Criminy.
He inserted the key in the bronze box. Nothing. Nothing! Again. He swore under his breath.
“Josh! Josh!” Morgan’s voice lilted through the corridor to where he stood. “I’m so glad you finally got home. I’ve been texting you for an hour. The mail is here!” She bounced toward him, this time wearing workout clothes, which accentuated the bounce. Blast! He looked straight at her face. Her blue eyes sparkled. “It came to my box—both letters.”
There were two letters? Oh, no. The one from Brielle got accidentally put in Morgan’s box? That was not cool, Mr. Postman. Not cool.
Morgan extended a hand with a yellow-brown envelope. “I opened mine immediately. It’s back inside my apartment. But here’s yours.”
Oh, the two letters were both checks. Yes! Josh tore his open. There, in all its shining, digitally printed glory was the six thousand dollars he’d gone to extraordinary measures to obtain. Finally! It was his.
He kissed the check and threw his hands to the sky. “Woo-hoo!” He grabbed Morgan up in his arms and swung her in a circle, planting an impromptu kiss on her mouth. “This is awesome!” When he set her down, she looked at him, a little dazed, and it suddenly dawned on him what he’d done. The spontaneous kissing—it was going to have to stop. Instinctively, he stuck out his tongue to taste his lips. Yep, raspberry lip gloss. Again.
“Uh.” Great. Caveman brain strikes again. “Sorry.”
“No, this is an awesome day.” The blonde came back to her senses. Man, she was gorgeous. If he could clone himself, he’d have one Josh take Brielle, and the other Josh could take this raspberry chick who had just made his day. His year.
Yeah, he’d take this chick and her raspberry lip gloss and her swimsuit model body and, since he was married to her… Stop. He’d better reel in that hook and bait right now. Josh might be good at the bio-tech stuff he was working on in his spare time with compost, but he was nowhere near perfecting cloning yet. And the real Josh wanted Brielle. Right?
Morgan was talking. “I think they must have sent both of them to my address, since we’re married. They must have just inputted the one apartment number. Maybe they thought yours was an error.”
The words hit Josh like a punch in the gut. Same address. The two of them had to have the same physical address if they were going to pull off the ruse that they were actually married. They could be found out. Separate apartments would be a dead giveaway. So would separate bank accounts, although not as much. And the fact she hadn’t changed her name officially. Sure, this was the so-called modern age, and some women didn’t take their husband’s names, but they needed to cover as many bases as possible. He ran a hand through his hair, pulling the front of it to a peak.
Morgan was looking at him with those deadly blue eyes. He needed to think this over.
She spoke. “I guess, now that we have the checks, we can go get the marriage annulled.” Instead of sounding business-like, she sounded a little hesitant. It made him look up.
“Oh. Right.” Maybe she was right. Maybe they didn’t have to worry about any of the trappings. They had the money. Time to annul.
“Smart. Okay. Well, I’ve got to go deposit this, get the tuition paid, and then I’ll text you. We can meet back at the county building?”
Her nose wrinkled. “My truck is down. Needs spark plugs. Maybe tomorrow, but after I head to my bank?”
Josh spoke before he thought. “I could give you a ride.”
“Thanks. That’s awesome. I’ll sleep a lot better tonight.”
“It’s a date.” Josh lifted his hand to give her a fist bump, then lowered it. Too ironic—he was high-fiving a girl over a date to get their marriage annulled. Something about that couldn’t be right.
“Just a sec. Let me get my purse and my check.” She accented the word check with glee. Oh, so she wasn’t going to make him wait while she changed out of the workout clothes. Excellent. Gorgeous, hot, raspberry-flavored, and considerate. Maybe he shouldn’t be dumping her. She didn’t even seem crazy, and that was almost impossible for a girl to be as hot as Morgan was and not crazy. He scruffed his hand up and down his cheek. Hold the horses, boy. You’re a man with a woman already.
Then it hit him—she said she was going to sleep better tonight. Was that because her tuition was going to be paid in full? Or was it because she wasn’t going to be his wife anymore?
