“You know, I don’t remember you being this stubborn last night when you were begging for my cock,” he calls, loud enough that it makes me tense, wondering if anyone can hear—how thin are these walls if we got noise complaints last night?

Or how loud was I being, exactly? The latter seems more likely, and it makes me blush and makes me hot all over again to think about.

Maybe Lea is right. Maybe I should let loose a little more often.

But no. What am I saying? Look at how this turned out. With a ring on my finger and a wedding contract I need to wriggle out of.

It doesn’t help that my headache and the fog of my hangover have redoubled, making every step I take feel like a mountain to my tired limbs. “Fuck off,” I mumble over my shoulder, which just makes John laugh, the bastard. Then I manage to reach the elevator—the elevator that just opens straight up into his suite, damn, how rich is this guy? —and hit the button for my floor. I refuse to turn around, even when he calls after me.

“I’ll wait for you, darling,” he yells, teasing, I think. Probably.

My back tenses. “Don’t make me get a restraining order on you.”

“Be tricky to sign our annulment papers if you do that, won’t it?” he yells back.

It’s childish, I know, but the only reply I can think of is to offer him my middle fingers, just as the doors to the elevator slide shut. But that’s as much energy as I’m willing to expend fighting him any more on this right now. Because my head has started to pulse and I swear I’m going to be sick if I worry about anything one minute longer.

I reach my floor and stumble down the hall to my room, swiping the key and making it all the way inside before I remember that I’m sharing this room. And shockingly, in a move that feels patently unfair, Lea is sitting up in her bed already, on the other side of our double room, watching television with a spread of room service around her on the mattress.

She takes one look at me and smirks. “So, I see your wedding night went well.”

3

Mara

I slam the door behind me and flop face-first onto my bed with an angry groan that turns into a scream halfway down. “I can’t believe you let me do that,” I yell when I’m finally ready to turn back over again and glare at my ceiling. “What happened to sisters before misters and all that?”

“Hey, you seemed entirely into it. I mean, the number of times you swore to me you wanted this, honestly—”

“I was drunk!” I wail. “Why didn’t you stop me? You know I’m a lightweight.”

“Relax, Mara. This kind of thing happens all the time.” Lea smiles over at me. “You guys can just go say it was a goofy one-night mistake and get it all cleared up by morning.”

“It is morning,” I point out testily, with a glare at the curtains, as if the bright desert sunlight out there is personally responsible for the terrible decisions I made under the influence last night.

“By tomorrow morning, then.” She waves a hand, but the words send a stone ricocheting through my gut.

Tomorrow morning. When I’m supposed to be back in Los Angeles, ready to start my brand-new dream job at Pitfire Media. I cannot have this hanging over my head while I’m there. It will ruin any chance I have at concentrating on what I’m supposed to be doing. “That’s not going to work,” I groan. “I need to fix this today, Lea. Tomorrow I won’t have time; I need to have my head in the game. This is the worst possible moment for me to decide to go off the rails—”

“Which is probably why your subconscious decided to go wild,” she points out. “The harder you suppress your wild side, Mara, the crazier it becomes when it bursts free. Trust me on this one. I’ve learned it the hard way.”

“Yeah? Did you get married to a complete stranger yesterday?”

“Well, no…” She smirks. “You might beat me on the wild side front now, actually.”

I groan again and grab one of my pillows to bury my face in.

“Come on.” Lea pats the bed next to her. “Come over here and have some breakfast. You’ll feel better with some food in you.”

The word breakfast just reminds me of John. Probably waiting downstairs at that café he suggested, feeling all smug in his knowledge that I’m thinking about him. He thinks I’m just going to cave and come running after him like a good little wife? Well, he’s got another thing coming.

I grab the ring, giving it a tug. But it’s stuck on my finger, probably because my hands are swollen from the heat and all the booze last night. Nobody warned me how sweaty and yucky hangovers would feel. I can’t decide if I want a cold shower or to drink a gallon of water or maybe just fall into a hot tub and drown myself.

