Claiming Her_A Romance Collection

by R. R. Banks

  Vincent steps forward and gathers me in his arms just as I collapse into tears. He holds me to his chest and his warmth surrounds me. I breathe in the smell of him. I've missed that smell so much. I can hear his heartbeat through his chest and feel the rise and fall of his belly as he breathes. It's soothing and calming. I feel safe for the first time in as long as I can remember. He touches a kiss to my head, making soothing sounds. I don't know how long we've been standing here before he speaks.

  "What's he look like?"

  His voice isn't angry anymore. I step back from his arms and walk over to where my wallet sits on the dresser. I pick it up and open it right as someone knocks on the door.

  "Could you see who that is?"

  "It's probably Laurel come to murder me."

  The picture slot that usually holds my picture of Aaron is empty. I flip through the rest of the wallet, frantically looking for it.

  "It's gone," I say.

  " Um, Olivia?" Vincent says.

  "It's gone," I repeat." I can't find my picture of Aaron. I must have taken it out of my wallet sometime last night and lost it somewhere."

  "Probably while we were getting married."

  The words bring my attention right to Vincent.

  "What?"

  I realize he's holding a bottle of champagne, two glasses, and a framed picture along with a large white envelope.

  "The manager of the hotel set this up to congratulate the newlyweds," he says. "Apparently we were so excited after our ceremony last night we forgot to bring our marriage license with us when we left his office."

  "His office?"

  Vincent is smiling as he sets the glasses on the nightstand and pops the bottle of champagne open.

  "It turns out that while Colorado has no waiting requirement for getting a marriage license or getting married after you get the license, they don't have too many instant wedding chapels. Fortunately, we were able to resolve that issue when we discovered the very hospitable manager of this lovely convention hotel is also an ordained minister. He has big aspirations for starting his own mobile wedding business. We're his first couple."

  I'm trying to process all of this as he hands me one of the glasses of champagne. I wave it away.

  " Oh, no," I say. "This girl is going back to her teetotaling ways. That's what got us into this mess in the first place. Besides, we need to get back to the conference."

  "What mess?" he asks, laughter sparkling in his voice. "Come on, Mrs. Preston, forget the conference. We're officially on our honeymoon."

  Mrs. Preston. The words send a tremble through me, but I can't let them. I can't be married. Surely no marriage that started when two people were drunk out of their minds can be legal. Yet Vincent seems to have gotten over his anger and is now sipping the champagne like he doesn't have a care in the world.

  "You find this amusing, don't you?"

  "I find it hilarious," he says. "Come look at this picture of us. It's actually two pictures. It looks like he took a picture of you signing something."

  "Signing something? The marriage license?"

  "It doesn't look like it. It's too small."

  We both sit down on the bed and he places the framed pictures in between us. The frame features a large section for a main picture and a smaller inset below it. The main image is of Vincent and me kissing. Both of us are holding my wallet-size picture of Aaron between us.

  "It looks like you already saw him," I point out. "Maybe I left that picture in the office. I'll have to check later." I squint at the smaller picture, which features me behind a desk hunched over what looks like a small piece of paper. I'm scribbling frantically at it. "What is that?"

  Vincent picks up the frame, so he can hold it closer and stare at it.

  "It looks like a napkin," he says. " You wrote our names on it. That might be the date under them. Your handwriting isn't the best when you're drunk."

  "A napkin?"

  What Gigi said to me earlier comes back to mind. Suddenly I think I know what that picture is. I look around the room to see if it might be sitting out somewhere. When it's not, I focus on the drawer in the desk against the far wall. It's open slightly as though something were put in it or taken out of it recently. I walk over to the desk and open the drawer. Just as I thought, a stack of napkins sits in the middle of the drawer, a pen beside it.

  "What's that?" Vincent asks as I come back toward the bed holding the napkins.

  I shake my head, unsure whether I should be incredibly embarrassed or just a little bit impressed with myself.

  "I made a scrapbook," I say.

  Vincent

  Twenty minutes later, Olivia and I have changed out of our conference clothes and are sitting in the middle of the bed surrounded by room service brunch. This isn't like me. Usually, business is the most important thing in my life, and I would never even consider blowing off something like a professional conference. Seeing Olivia laugh until her head falls back and tears stream down her face, however, makes it all absolutely worth it. There's nowhere in this world I would rather be right now than here with her.

  She picks up another of the napkin pages of the makeshift wedding scrapbook she crafted for us and holds it out to me.

  "Guests,” she says, trying to catch her breath. " No one."

  I laugh and point to the somewhat off-kilter scrollwork she drew at the top of the napkin.

  "This is a pretty touch, though."

  She laughs harder.

  "Thank you," she says. "I spent a whole summer learning how to do lettering."

  "Why would you do that?"

  "So I can capture precious memories in heirloom quality scrapbooks such as this," she says.