It turned out they used the same bank. Convenient. That saved time.
Next, he drove up the hill to campus so they could go pay tuition. Late payers had to go in person with money orders or credit cards, Clarendon College rules.
“Looks like we’re not the only people who got their grant money today.” Morgan pointed to the line for financial aid and the cashier’s office. It stretched long. “They all look mad. Turns out maybe misery doesn’t love company.”
They walked over to the back of the line. Ugh. It could be an hour. “Too bad I didn’t bring cards. We could play poker while we wait.” Strip poker. That’d make this whole place a lot more interesting.
“I’d clean you out.”
“Oh, you think so, huh?”
“I know so.” Morgan lifted a shoulder. “Try me sometime.”
“I will.” Josh would so beat her.
A heavy hand clapped down on Josh’s shoulder. “Well, I’ll be. If it isn’t Joshua Hyatt. Back at Clarendon, eh?”
Josh looked up and saw a familiar face. It took him a second, but, “Wow. Rick Van Zandt. Hey.” Great. Rick Van Zandt. A giant blast from the past—but more like a blast of stench.
Rick roared. “Well, how about that? You are a sight for sore eyes. Remember all the good times we had—bonfires on Cannon Beach? But it looks like you’ve got a beach bunny of your own. Is that where you’ve been all this time? Hunting bunnies?”
“Ah, Rick. You always were so funny.” Better to change the subject to Rick’s favorite topic. “What you up to these days?”
“Me? Got my bachelor’s degree a while back. Just working my way through grad school now. Did an internship with Agri-Gen this summer.” Agri-Gen. That was where all Josh’s pals during his first go-round at college were dying to work. How did Rick get in that door? “So, where’d you get off to anyway, after you quit school? Last I heard, you had a couple of patents in the works.”
“Yeah, still doing my thing. Hey, you probably have stuff to do. Good to see you. I’ll probably run into you again.”
“No way. You can’t give me the old brush-off. Not before you’ve introduced me to this one.” He reached out and ran a hand down Morgan’s arm. “Please say you’re Josh’s hot cousin.”
Josh recoiled at seeing that caress. He almost lashed out at the guy, but he got it together fast. “This is Morgan, my wife.”
Wife, wife, wife, wife. The echo bounced from the marble floor to the cathedral ceilings of the hallway. The first time he’d said the word out loud, and it hit him like a thunderclap.
“Wife!” Rick roared again, now like a second boom of thunder. “Well, good on ya, man.” He looked Morgan up and down. “Really, really good on ya.”
Rick’s eyes slithered up and down Morgan, and Josh turned to see that Morgan had gone red from collarbone to scalp. Poor thing.
“She’s awesome. I’m lucky I found her.” Josh put an arm around Morgan’s shoulder and jostled her. Holy crap. This was not the way he ever saw this going, his announcement to planet Earth that he’d gotten married. Rick Van Zandt was never at the top of his announcement list.
“Well, hey. Gotta go.” Thank heaven Rick suddenly lost interest. That was so like him. When he had nothing to gain, he was gone.
Josh let his arm slide off Morgan’s shoulders. “Sorry about that guy. He was always a jerk.”
“It’s fine,” she said, but she didn’t look fine. He watched her face until she finally said. “It’s just—it’s weird that you announced that, and then in half an hour we’re headed off to do that other errand. You know. I guess it just seemed…weir
d.”
“Well, I couldn’t stand here and let Rick Van Zandt hit on you. He’s a jackwagon of the highest order.”
“There’s an order for jackwagons?”
“Yes. And he’s their Grand Poobah.”
“I see. I could sense the poo part of that.”
Josh laughed a little. The line had moved forward quite a bit. He checked his phone. Morgan was reading some paperwork from her purse. She was funny. He liked funny. Brielle was pretty intense all the time, and she didn’t really get some of his jokes. That or she didn’t think his jokes were funny. That sucked when it happened, but whatever. She had other charms, like the fact she knew he was penniless and loved him anyway, both before and after the blowup with Bronco. She’d been tested in the fires of trial, and she came out pure. Josh couldn’t say that for certain about any other woman alive.
