by Lila Monroe
Keeping up with all the well-wishes was the only thing that kept my brain from breaking under the strain of that impossible fact—I’m getting married to Grant Devlin—like a twig under an elephant’s foot. I lost track of the smiles and happy tears—at least I assume they were happy tears; possibly everyone was just heartbroken that Grant had been taken off the market. Everyone seemed to be testing how many different ways the English language could be rearranged to say “I’m so happy for you!” while actually meaning “But what did you do to get him to even look at you in the first place?!”
“Congratulations.” The voice of Grant’s godmother Portia cut through the crowd. “How marvelous for you, Lacey. What a…coup. And for you, Grant, what a…words fail me.”
“Thank you,” I said through a clenched smile. I willed my tear ducts to not activate immediately at her presence. So what if she embodied all the imperious disapproval of the entire upper class that had been actively shitting on me my entire professional life? There were scarier people in the world. There had to be.
“I’m so delighted you’re one of the first to know,” Grant said to Portia. “You know how I rely on you.”
“Indeed I do,” Portia said so coldly I was amazed the people next to her didn’t all develop cases of severe frostbite and hypothermia. “We’ll have lunch tomorrow, Lacey dear. Noon.” She managed to make ‘Lacey dear’ sound like ‘scum of the earth,’ and ‘noon’ sound like the time of my planned public execution. “We’ll get to know each other better then, I’m sure. I can’t wait to learn all about you and your many…attractions.”
Before I could reply, a reporter shoved a microphone into my face and said, “Lacey, tell our viewers: how did the two of you meet?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could blink, two more reporters popped up like sharks scenting blood in the water, microphones and notepads at the ready in place of teeth: “When’s the wedding? What’s he like as a person? How do you feel about marrying into San Francisco’s premier business dynasty? What’s your favorite—”
There was a glass of champagne in my hand and I drained it.
“How many children do you want?”
“Have you encountered any ethical issues inherent in dating your boss?”
“What would you say to anyone who might wonder if you’re just in it for the money?”
Did I just compare the reporters to sharks? I should have said cockroaches. They were swarming all around me, hemming me in with their questions and cameras so that I couldn’t move if I didn’t want to squash them—and wouldn’t that have been good publicity, a viral video of Grant Devlin’s fiancée mowing down an innocent reporter with a glass of alcohol in her hand. I tried to keep my smile pinned to my face and reply in innocuous clichés—I was so happy, I was floating on clouds, gosh, what a wonderful occasion—but they kept cutting me off, I couldn’t understand how they could even hear me under the constant barrage of questions, damn but I needed more champagne—
A firm hand on my arm, and Grant was pulling me away, like a lifeguard pulling me out of the ocean’s grip. “Sorry, ladies, gentlemen…” The reporters parted before him like the Red Sea; I was going to have to get him to teach me that handy little trick. “Got to get the lovely lady home before she comes to her senses and takes back her answer!”
A polite smattering of laughter greeted this statement, and the reporters let us pass with only a few more questions, even those waved away by Grant with a casual flap of his hand, as though he were swatting a few annoying flies. The cool night air felt like heaven on my skin, like a draught of sweet cold water after a trek through the burning hot jungle of public scrutiny. His car pulled up, and he held the door for me as I slipped into wonderful anonymity behind its tinted dark windows. The door shutting behind him cut off the roar of sound from the party like someone had hit the mute button on my life; what a relief.
“I need more champagne,” I informed him.
“I have three bottles,” he said, reaching into the car’s mini fridge.
“Just keep them coming,” I said, and he laughed as he poured me a fresh glass.
I gulped it like it was the elixir of life, and closed my eyes. Unfortunately, when I opened them again, I was still there. “What the fuck did I just agree to?”
I swilled the champagne in a doomed effort to settle my nerves.
Grant quirked his eyebrow. He was smirking. Of fucking course he was. “It was your idea, Lacey.”