  "OK, so let's recap. From what we can gather from the lovely gift from our hotel manager slash wedding officiant, and the scrapbook that I hope you know will be laminated and kept on the mantle, last night was quite the adventure." I tap one of the napkin pages on the bed. "This says after we hashed out the issue with the pictures and the letter at the resort, and you decided you believed me that I didn't do it, we celebrated by getting drunker than we clearly already were."

  Olivia picks up another of the pages.

  "Then we decided to show up my ex-boyfriend by getting married at his wedding venue before he had a chance to."

  "You know," I say. "This is all super hazy, but I seem to remember that we both thought this was a really good idea at the time."

  "I'm sure we did," she says. She looks at the framed picture again. "And evidently at some point during the night, I told you about Aaron."

  "It looks like the conversation went smoothly," I say.

  "At least we have a family picture, now. Well, kind of."

  "We'll put it right on the wall," I say.

  "You can't be serious," she says, then looks back at the picture. "I'm going to keep it tucked away somewhere though, so I can bring it out as a visual aid. Here's evidence of why you don't start drinking early enough in the afternoon that you can still make it to the courthouse before it closes."

  There's another knock on the door. I cross the room to it and peek through the security hole. A distorted image of Laurel stands on the other side of the door. I open it and she glares at me. This is becoming a familiar routine with her.

  "Am I seriously seeing you in front of me in a pair of sweatpants?"

  "Yes," I say with a grin. "I've decided I'm not attending the rest of the conference."

  "Oh, you just decided that, huh?" She asks, then shakes her head. "You don't just decide things like that. This is your work, Vincent. This is what you do. Except for this weekend when apparently it's what I do."

  "You've been to conferences like this with me before," I say. " As a matter of fact, the last one we went to, you came as my assistant."

  "Speaking of which. Here." She holds out Olivia's bag. "You left this in the meeting hall when the two of you did your little disappearing act."

  When I don't take the bag, she sighs and pushes past
me into the room.

  "Hi, Laurel," Olivia says, obviously uncomfortable.

  "Hey, Olivia." She glances at the bed. " Oh, hey. Look at these pictures."

  "Now that you mention them," I say, sitting back down on the bed, " we have a little announcement."

  "Vincent, don't," Olivia says.

  "Why not? She's going to find out eventually. I'm taking the rest of the conference off because it's now my honeymoon. Olivia and I got married yesterday."

  There's absolutely no reaction from Laurel.

  "I know."

  "You know?" Olivia asks.

  "Of course. Who do you think took these pictures?"

  "You were there?" I ask incredulously.

  "Absolutely. I saw the two of you dancing your way through the lobby last night when I arrived, so I joined in. You don't remember that I was there?"

  "We don't remember we were there."

  "Oh, awkward. Well, it was really nice. I mean, for a spontaneous wedding in the office of the manager of a conference center."

  Olivia picks up the napkin scrapbook page that lists our lack of guests. She holds it up like evidence.

  "You aren't listed as a guest. See? Right here. Guests. No one."

  "Those turned out really nice," Laurel says. She reaches over and sifts through the other pages before pointing to one of them. "Right there. Photographer, Laurel."

  I squint at the scribble she's pointing to.

  "I thought that said Lincoln," I say. " I figured we'd made a new friend."

  "Nope. Old friend."

  "Wait," I say, narrowing my eyes at her. " You knew we got married, and you didn't mention it to me this morning when you were blowing up my phone, or in the meeting?"

  "I honestly didn't think it needed a mention. I didn't figure you'd forget you did it. Besides, I don't know if the two of you have realized it yet, but both of you make really fucking bad decisions about each other. I thought for once you might have made a good one. A compulsive one. One that might take some serious explaining. But a good one." She glances at the slim gold watch on her wrist. "Well, there's my lunchtime gone. Thank goodness I sneaked some of those tiny packets of peanuts from the airplane into my bag because apparently, I'm the only one holding down the fort now."

  She turns and whisks dramatically out of the room. I turned to look at Olivia with a smile on my lips, but she isn't returning the expression.

  "What's wrong?"

  She holds up her hand as if gesturing toward Laurel.

  "She knows," she says. "It's going to make it a whole lot harder to make this whole thing go away if other people know about it."

  My heart sinks.

  "Make it go away? What do you mean make it go away?"

  She tilts her head at me.

  "Vincent, really. Let's be serious now."

  "I am serious," I say.

  She waves her hands over all the napkin pages and the framed picture.

  "This is all very funny, and we had a good laugh about it, but think this through. We can't go forward with this marriage.”

  "Why not?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Olivia

  Why not? Did he seriously just say why not?

  "Why can't we continue being married? You heard Laurel. We make bad decisions about each other all the time. We have since we met. But sometimes we make really good decisions, too. Maybe getting married was one of those good decisions. Don't make a bad one out of it."

  My heart is beating faster. I want to hear what he's saying and just let it makes sense to me, but I can't. There are too many thoughts tangled in my brain, and too many questions to stop me.

  "Vincent," I say. "Think about how this would look. We barely know each other. What are people going to think if we just show back up from what was supposed to be a conference where I'm working for you, and we announce we're married. People would be horrified by it. Not to mention how embarrassed and horrified I am that I even got myself into this position. You can't think this is a good thing."

