Marry Me, Right Now : (Marriage of Convenience Romance, Toronto)

by Haley Travis

  I was getting married less than two weeks from today, and earning a million dollars to be a wife. It was completely unreal. All I could do was focus on the tasks at hand, the details, and working hard to do an excellent job. Worrying about what this all meant could be done later.

  JACOB

  <<< 8 >>>

  PLANNING

  When we returned to the condo after our quick trip to the lawyer’s, I made some more coffee while Mia went through her notes. There was so much we still had to cover.

  “So, Mia, there’s another important thing that we have to both be on board with. We can’t date anyone else until after the marriage is dissolved. Will you be okay with that?”

  She began examining her cuticles as if she were trying to distract herself. “That certainly won’t be a problem for me.” Then she looked at me strangely. “But, um, I know that it’s different for guys. Will you be okay for a year?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. The last couple of relationships were, shall we say, rocky.”

  She looked over at me as if she were trying to read my face. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Anything I should know?”

  I shook my head sadly. “No. It’s just that women are always pushed on me by my mother, coworkers, friends, and there is hardly ever a spark. And when there was, well, I guess I’ve just had bad luck.” She nodded, so I continued. “They haven’t been nice girls. Everything they did was so that it would look fabulous and pretentious on social media, and they didn’t have a personality of their own. They were difficult, needy, and boring as hell.”

  Mia nodded. “You’re also only twenty-eight. I mean, you might still be finding out who you are.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m boring too. All I want to do is work, and hang out with my friends. Go to a museum or a show now and then. Travel once a year. That doesn’t sound very exciting, does it?”

  She grinned, and I noticed once again how perfect her smile was. “This year is definitely going to be a little more exciting for you, I think. A secret mission, buckets full of lies. Millions of dollars on the line. It’s kind of our own little espionage movie.”

  “You’re right,” I laughed. “Our desperate mission.”

  She frowned, biting her lip. “We are going to need a really good excuse for why we are getting married so fast.” She looked up at me quickly. “I really don’t want to fake a pregnancy.”

  “Oh, hell no. My family would freak. That is seriously frowned upon.”

  “Would they kick you out or something?”

  “No, but I might be shunned. They might strongly encourage me to move to Europe or something.”

  “Damn,” she said. “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s my family. Everything is about appearances. We have to appear perfect, larger than life. We are a beacon of civility amongst the heathens.”

  She gave me a very strange look, and I couldn’t help cracking up completely. “Sometimes my mother has too much wine and gets really freaking dramatic.”

  “To be honest,” she said softly, “I am pretty terrified about meeting your mother.”

  “She’s a nice lady at heart, and no matter what, she’ll be polite to you. Don’t worry, anything negative she has to say will only be said to me behind your back.”

  Poor Mia looked positively horrified. “She’s going to hate me, isn’t she?”

  “Not necessarily.” I took a sip of my coffee while I contemplated. “If I go on at length about how happy I am, how everything has changed for the better, and how wonderful my life is with you in it, she’ll be happy that I’m happy. She’ll have a lot of questions, of course, but she’ll welcome you to the family. I’ll have lunch with her as soon as possible to pave the way.”

  My hand reached out to take hers without even thinking. “Mia, I hope this doesn’t offend you, but a few people might think this is just my first marriage anyway.”

  I gave her hand a little squeeze, then released it. It was really hard to keep myself from comforting her when she looked distressed.

  She nodded. “I realize that I’m a complete hypocrite for saying this, given the current situation, but I’ve always thought of marriage as once and done.”

  “I agree completely. Two years ago, my friend got married to the girl he had been dating for about two years, and everything looked perfect. They got divorced one year and one week later, because they had fundamental differences about how to raise children.”

  “A year and a week? That’s weirdly specific.”

  I chuckled. “Apparently one of those manners experts says that if you divorce within the year you’re supposed to give the gifts back.”

  The look on Mia’s face was absolutely hilarious. She looked like she had been slapped. “You must be joking.”

  “No, I’m totally serious, unfortunately. They got married, yet never had that conversation about their beliefs on child-rearing.”

  “Not to mention, the gifts were so important to them that they stuck it out for another few months or whatever?”

  “Apparently. I saw their gift registry, and they definitely raked in well over a million. Their wedding was a gigantic production.”

  I could see the shudder rattle down her spine. “Disgusting,” she practically spat.

  “Tell me,” I joked, “How do you really feel about this?”