“Whoa. I didn’t notice that last night.” Lea crawls over to my bed, and offers me a plate entirely consisting of bacon and eggs. I dig into the bacon, unable to stomach the site of the slightly congealing eggs, and crunch on it while she forcibly examines the diamond. “Is that real? Holy shit, girl. Maybe you should stay married to this guy. Who the hell did you say he was again?”

I groan. “No idea. John somebody?” I don’t even know my husband’s last name. What a mess.

“It’s probably on your marriage certificate,” Lea points out with a sly grin, and I want to smack her all over again. I kick her away with a grumble of annoyance, though not before stealing one last slice of her bacon first.

“It’s got to be fake,” I say. “He probably bought it at one of the zillion arcade-looking stores on the main street.”

“That thing is not plastic,” Lea disagrees, but I just stare at the ring, too stubborn to think about what it means if she’s right.

“Can we just not talk about it for a while?” I ask. “I’ll already have to start researching annulment procedures when we get home. I’d rather not ruin my whole day dwelling in the meantime. Especially when we need to get moving.”

Lea sighs. “Fun time is over, huh?”

I grimace at the clock next to my bed, all too aware that checkout is in less than an hour. After that, I’ll have to drive home, get cleaned up, and figure out how to start the rest of my life tomorrow. “I’m afraid so,” I mumble. “Time for the hard work to start.”

Monday morning rolls around all too soon. If I’m honest, I still feel a little fuzzy around the edges, but at least the blinding pain of the hangover has mostly faded, replaced by a vague gnawing hunger and even more nerves that I anticipated for my first day—which is saying something, since I already expected to be a mess of anxiety from the minute I walked through the studio doors.

Not to mention, I still can’t get this damn ring off. I tried everything. Coconut oil, running cold water over it… Nothing. It must be way too small for me. But it feels all right on my finger. It’s only when I try to tug it off that my finger swells up angrily and seems like it’s holding onto the damn thing to spite me.

Great. I can’t wait to try and explain that away to my new coworkers. “Oh, this? Just a joke ring from my not-husband, haha, yes…”

At least I found out how to annul this damn marriage. It didn’t take long last night, just a few google searches. The process is simple, but it does require both of our signatures. Which leaves me with my latest problem, one that only hit me, helpfully, in the car on my way in to my first day of work.

I have no way to contact my new husband. In fact, the only thing I really know about him is that he’s probably wealthy and his name is John. Not exactly a lot to go by. You can’t reall

y search “rich John in Vegas”—believe me, I tried. The results are… not what you’d expect. Definitely not men like the one I slept with.

I hope, anyway.

But when I park out front of the theater and glance up at the big Pitfire Media sign out front, it feels like a weight is lifting off my shoulders, despite all my first-day jittery nerves. Because what matters is still on track. My career is in the right spot. This whole marriage thing is a blip, and a frustrating one, but I’ll solve it.

I’ll figure things out, and as long as after it’s done I never have to deal with my frustrating as hell one night stand again, I’ll be golden.

Yes, okay, so he was hot. And sexy. And he’s right, he did make me come more than I’d even realized was possible in a single night. And maybe I had a sexy dream about him last night, one that I couldn’t even tell if it was a hot memory or a creation of my dirty mind.

In it, he had me pinned across the bed, my hands above my head and clasped in his, while he teased me with his hand between my legs, toying with me right up to the edge of an orgasm, and then stopping, until I was bucking against the sheets, begging for his cock. When he finally slid into me, stretching my walls, stuffing me full of his fat cock, it was everything I’d begged for and more.

But I’m not ready to be a wife. Not to anybody, least of all to a cocksure asshole like him.

Right now, I am all about work. Work first, and everything else second.

That’s what I’m reciting in my head as I stride into the general meeting for new hires and find my seat at the back of the room, between a couple other interns who both flash smiles at me. I’m still reciting it as I take out my planner and organize myself on the table, ready to take notes.

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