I nearly spat out my champagne all over his car’s expensive leather interior. “In what crazy alternate universe was this my idea? Did you just beam in from the alternate universe where up is down and Spock has a goatee and I have absolutely terrible ideas? Because I hate to break it to you, but this is not that universe!”
“Charmingly put, as always,” he almost purred. He put his hand on my shoulder, warm and comforting and strong. His fingers stroked my skin, toyed almost absentmindedly with the silk strap of my dress. “Relax, it’s just a PR strategy.”
His hand slid down my arm, stroking it soothingly. His voice was soft and gentle, and my head was swimming with champagne and longing, and I wanted nothing more than to rest my head against his shoulder and let him tell me that it was all going to be fine, that I could trust him, that he would take care of everything...
“This isn’t Beauty and the Beast; I’m not going to lock you in a castle with a bunch of singing household appliances.”
“What, you don’t have one of those?” I shot back automatically. My head traitorously leaned down against his shoulder. Oh, it was so comfortable there. I could stay there forever.
“Oh, I have three castles,” he said offhandedly, as if he were talking about three bikes or three armchairs or three lightly used paperbacks and not three goddamn castles. His arm came up around my shoulders and pulled me closer into him. “But singing appliances are overrated; always breaking down. I blame the shoddy manufacturing techniques of the factories we outsource them to.”
I frowned up at him, not sure how serious he was being about the singing appliance thing, and not certain whether to be sarcastic about that or—
He pressed a kiss to the top of my head and took advantage of my wrong footedness to continue: “This isn’t a life sentence, Lacey. We can stay engaged long enough for the share price to stabilize and to secure the buyout of Jennings’ company. Nothing could be simpler.”
“Lots of things could be simpler,” I muttered into his shoulder. “Calculus is simpler. Gerrymandering is simpler. Peace in the Middle East is a goddamn cakewalk compared to this tangled-up mess of a—”
And then his hand was in my hair, gentle but insistent as he titled my chin upwards for a kiss, his lips covering mine. It was a slow, warm kiss, tender at first but then increasing in intensity, his mouth growing greedy as he pulled me into his lap, my breasts pressed against his chest as his tongue slipped between my lips, as his other hand gripped my hip. I could feel him hardening against my thigh, and heat flushed between my legs, I could feel myself already wet for him—
He grinned against my mouth, pulled away just a fraction of an inch. “We seem to get along so much better when we communicate like this, don’t we?” he murmured, that voice like dark chocolate and sea salt and sin.
He tried to kiss me again, but I pushed him back into the seat, away from me. I couldn’t do this. We couldn’t do this. Not again. I had to keep my head on straight. “There’ll be none of that.” I tried to clamber off his lap; he held me tight. “Dammit, Grant, this is business!”
Oh, why did I drink all that champagne, why did he have to be so warm and firm and lovely, why did he have to be my boss and off-limits, why did he have to be an asshole when all I wanted to do was touch him, feel those firm shoulders like the foundation of a building, those cheekbones that could cut diamonds, those soft and supple lips that lit a fire in me—no, no, no!
“I’m serious, Grant, we have to stay on the ball here.”
“I can think of
other things I’d like you to stay on,” he murmured with a rakish grin.
Dammit, no one had a rakish grin in real life! Rakish grins were for sexy pirates and dashing seventeenth century French spies with ruffled shirts! I refused to melt for an attribute real people weren’t even supposed to have.
“You’re not a pirate,” I informed him. “You don’t have a parrot or a hook hand or anything except the sexiness, so you can just stop with the pirateness right now and get back to business.”
It’s just possible that I was becoming tipsy. Maybe. You make a not entirely weak argument for the tipsiness hypothesis.
Grant didn’t even blink at my verbal sidetrip into pirate territory. “Business, hmmm? Ah, a girl with her eye on the prize. Are you into diamonds? Or did you see that movie about blood diamonds and become a sapphire girl?” His hand came up to stroke my cheek; I leaned into it without thinking. “Rubies would certainly be enchanting with your complexion.”