  She giggled. “I know. But damn, you must realize that the amount of money being blatantly wasted by people like that is practically criminal.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed noncommittally. “It’s weird, and I do mention it occasionally. But it’s going to take a long time to break some people’s habits. Or even make them aware that there is a problem to begin with.”

  She took a long slow breath. “This is going to be extremely difficult for me at times, but don’t worry, I will manage to stick with the mission. “

  I stopped my hand from reaching out to her this time. “As long as we stick together, and keep joking about our mission, it’s going to be okay.”

  “Agreed. All right, so what’s our big excuse for having to get married so quickly?”

  We both stared out the window for a minute as if the clouds held the answers, thinking as hard as we could.

  “Is there anything to do with your work?” she asked. “Like, are married people taken more seriously, and it would further your career?”

  “Good thinking,” I said, “But company has my name. I’m already sort of top of the ladder there.”

  “I guess I don’t need an excuse,” she said sadly. “Everyone will just assume that I’m latching onto you because I need the money.”

  “We won’t let them think that,” I said gently. “Sure, they might at first, and there’s nothing we can do about that. But we are going to fake our magical love so well that there will be no doubt in their minds.”

  She shot me a little sideways glance that made me laugh. “Yes, we are going to become the best actors in the land.” Her voice took on a cheesy bad actor tone, as she over-enunciated each word. “Our love will be that of legend. Tomes shall be written about the exquisite manner in which we met and married in less than a month.”

  I cracked up, and she sipped her coffee while I caught my breath. “If nothing else, we’re going to laugh our asses off this year.”

  “The year,” she said, staring into space. “And the month.”

  “Go on,” I said softly, realizing that she was forming an idea.

  She grabbed her phone, opening the calendar. “It’s two thousand and nineteen. In a week and a half, it’s September ninth. The ninth day of the ninth month, in two thousand nineteen.” She wrote down the numbers, staring at them. “My birthday is on September twenty-seventh. Twenty-seven is three times nine, in the ninth month. When is your birthday?”

  “March ninth,” I answered, hoping that it was a helpful date.

  Her face lit up with delight. “The third month and the ninth day!” she squealed. “So Sept
ember ninth is the perfect date for the two of us numerically!”

  “Wow. You’re a genius.” The way she positively beamed was adorable. Then my brain started racing further. “Are you into numerology?”

  “No.”

  “I know it’s sort of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but have you ever been into anything like that?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” I nodded. We were both concentrating so hard that I’m sure that an outsider would have thought we were trying to plan a bank heist.

  “Has there ever been a time when you’ve gone with your gut reaction, and been right?” she asked.

  I combed my mind, trying to search every corner. “There was one time I lied to my brother but not wanting to go out, and it turned out that they all got food poisoning that night. I remember him giving me very strange looks when I saw him a few days later, as if I had avoided the situation on purpose.”

  “Perfect!” she chirped. “Remember the old game, two lies, and one truth?”

  “I think so?”

  “Apparently when you’re trying to gaslight someone, the same thing applies. You mention one truth that they will recall, and then two more that they forget, because you’ve just made them up. But since one of them was true, they assume that all three incidents were. The human memory is so fallible that people will always believe someone if they are emphatic, and claim to recall specific details.”

  “You are devious.”

  She shrugged. “I read a lot of psychology stuff.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that. So we just have to think of a truth every time we are trying to get someone to believe our lies?”

  She nodded. “It doesn’t always have to be three. But a few things might need back up.” Her wide blue eyes stared out the window for several moments. “I had a lucky necklace once. I was trying to find it on my way out the door, and Rayanne was getting annoyed that I was taking so much time trying to find a stupid necklace when we were already supposed to have left. When I finally found it, we arrived twenty minutes late. As we were walking into the concert, two people stopped us and handed us their tickets. Her sister had just gone into labor and they had to run, but didn’t want front row tickets to be wasted.”

  I laughed. “So your lucky necklace scored you free tickets?”

  “Yeah, that’s the way that Rayanne saw it. She still mentions it now and then.” Mia stared off into space again. “Years ago when I worked at a convenience store I could pick winning tickets for others, never myself. Not millions, but ten or twenty dollars. For the record, I don’t believe in psychic powers or anything. Must have been a weird coincidence several times a night.”

  “Did anyone else know about that?”

  “I’m pretty sure I mentioned it to Lauren once.”

  “Perfect.” I nodded. “So we will just mention the times that we’ve gone with our guts and it has turned out right for us, and with a numerical connection like this, and our deep, intense, Shakespearean level of love, means we have to act on it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I actually wish we had time to take acting classes together. Or at least improv classes.”