  He's staring at me, and I see a flicker of hurt in his eyes, but he pushes forward.

  "I think it's a fantastic thing," he says. "I couldn't care less what anybody thinks of me, or of us, but if I did, I would still think us being married is a good thing."

  "How? How is the quintessential billionaire playboy suddenly showing up with a wife and previously unknown child a good thing? Nobody knows about Aaron, Vincent. I kept him completely to myself."

  "That makes it even better."

  I'm dumbfounded.

  "How does that possibly make it better?"

  He slides toward me across the mattress. His chest is directed at me, and I try not to focus on his chiseled muscles as he gestures at me with every word.

  "If you refuse to see this is a good thing just because it's us, think of it this way. I'm anonymous in most of my business, but in the circumstances where I'm not, people sometimes have a problem with me. Just like you said, I'm the young, mysterious billionaire playboy. They don't see a businessman they can trust with major decisions like mergers and takeovers. When I'm talking about projects like expansions or building new properties, they see a young man with too much money at his disposal just making the next place he can go play. They don't have the balls to say it to my face, but I know it's what they think. They'd rather see somebody who's established. They want somebody they can look at and see security and responsibility. What better way to do that than with a wife and a child? "

  "So, you want to use me and Aaron as leverage."

  "No, I want you and Aaron to be my wife and child. But if you want to think of it that way, then yes. Having the two of you will help other people relate to me more, and make me come across as more trustworthy and reliable. But it's not just me this could benefit. Think about what your family is going through right now."

  "Far too much for one drunken wedding to fix. Not that I can really imagine any situations where a drunken wedding is actually the ideal solution."

  "Yes. Your family is going through a lot. As a matter of fact, it seems like you're right in the middle of one big clusterfuck. But there's something you're forgetting, and it's something I would never expect you to forget."

  "What?"

  "The power of image. I've been looking into what happened to your father's business. You're right. He's done an exceptional job of covering up most of what went wrong, but I have my connections and I can do a lot of digging. Some really shady things happened, but what made it all snowball into the current mess is image. People have a lot harder time doing business with someone they don't feel a connection to. When your father started pulling away from his business partners and friends, he broke a lot of that trust. What's better to rebuild trust and create a sympathetic image then the hope of a new family? It's not like we have to take out an ad in the newspaper and throw a parade to announce it, Olivia. We can just quietly go about our lives and let people figure it out."

  "I really need to think about all this," I say.

  Vincent nods.

  "Fine," he says. "I'll go over to my room. Come talk to me whenever you want."

  He walks out of the room and I feel like everything is spinning around me. I'm confused. I could never have imagined this happening. This isn't me. I'm the woman who's waited my whole life for my perfect proposal from the perfect man to lead into the perfect engagement, and then the perfect wedding. I'm not the woman who is so angry at the world she gets drunk and marries a virtual stranger.

  A virtual stranger who I gave my virginity to and whose child I carried.

  I think about everything Vincent just said. He was able to lay it out so logically, but that almost makes it worse. Can I really stay married to Vincent and let him make everything all better while I just skate by? That doesn't feel like what I'm supposed to do. I glance at the picture still sitting on the bed. Both of us are smiling as we kiss. I can still remember the taste of his kiss the first time he held me in his arms. I've never felt anything
like that moment, and I haven't since walking away from him.

  Is it possible I found the perfect man, and I just had to sacrifice all the rest for it?

  I take purposeful strides to Vincent's room and knock on the door. He opens it almost instantly as if he was standing on the other side waiting for me. I brush past him and walk almost all the way across the room before turning around to look at him.

  "I don't want to be a wife of convenience," I say.

  "What?" he asks.

  "I don't want to be a convenience wife," I repeat. "You said Charlene was your convenience date. She was the fill-in, so you didn't have to find someone else, and so you could have the image you were supposed to have when you went to those events. I don't want that. I came to work at your office because I got to a place in my life where I needed to step up. I need to be independent and do what I can to help my family, my son, and myself. That hasn't changed, Vincent. I still want to do this on my own. Not exchange myself for it."

  Vincent shook his head and let out a long breath.

  "You could never be just a convenience to me, Olivia. In fact, you might be the least convenient thing that has ever happened to me. But that's why I think you're so perfect. I don't want to be married to you because I tricked you into staying married. And I don't want to be married to you so that I look good to people, even though that would be an added benefit. I want to be married to you. Full stop. And if you want to keep working, that's fine. I wouldn't ever tell you to stop doing something you believe is right. If you want to be independent and help your family, then do it. That doesn't mean we can't be married. I have a son I've never had a chance to know, and I want to change that. I don't just want an image, Olivia. I want my wife and my child. I'm not asking you to exchange yourself for anything. I'm asking you to do this with me."

  I feel breathless when he finally stops speaking. My heart is beating so hard in my chest I can feel it in my fingertips. I don't know what to say. There isn't a word I can think of that I think could express what I'm feeling right now so I just nod.