“Please stop talking,” I said into the skin of his palm. Oooh, nice skin. Just slightly weathered enough to be rugged, and so warm.
“If you insist,” he replied with a glint in his eye. He leaned closer.
I slapped him away. “Not like that! I’m pretty sure you can stop talking without using my lips as a breaking mecha—mechamis—stopping thing!”
He pouted. I was nearly overcome with the urge to kiss him in order to stop him from pouting. It would have been for the greater good of humanity. Pouts like that could drive the entire female population of Earth to sex-based insanity.
“Is that really how you want to treat your fiancé?” he asked, his eyes wide in a parody of tragic disappointment. “Lacey, I do believe you’ll give me a complex.”
“You’re not my fiancé,” I mumbled. “The question is invalid.”
“I know a few hundred people who would disagree,” he said.
“Fuck those guys,” I said eloquently.
“I’d rather fuck you,” he said bluntly, and my entire body lit up like a volcano, magma pulsing through my veins as I swooned towards him, melting. “Though if you’d prefer to wait for the wedding night, I might let myself be persuaded.”
Contrary to this statement, his hand began a leisurely journey up my thigh, occasionally pausing to take in the sights and soak up the atmosphere. I was torn between derailing it and telling it to stop snapping vacation photos and get to its final destination before its hotel reservation was canceled.
“Now, as to the wedding dress and wedding ring—”
The beacon light of the neon Steddy Tatts sign had never looked so inviting, like the shining beam of a lighthouse saving me from the stormy seas of hormones, really bad decisions, and future humiliation. I practically leapt out of the limo almost before the driver had come to a full stop, avoiding spraining my ankle Lord-only-knows-how as I blurted: “We will talk about this tomorrow goodnight goodbye!!”
Grant’s voice pursued me up the steps to my apartment, his accent only broadened by his obvious amusement: “Don’t leave me in suspense, Lacey: do you prefer princess, or square-cut?”
Princess, but there was no way in hell I was telling him that.
14
I awoke with an all-drum band going to town in my head, improvising alternatively between meringue, salsa, and a little-known genre of drum music I like to call ‘fuck you, Lacey, fuck you so hard for drinking that much, are you a fucking idiot, oh God I want to die, let me just die if it will only end this pain.’ It’s kind of obscure, but I myself am well-acquainted with its many fascinating variations.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck,” I moaned, and rolled over to blink blearily at the alarm clock. The fuzzy red numerals informed me that it was noon. Noon—there was something important about noon. Work? My heart seized up in a moment of panic before I remembered that it was my weekend off; I wasn’t scheduled to go in till Monday. So, not work then. Oh well. It would come to me.
I let my head fall back into the pillow. Pillows were great. The whole world should be made of great big fleecy pillows, and darkness, and silence. Oh God. That had definitely been too much champagne last night. Was it possible to actually die of a hangover? I would definitely be testing that theory to its limit this morning—er, afternoon. Oh God. Why me? Couldn’t this hangover and its pounding headache have gone to someone who deserved it, like a terrorist or an embezzler or Grant Fucking Devlin? There was no justice in the world. Just blaring noonday light, and that endless pounding drumming sound—
Bam, bam, bam. BAM.
Wait a minute.
BAM.
That drumming was not coming from inside my head. It was coming from…my front door? How long had whoever it was been knocking there? Someone was really fucking determined.
If it was Grant, he better have brought an entire year’s production of aspirin and the annual coffee crop of a random Latin American country if he wanted me to refrain from ripping his head off.
“Hold on a damn minute!” I yelled, and immediately regretted it as the sound waves of my own voice crashed through my head. Wincing and muttering every curse word I could think of, I stood up.
The frantic pounding at the door, if anything, intensified.
“I swear to God,” I muttered, as softly as I could to keep pain from lancing through my head as I shuffled to the door, “I will cut his balls off and mail them to China first class and send him the bill. I will carve him like sliced ham and feed him to that witch Portia on an artisan sandwich.”
