Married in Michigan

by Jasinda Wilder

  “Then why are you doing it, Paxton?”

  “Because, despite what you may want to believe, my political aspirations go far beyond just climbing the ladder to more influence, more power, and all that. I do the job because I like it. I like serving my constituents. And to get where I want to be, I need the family’s connections, and I know damn well that you’ll cut me out of those if I don’t do this—and you are also right about my image. So I’m playing your game, but only up to a point.” A pause, and he resumes, but this time his voice is low and slow, carefully considering his words. “Despite your best efforts to convince me of the opposite, you’re still my mother and I do love you. You’re just this side of pure evil, but you’re the mother I have, and I’m not quite willing to walk away from you just yet, and unfortunately for me, that means I have to play along with your stupid plans.”

  Silence. “I’m not certain whether to be touched or offended, Paxton.”

  A self-conscious laugh. “Me either, honestly.”

  Another silence, this one rather lengthy—Paxton spends it noisily munching nuts. “It’s rude to chew into the phone, Paxton,” Camilla says with an annoyed sigh.

  “Yeah well, I don’t care.” He chomps louder. “Goodbye, Mother.”

  “You really won’t tell me?” she says, sounding…well…petulant. “Nothing? A first name? Where you met her? Her net worth?”

  A laugh, around a mouthful of olives and crackers. “No, Mom,” he says, once he’s swallowed. “I’m not telling you dick.”

  “So vulgar.” She sighs. “Well, have it your way then. But you’ll be at the wedding? You’re taking this seriously?”

  “Yes, we will be there.” A pause, his golden-brown eyes on mine, serious, deep. “And yes, I am actually taking this seriously.”

  A hesitation. “Is she there with you?”

  “Yes.”

  Camilla’s voice goes predatory and threatening. “Listen to me, whoever you are—if you take advantage of my son, you will regret it. I promise you that. You do not want to cross me.”

  I’m tempted to speak up, to give voice to my derision, my frustration, my anger, but I don’t. Not just because Paxton is shaking his head and glaring at me, but because I really do want to see the look on her face when I walk down that aisle.

  Ohhh shit, shouldn’t have thought that. I should not have thought that. I am in no way ready to walk down the aisle—to get married. I get dizzy, and carefully set my bottle of water down so I don’t drop the glass on the marble.

  Paxton hangs up the call without saying goodbye to his mother, and eyes me. “You okay?”

  I shake my head. “No, not at all.”

  “Don’t let her scare you.”

  I arch an eyebrow at me. “Oh? Are you going to tell me her bark is worse than her bite?”

  Paxton pauses, laughs, and then shakes his head. “Actually, you probably should be a little scared of her. But my point is, don’t let her threats get to you. I won’t let her get near you once this is over. I’ll handle her.”

  I focus on breathing steadily. “Actually, that’s not my problem right now.”

  “Then what is?”

  I hum the wedding march: “Bummmmm bum-bum-bum…Bum BUM bum-bum.” I shake my head, dizzy again. “I am not ready for that. Not even a little bit.” I wave a hand. “I thought, I really do want to see the look on your mom’s face when I walk down the aisle to you, and it made me dizzy.”

  Paxton stares at me blankly, slowly lowering the rolled-up meat and cheese he’d been eating. “Now why the hell did you have to go and say that?” he mutters. “Now I’m dizzy.”

  “It’s easy enough talking about getting married, but thinking about it being a reality?” I shake my head, rubbing my temples with my middle and forefingers. “That’s totally different.”

  He blinks at me. “Yeah, no shit.” He breathes in deeply, holds it, lets it out slowly, and I feel him regaining control over himself. “Well, it’s the path we’re on. I chose it, and so did you.”

  “Doesn’t mean I like it,” I say. “It’s still scary as hell, and I don’t know how I’ll cope with it. I’m only making it through right now by not thinking about it.”

  A sigh. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  I shake my head at him. “You’re not giving up as much as I am, Paxton.”

  “You also stand to gain a hell of a lot.”

  I don’t have an answer for that.

  “Speaking of which,” Paxton says. “How’d shopping go?”

  I shrug. “It was a lot.”

  “Am I poor now?” he quips, cackling.

  “Yes, I think you very well may be.”

  “Well, let’s see what the damage is.” He opens an app on his phone, taps and scrolls, perusing the list of recent transactions, totaling them up, muttering to himself. “Ten, plus twelve is twenty-two, plus another fifteen is thirty-seven, plus thirty-five is…seventy-two, plus ten and another ten is twenty, which makes ninety-two, plus eleven and another thirteen…that’s…one-oh-three and then…one-sixteen.” He nods. “Not bad.”

  I stare. “That’s how much Julie spent? A hundred and sixteen thousand dollars?”

  He nods. “About what I was expecting.”

  He seems so casual about it, and I just can’t understand how he can be casual about spending a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in a single day. That’s more than I’ve ever made in my life, total.

  He seems to see my discomfort. “That seems like a lot to you, huh?”

  I boggle at him. “Yes, Paxton, a hundred and sixteen thousand dollars does seem like a lot to me.”

  He snickers. Stands up, waves his hand for me to follow him. I do, and he leads the way into his bedroom, and his closet, which is twice the size of the one in my room; his closet is full, but it’s obviously been organized and spaced to make it look full, and he obviously has plenty of room for more…easily double what he has right now, more if he compressed them a bit. One entire wall is dedicated to suits—grays, blues, blacks, a couple tan suits, pinstripes, houndstooth...

