's kinda new for me.”
“Yeah. Me too. So where the hell is she?”
His voice sounded placating when he said, “Oh, she booked a separate room.”
The words hit me like a punch in the gut. “What?”
“Yeah, we don't think that Lucinda is going to go for that. We have a call in to her people now, but you guys are scheduled for a breakfast on camera in an hour.
“Great.” I hung up.
Not only did she not want to be married to me, but she didn’t want to sleep in the same room with me either.
Fuck.
All of a sudden I felt like I was in fourth grade again and all the girls thought I had cooties.
If I'd known how much it was going to bother her, I would have offered to take the couch. Or another bedroom.
Crap. It really pissed me off that she hadn’t even given me a chance to offer that.
Lucinda was not going to put up with this shit. If this kept up, the next thing we knew the tabloids were going to be broadcasting the fact that we were sleeping in separate hotel rooms.
Nobody was going to believe our relationship was legit, and if no one believed that, the show and everything else we were trying to accomplish with this charade would be for nothing.
I knew my mom would straighten it out, but it really sucked that she had to convince my wife to sleep in the same room with me.
Feeling stupid, I took a shower, hoping that would I could wash away some of the slime I felt forcing a girl to pretend to be my wife for the next few months. My only consolation was that I couldn't get out of this, so it wasn’t all up to me. Besides, we had discussed that once we were done we could go our separate ways. It would give us both the out we wanted so we could go on with our respective lives.
She was just going to have to suck it up buttercup and deal with the bed we made for ourselves.
And that meant one motherfucking bed.
I wouldn’t touch her if she didn’t want me to, but we’d come this far. She needed to make it work.
While I was waiting for the water in the shower to heat up, I scrolled through my phone and couldn't help but see some of the photos making the rounds from our wedding.
Damn! Honoré was hot. I never fantasized about having a girl in a white dress pledge her love for me for all eternity, but if I had she would look just like my bride in these pictures.
That sweet, round little face with those almond-shaped brown eyes. It was hard to describe the color of her eyes, but instinct told me I would try at some point. A song just begged to be written about them.
The image of Honoré stared up at me from my phone’s screen—with her flawless olive skin and luscious pink lips. Her dark hair was so perfect. She was exotic, yet the perfect picture of sophistication and beauty. I couldn't really ask for more.
Except for that she didn’t freaking shun me.
My brothers thought she was hot. Nick seemed to believe that just because we were married, I was going to fall for her. I guessed he assumed she’d fall for me too. Or at least that we would have fun cavorting like rabbits on our honeymoon.
He took the attitude that I was legally married to a beautiful woman so why the hell would I not take advantage of that?
Eduardo, on the other hand, seemed to understand my hesitation, but he too believed heavily in the sacrament of marriage.
I shouldn't have been surprised by that. It was my understanding that he practically married Chloe just to be able to sleep with her. I mean, I knew he loved her, but when he married her, it didn't sound like she felt the same way.
Was that a thing for the Barnes sons?
I looked in the mirror and remembered I wasn't really a Barnes.
This was something I learned after I was injured in a motorcycle accident.
I needed some blood, and my blood type was an unusual one. Honestly, I’d known this before, but I knew better than to mention it to Lucinda. I did a little digging and figured out there was no way that Lucinda and Ziggy Barnes could have had a child with my blood type together. Ever since then, I’d been trying to figure out how to bring this up with my mother.
But the longer I kept quiet about the deception, the more it ate at me, and I began to resent my mother more every day.
Oddly, my twin sister did appear to be Ziggy's child.
But wait, maybe she wasn't. How could we even know now? We certainly couldn’t take the word of our mother.
It was fucked up how common paternity tests were becoming in our family these days, with the discovery of my long-lost brother Eduardo last year.
That was probably why I told him about my unknown parentage.
For a guy who had only recently come into my life and who might not even be a full sibling to me, I really liked the guy.
And I would think of him as a brother, regardless of what the genetics showed.
A text came through telling me I had thirty minutes until I needed to be there, so I quit thinking abo
ut all that and stepped into the shower.
Closing my eyes, I let the warm water slide down my body, and I couldn't help but think of Honoré and wonder what she was doing right now.