It took a couple of minutes, but the adrenaline from the Rick Van Zandt encounter subsided. Speaking of weird, he’d liked and hated how Rick’s eyes crawled up and down Morgan. Made him want to punch Rick and protect Morgan at the same time.
“You probably get that all the time, huh?” he asked.
“What?”
“Getting hit on by big creeps.”
Morgan just rolled her eyes. “It’s…whatever.” She went back to her reading, turning another page of the big, stapled stack.
So she did. So why didn’t she have a boyfriend? There were a lot of things about her he didn’t know. Morgan was pretty quiet—until she was upset—although they’d talked kind of a lot on the phone when they were filling out the applications. It wasn’t like she was all silent with nothing to say. That kind of woman drove him up a wall.
Which was why he liked Brielle. Brielle never lacked for things to say—with certainty or drama or animation. Geez. Back to reality, dude. Brielle Dupree had information on almost every conversational topic. Legitimately. She’d given serious reflection to history and politics and foreign relations. She had a mind. A memory of their dating floated back to him—not their trip to Acapulco when she’d been practicing her Spanish and got a killer bargain on a woven blanket for Josh at a street vendor’s then found out it was half price at the next booth—but after the break with Bronco. Too poor then to do much of anything else, they’d gone to a board game tournament and entered the Trivial Pursuit bracket. With Brielle’s knowledge on history and current events plus Josh’s answers for the science questions, the two of them had cleaned every other team’s clocks. They came out fifty bucks richer and blew the whole wad on dinner and a movie.
Brielle was a cool chick, and he smiled just remembering. Josh started to text her, but then he stopped himself. If she hadn’t contacted him, a text from him might actually put her in danger. That was how she’d made it sound, anyway, when she left. She’d made it pretty clear. But still, he and Morgan were almost at the front of this line. In the next ten minutes, Josh was paying his tuition, putting himself one step closer to getting that foreign policy degree, and then Brielle was his forever.
“Uh, Josh?” Morgan rested a hand on his arm and talked so low he almost didn’t hear her. “I think you’d better look at this.” She held out the paperwork she’d been reviewing, and her finger ran back and forth, underlining a section of a long paragraph a few pages into the stack.
“What is it?”
“It’s the grant requirements.” She sounded a little sick, and Josh took the papers from her, his eyes running along the sentences—sentences that spelled their plan’s doom. Morgan’s blue eyes were pools of worry. “It looks like we won’t be going to the county building this afternoon.”
“Next!” the lady in the Clarendon College embroidered polo shirt called.
Josh stepped forward, sick to his stomach. “Mr. and Mrs. Josh Hyatt. Here to pay our tuition.”
Chapter Ten
“I can’t believe they’d charge interest—on top of requiring us to pay it back,” which they couldn’t now, anyway, because she and Josh had just forked over the whole amount to Resistencia and her greedy tuition-devouring fingers. Morgan and Josh stood together at the deepest back corner of the Clarendon College bookstore, next to the theoretical physics textbooks and the laptop keyboard cleaner spray. “Man. What have we accrued in interest already, just by standing in that horrendous line?”
“Wait. I can calculate that.” Morgan let her mind reel through the interest formula from her Mortgages and Amortization 395 course. “Probably over thirty dollars, just since the mail arrived.” Her stomach hurt. She started pacing back and forth. “What are we going to do, Josh?”
Josh came toward her, taking both her arms in his hands and steadied her. She looked up into his face while he answered her slowly and calmly. “We’re going to stay married.”
They were? This was so not in the plan. Not that she had anything against Joshua Hyatt, but he was totally not into her, and— “But it’s for a whole year.”
“Yeah, so?” He didn’t sound like he minded too much. Of course, his girlfriend was gone for this whole year. Promise you won’t allow her to be your competition. Tory’s hush-money demand echoed in Morgan’s brain.