  “That idea behind improv is you are always saying ‘Yes, and...’ Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we will always have to agree with the other one. No matter what we screw up, we have to always be a team. Inseparable. One unit.”

  She nodded. “Right.”

  I followed her gaze down to her hands, where her fingernails were nervously picking at the cuticle on her thumb. Then she gave her hands a little shake, and got up slowly, walking over to the window to look down at the city below. It looked like she needed a moment, so I waited, pretending to check something on my phone before going over to stand beside her.

  “Mia? Are you okay?”

  She nodded, but everything about her face seemed tense. My hand reached out of its own accord and began stroking her back until she looked up at me and gave a tiny giggle. “Thanks. I’m all right, I think. The magnitude of what we’re doing just hit me all over again. This is really serious. It’s legal, it’s for a whole year. And I’m scared.”

  I couldn’t stop my arms as they encircled her, pulling her against my chest. “You would not be liable for anything. Not a damn thing. I promise.”

  Her arms wrapped around my waist as she snuggled into me, but then she looked up quickly. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not exactly illegal to marry someone for convenience. Rich people do it all the time. And I’m not sure whether it’s a stipulation of my uncle’s will that the marriage is one hundred percent genuine. I think the very worst thing that could happen is that we lose my uncle’s house, and maybe the inheritance. I would move away until it all blew over, and I’d make sure that you are set up with at least six months living expenses before we went our separate ways.”

  I felt her shoulders stiffen. “That makes me feel like a kept woman again.”

  “That’s nonnegotiable,” I said flatly. “You’re going to all of this trouble, I couldn’t live with myself if you didn’t get something out of the arrangement. I just couldn’t.”

  Her sweet warm eyes regarded me very oddly. “It’s strange the way you connect money and influence and effort, sometimes,” she said. “You’ve never worked at a minimum wage job, have you?”

  “In high school I tutored some students for free. Does volunteer work count?”

  “Did you have a summer job when you went to university?”

  The sensation of realizing I was completely spoiled was extremely unpleasant. “No. One summer I went backpacking in Europe, and the other two I interned with my father.”

  “So you’ve never had to work an hour for less than fourteen dollars?”

  She smiled at the way my head shook. “Someday I’m going to have some stories to tell you that will break your heart. But for right now, I guess our job is to act like privileged eccentric people who get married on a whim because the numbers align.”

  She patted my back before ending our hug, fluffing her hair with one hand. “I’ve worked my ass off at many jobs, often being insulted, degraded, and treated like human garbage. At least my yearly salary of one million dollars is going to come with the use of this gorgeous condo, and endless wine.”

  “And a gigantic sparkling engagement ring,” I winked. “We have to go shopping tomorrow morning.”

  JACOB

  <<< 9 >>>

  THE RING

  As we walked into Tiffany’s, Mia’s eyes were tight, and she clutched my arm as if she were afraid to be in the room with this much jewelry. I didn’t quite understand her aversion to wealth yet, but I could see this place freaked her out. Placing my hand against her back, I rubbed in gentle circles as I whispered, “These people are here to wait on us hand and foot. It’s what they do. The more you try on, the happier they’ll be, and if you don’t like anything, we can try another store. Okay?”

  She nodded grimly.

  “Let’s try something on right away. Like ripping a bandage off.” She nodded again, but her eyes were clearer. Determined.

  A middle-aged woman with a touch of white in her hair and a motherly demeanor appeared immediately. “Hello, I’m Vera. May I help you? Are we looking for anything in particular today?”

  “An engagement ring,” I declared, slipping my arm around Mia proudly.

  Vera looked genuinely touched. “Congratulations. Such a darling couple. Well, let’s get started. Do you have a budget in mind?”

  I quickly caught her eye and shook my head, darting my eyes at Mia. Vera nodded, instantly understanding that we were not discussing that now.

  She turned her attention to Mia, who appeared nervous. “Are you looking for anything in particular, dear? Did you bring any photos of rings you like?”

  Mia looked like she’d rather run shrieking from the building, but seemed to steel herself. “Whatever Jacob likes, I guess.”


  Vera shot me a strange look, but she removed a tray of elegant rings with huge solitaire diamonds from the cabinet. “How about we try on a few, just for fun.” She raised a large round diamond so that Mia could take a good look. “Do you like round or square? One large stone by itself, or surrounded by smaller diamonds as well?”

  Mia picked up a ring with a giant square cut stone, looking up at me. “Ripping off the bandage,” she whispered with a wink. She pretended to admire it, but I saw that her nose crinkled and her shoulders were tense.

  “You have excellent taste,” the sales lady was saying.