I hoped that tomorrow morning she and I would be in the same room.
Just for the companionship, I told myself.
That was all.
We were in this together, and we needed to approach it as a team.
And I planned to tell her as much when I saw her at breakfast.
I arrived before she did. I knew Lucinda would’ve preferred that Honoré and I be lounging in white fluffy bathrobes with the hotel crest on them, but we’d have to do that another time, seeing as we’d slept and dressed in separate accommodations.
The lights and cameras were ready for us.
Production for this scene was set up on a private terrace the hotel arranged for us.
While I waited for Honoré, I glanced over the menu.
Ten minutes later, I knew what I planned to order, and I was about to ask Arnold what the holdup was when Honoré rushed onto the terrace. She appeared flustered, her hair slightly out of place.
I stood and pulled out a chair for her. She promptly sat and nodded a thank you as I pushed her chair under the table.
“Sorry I’m late, and sorry if my taking a private room last night upset you.”
“Not the image we’re trying to sell, if you know what I mean.” I frowned.
“Well, the situation has been corrected.” Her pitch rose. “My goodness. I had no idea requesting my own room would cause an international incident.”
Unable to resist, I remarked, “I know the feeling.”
Her cheeks turned red, which made her look even prettier.
And shut her up.
Soon our server came over to take our order.
I requested a pitcher of mimosas. I wasn't sure how much Honoré drank normally, but I was about to find out.
When the waitstaff brought our breakfast, I had to laugh.
They brought her a lone egg sitting on this little cup all prim and proper.
Exactly what you’d expect a princess to eat. I bet she’d feel a pea under her mattress too.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“What? My egg?”
“Yeah. That is the prissiest way to eat an egg I've ever seen.”
She shrugged. “It's the only way I've ever eaten them. Do you have a preferred way that you believe is superior?”
Now I felt kinda bad for making fun of her, but I opened up the bottle of ketchup and poured a quarter of it out onto my plate and on top of my scrambled eggs and hash browns. “Scrambled with lots of ketchup is pretty good.”
She looked skeptically at my plate, and I was expecting her to label it disgusting, but instead she asked, “May I please try a bite?”
By now the cameras were rolling, and I knew they’d love a shot of me feeding my new wife across the table. I’d grown up at my mother’s knee and knew good TV.
“Sure,” I said as I heaped a bite onto my fork. Ever so slowly, I lifted my fork to her open, waiting mouth.
That pretty mouth made me want to put some other things inside it, but this wasn’t the time.
Adjusting my pants inconspicuously, I grinned at the cameraman who’d captured the shot.
Viewers would love the hell out of me feeding my princess bride some nasty ketchup eggs. That was the kind of shit that made ratings soar. I didn't know why, but I knew they would eat it up.
But that wasn't the only reason I did it.
I had long since given up caring about what the people on the other side of the camera thought. The whole reality TV show thing was my mother's planet, and I just survived on it. I couldn’t care less if viewers fell asleep watching us doing whatever we’re doing, but we had been doing it for so long that it was second nature to me.
“Hey, that's not bad,” Honoré said after swallowing the eggs.
We both smiled at each other.
Maybe this whole thing wasn't going to be so bad after all.
8
Honoré
“No fucking way.”
Leo’s voice rose above the din of the crew milling around, preparing them for the shoot.
Married less than a week, and I’d already gotten a crash course in reality television production.
A wardrobe assistant with pins in her teeth adjusted the fit of my shirt. It was nothing for these people to rummage under my clothes and tighten the straps of my bra or insert a nipple cover.
Most of my life I’d been treated like a doll. Now I was treated like a piece of meat.
It was an adjustment.
“What’s wrong with Leo?” I asked the assistant, which was dumb because she obviously couldn’t talk to me with pins in her mouth.
“Oh, he doesn’t want to rappel down the pyramid.” This explanation was imparted by a lackey who heard my question as he passed by, taking a tray of coffees somewhere.
If I was honest with myself, I wasn’t looking forward to the activity the show runners had planned for us today either.
When I first learned of this a week ago, I protested to my assistant, Jane, that the pyramids were ancient artifacts that you surely weren’t meant to be climbing on.