Something about this last sentence made me pause as it rang a mental bell, something familiar about what I had said, something I was supposed to remember—it was gone. Ah well. The ridiculous threats were making me feel marginally better, so I continued them as I advanced across my apartment towards the cacophony that was currently my front door, shuffling as slowly as I could both to avoid stepping on anything small and painful, and because I was feeling a perverse pleasure in taking as long as possible to answer whatever entitled jackass was at the door—like I didn’t already know it was Grant, the asshole, probably back to mock me some more.
“I will call a press conference and tell the world that he has a tiny dick and a crippling addiction to reality television.” I remembered Grant’s distaste at the state of modern television, and allowed myself a wicked smirk at the thought of twisting that particular knife.
I tried to look through the peephole, but it was dark; damn teenagers kept sticking gum over it as a joke. I called through the door: “Who the hell is it?”
“It’s noon, Lacey, for heaven’s sake,” Kate’s voice shrilled through the keyhole. I winced; I love that girl, but that particular tone was cutting through my skull like a buzz-saw. “Open up, open up, open up!”
My hand was barely finished pulling up the latch when Kate barreled through the doorway like a tornado that had been through a printing house. The San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian…she could have opened up a newsstand with just what she had in her left hand.
She promptly dumped them on the floor in front of me.
“What the hell—” I shrieked, my surprise triumphing over my short-term memory, and once again instantly regretted raising my voice.
“Don’t ‘what the hell’ me, Lacey Newman,” Kate said.
She grabbed a first page at random, and I cringed at the full color photo of me in the sleek little black dress—considerably sleeker in the photo than on me now, rumpled with a full night’s sleep and speckled with green mattress lint from my futon bed—gasping in surprise and apparent delight as I looked down at my hand and a diamond so big it looked like it had been chipped from the idol of some forgotten god in an Indiana Jones movie.
Kate’s eyes followed mine, and then fastened on my hand, the engagement ring still perched there and sparkling away. “Is there something you want to tell me? And do you maybe also want to tell me why you couldn’t have told me it last night, or when we went out for drinks, or any freaking time w
e talked in the last week?”
Where the hell to begin? I avoided even thinking about trying to untangle last night’s events for Kate’s benefit by casting an eye over the sea of newsprint Kate had dumped on my floor.
Splashed across the pages were photos of me with my mouth making a perfect ‘o’ of surprise, photos of Grant gazing into my eyes in an impressive pretense of adoration, photos of us both with our arms around each other, smiling like we had just stepped out of a fairy tale. PLAYBOY POPS THE QUESTION, one headline blared. ONE GALA NIGHT WE WON’T FORGET, insisted another. WHO IS THIS LUCKY LADY, wondered a third. “Did you rob a paperboy? Where did you even get all of these?”
“The pharmacy next to the bodega by my place, and don’t change the subject,” Kate answered promptly. “I got them after I heard about it on the radio when my alarm went off this morning, and after I heard three little old ladies and a teenage girl gossiping about it at the bus stop. Lacey! You did not say anything about this at drinks! You said basically the opposite of this when we went for drinks! You cannot go around saying the opposite of things you are going to do or I will know you are not Lacey Newman, and I will have to hold you hostage until you confess to being a Russian spy who has replaced Lacey in order to inveigle your way into my confidence and steal my lingerie designs.”
This was a long spiel even for Kate, and I could see in the way that she was rushing through her words that despite her bubbly, silly tone, she was trying not to show that she was hurt.
“Seriously, girl, I know my designs would do wonders for the Russian morale in this economic downturn, but you couldn’t say anything to your best friend? Even last night?”
“I didn’t know last night!” I hastily reassured her. “I swear, if I’d known anything about what that jackass had up his hand-tailored sleeve, I’d have been in that taxi to you in two seconds flat. He sprung this on me last night. It’s his idea of listening to my advice about PR.”
“Wow.” Kate took a second to process this. “Does he maybe want to look up ‘listening’ in a dictionary or something?”