Did he even know how long a year was? It was like…five percent of her life at this point. Well, a little less, but still. “So it’s just not what we had discussed.” Of course, there were way worse things in the world than having to keep up a fake marriage to the handsome son of a millionaire. Like root canals. Fifty mile hikes with shoes that didn’t fit. Being stuck with her old Dodge truck broken down. “Aren’t you upset? I would have thought…” She pictured him hand in hand with his faceless, globetrotting girlfriend, but then Tory’s voice in her head shouted that image away.
Josh shook his head. “It is what it is.” He pulled a textbook called Ectoplasm and You off the shelf and then put it back. “We should have read the fine print. We were dumb. But it doesn’t change much of anything.”
Why not? It changed her marital status. That seemed like a lot. “Look,” she said, “if we can’t just annul, there’s a lot we are going to have to do.” Being at the bank earlier reminded her that married people generally have joint bank accounts. And when he was at the cashier’s desk, Josh had given his address to good old Resistencia, who gave him an appreciative look in return. He really was that good-looking. “You saw what happened when I went to use my debit card to buy that stupid textbook. They asked for ID, and whether it was up to date. This is going to keep happening.”
“I’ve already been thinking about that.” Josh’s voice reassured her. “You’re absolutely right. We’re in this, and it’s pretty much go big or go home.”
“If go home means the go to the big house for fraud, you mean,” Morgan hissed.
Josh opened his mouth to argue but shut it. He took a deep breath then spoke again in calming tones. “It’s going to be fine. So we have some hoops to jump through. So the annulment takes longer than we planned. You seem like a patient person. You graduate in a year, anyway, and all this goes away. I go away. You won’t ever have to think about me again.”
Yeah, right. Chances were he’d occupy her mind as fully as now for years to come. Those teeth. That kiss.
And that other kiss—the one by the mailbox earlier. Why on earth did he have to do that to her? If he wanted her to be his fake wife, he was going to have to keep that kiss far away. Very far away.
“Since you’re not arguing, I take it you’re game.” Josh reached for her elbow. Great. If it wasn’t the kiss, it was the touch. She suddenly wished for a lot more layers of clothing right now between her skin and his electric touch. “It’s details, but they have to be done.”
“Right. Like at the very least, we have to get a post office box together. Address change, my name change at Social Security, renewing my driver’s license.” She’d thought some of this through, and her accounting background demanded to know what were they were going to do, come tax season. File jointly? Geez. This was such a mess.
“Bank accounts, everyt
hing. Frankly, we have to sell this—everywhere.”
“So you’re game.” Morgan felt sick all over again. “If you’re in, so am I.” What other choice did she have? She’d drunk the Kool-Aid, and there was no stomach pump for this.
Josh nodded. “Look. It’s not going to be that bad. After this initial bunch of details, you’ll probably just forget it’s even happening. Like somebody with a pacemaker. A few days after the surgery, they forget it’s even in there.”
Right.
“We can start this afternoon, head to Social Security, change your name. I still have the marriage certificate in my truck. It’ll take two seconds.”
Okay. She was feeling a little better about this, a little. He made things sound simple, not terrifying. And when he was around, something loosened her jaw, like the oil can for the Tin Man.
“And then we can go to the DMV and get you a new driver’s license printed.”
But her hair wasn’t done. She lifted her hand to feel how much of it was a matted mess. She’d just been working out. Her face must have shown the terror because Josh waved his hand and said, “Come on. You look totally hot today. That ponytail is…” He trailed off. He thought she looked hot? She glanced down. She was in Spandex. Geez. She’d barely noticed, but apparently Josh had taken note.
Suddenly, a guy came around the corner. He caught sight of Morgan and smiled. She’d seen him before. “Hey, Morgan. How’s it going? Chad from Business Stats spring semester? We talked?”
It was vague. She pulled a smile. “Hi, Chad.”
“You look fantastic.” He gave her that eye crawl, and she tried not to let her wince show too much. “I was wanting to ask you—do you want to go surfing with me sometime? The water’s getting kind of cold now, September, so we’d have to go soon. You up for some waves this weekend?”
Legally in Love Boxed Set 1 Page 7