“That’s why they’ve built a fake one out of this dense foam out in the desert,” Jane said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I protested.
“Nope.”
“But won’t fans know it’s fake and fuss? Or if they think it’s real won’t they pitch a fit that they aren’t allowed to climb them? Rappel down them—whatever,” I huffed.
“That’s likely part of the plan, Honoré. Ratings is the most important thing to the Barnes. The higher the ratings, the more they can charge for their ads. Anything that feeds controversy and makes headlines gives the show more visibility.”
It had taken a few days for me to wrap my brain around the nature of this beastly show I would now be starring in. Even this morning I considered complaining, but then I came up with what I thought was a better strategy.
When the pin lady stopped fussing with my clothes, I casually made my way over to where Leo stood, arguing with the producer.
“It’s too much. This is where I draw the line.” Leo stomped his foot.
The producer lifted a stack of pages over his head like he was giving up. “You talk to him, Honoré. Please.”
With hands pressed together in a gesture that was both praying and pleading, the producer walked away.
Smoke was practically coming out of Leo’s ears, and I knew he was pissed. But I couldn’t help but goad him.
“Really? You’re not going to do this?” I asked.
“Fuck no. I’m not risking my life for this stupid show.”
I shook my head gently like it was a pity really.
“What?” he snarled.
I shrugged a shoulder. “Oh, nothing.”
A dark cloud passed over his face. “It’s not nothing. What are you not saying?”
“Well, it is your family’s show…”
“Correction. It’s not just my family’s show. You’re a Barnes now, so it’s your family’s show as well.”
“I see your point.”
What a dick.
If he was going to be like that about it, I wouldn’t mince words.
“It’s just that I didn’t expect you to pussy out like that. That’s all I’m saying.”
Then I gave him one of my “so-there” faces that usually stopped the other person from commenting further.
I knew it was mean, but I couldn’t help myself.
Mr. Perfect Rock Star, wanted by every woman in the world, was scared of heights? Please.
Leo stared at me like I had three heads. “Damn, wifey, you’re a real ball-breaker aren’t you?”
Turning away from him, I started strapping on my repelling gear. “I just call ’em as I see ’em.”
“Baseball reference. You’re actually pretty Ameri
canized in your country, aren’t you?”
His remark was probably meant more as a dig than an attempt at real conversation, so I ignored him and kept working on my gear. “Chad, is this how it goes?”
The production assistant came over to help me get strapped in my harness.
“Fine!” Leo bellowed. “Where’s my fucking gear? We all know my mother doesn’t want me falling off the side of one of the seven wonders of the world.”
I laughed. “That’s one way to make bigger headlines than your father.”
The minute the words were out of my mouth, everyone within earshot stilled.
The assistants helping us get into our gear stopped moving.
The cameramen and his assistants froze. The makeup artists’ brushes halted in mid-air.
Too late, I realized I’d attempted to make a joke out of the worst thing that had ever happened to my—gulp—husband.
Everyone stared at Leo, who finally spoke.
“What? It’s true.” And then he laughed. Like magic that broke the tension, and the rest of the room went back to work.
One more demonstration as to how this was the Barnes’ world, and I was just living in it.
Catching Leo’s eye, I mouthed, “Sorry.”
He winked at me, which I interpreted as “Don’t worry about it,” and despite myself, my knees got weak.
He was handsome as all hell, and the way he winked at me—I had to remind myself I wasn’t a groupie who should be thrilled to garner a slice of his attention.
But, in that moment, sharing an intimate few seconds like that in the middle of a crowded room was nice.
Thirty minutes later we were all harnessed and strapped in at the top of a Styrofoam pyramid.
Leo and I had listened to a brief instruction talk from the guys in charge, and it wasn’t until they told us that we could go that I realized how complicated the process was going to be, and that I wasn’t really sure what to do.
After giving him such a hard time, I couldn’t admit that now I was having serious reservations.
“You guys ready?” the producer asked.
I smiled, trying to appear lighthearted. “As I'll ever be.”
I didn’t look over at Leo, who was only a couple of feet away, but I could see out of the corner my eye that he was standing at attention, ready to go.
Royal Wrecker: Barnes Family Romances Book 4 Page 5