  He walks over to the suits, slides three aside, and glances at me. “A hundred and twenty grand.” Another three. “Another hundred and fifty.” He gestures at the rest. “And so on. I go to London each year and have three or four new suits made, and I drop at least a hundred, sometimes double, just on suits. Shoes, coats, ties, watches, cuff links…I drop easily a quarter mil, sometimes half a million.”

  I blink, and can’t swallow or breathe. “I…but…why?”

  A shrug. “The suit makes the man, so they say, and nothing makes a man like a bespoke Brioni suit.” A laugh, somewhat self-conscious. “And plus, I can, so I do. It’s fun.”

  I glance at the rack of suits. “So that’s like, half a million dollars just in suits on that rack?”

  “Oh, easily.” He waves a hand. “I donate a few every year to make room.”

  “You donate a fifty-thousand-dollar suit? To who?”

  “Whom, you mean,” he corrects automatically.

  I snarl. “What the fuck ever.”

  He laughs. “Sorry, sorry. That was rude of me.” A pause. “Anyway, I donate them directly to a charity org I founded. It works to get homeless people jobs—provides showers and haircuts, suits, rides to and from interviews, a meal before and afterward, and if they get the job, enough professional clothing to get through a full week without having to recycle outfits.” He heads out of the closet as he drops this on me. “I don’t specify the worth of the suits, obviously, because that would be tacky.”

  “So there are homeless men out there wearing a fifty-thousand-dollar custom Brioni suit and they don’t realize it?”

  “No,” he says, “there are former homeless men out there wearing a fifty-thousand-dollar custom Brioni suit without realizing it.” A cocky grin. “The difference is vital.”

  I frown. “Let me guess, the charity organization and the donations look good on the campaign trail.”

  He laughs ea
sily, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “It does, yes.”

  I hesitate, hating the squirmy, leaden sense of having deeply offended him. “That was shitty of me, wasn’t it?”

  He shrugs, still giving me that grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. “No, you’ve got me pegged.”

  “Paxton—”

  A sigh, a wave of his hand. “It’s fine.”

  “No, it’s not. That wasn’t fair of me. There’s more to you than that, I’m realizing, and I’m sorry.”

  He blinks, the hardness in his eyes softening a little. “That charity is not publicly tied to me. It’s called Dress For Success, and it’s run by a nonprofit I started back in college, under a DBA that can only be traced back to me if you know how to look.”

  “DBA?”

  “Doing business as,” he says. “A way to do business under a name other than your own.”

  “And you started it in college?”

  He nods. “It was part of a project for a business class. I went through all the steps, but for the project you weren’t supposed to actually go through with it and make it legal, you were just supposed to know how to do it. But I figured, I’ve already done all this work, why stop there, right? So I created the 501c3, registered it, built the charity structure, borrowed financing from Mom and Dad to fund it and hire staff. It took a few months of extra work, but I got it off the ground and set it up to run without any input from me, and hopefully without anyone knowing it’s my work.”

  I tilt my head at him, taking a seat on the stool beside him. “Why don’t you want people to know?”

  “Because that’s not the point of it.”

  “What is, then?”

  “To help.” He meets my eyes. “As you’ve pointed out numerous times, I’m spoiled rotten. Entitled. Born with a golden spoon in my mouth. I know it. I’ve always known it. I guess I felt like…I needed to do something to offset it. Like, in order to be able to consider myself even a remotely decent person, I had to do something to give to other people. If I profited from it, even in terms of reputation or publicity, it would counteract the whole point of it.”

  I can’t help but laugh a little—it’s a soft, quiet huff, not meant to mock. “I’m not sure that’s how being a good person works, Paxton.”

  Another of those maddening, insouciant shrugs. “It’s all I’ve got. Being a good person doesn’t come naturally to me, after all. I’m two parts asshole, one part selfish prick.” He smacks his legs. “So. Let’s see your haul.”

  And just like that, sharing time is over, and there’s no chance to even think about his revelation, because he literally and legitimately has me show off several of the outfits for him. I’ve never paraded around in front of someone so much in my life, and it’s odd. For Julie, it was purely business—she was being paid to assess how I looked.

  Paxton?

  I’m not sure what his motivations are. First, he has me try on a few casual outfits, and then some of the dressier ones. Finally, wearing a pair of soft gray linen pants and a yellow top with a plunging neckline and shoulder cutouts with a low wedge heel, he nods, smiling at me.

  “That’s the one.”

  I blink. “The one, what?”

  “The perfect outfit.”

  “Perfect for what?”

  He ignores my question, moving over to stand in front of me. He reaches up, his thick arms framing my face, and slides my springy mass of curls out of the loose half-bun I had it in. My hair flops and bounces down around my shoulders, and he nods again.

  “There, better.” He ambles over to the jewelry box on the bureau, sorts through it, and finds a simple but pretty pendant, a tear-drop crystal set in fine platinum. He examines it, wrinkles his nose, flicking the big center crystal. “Is this Swarovski?”

  I shrug. “I dunno. I think? I know it’s real platinum, because the clerk behind the counter made a big deal out of it.”

  He tosses it back into the box, careless and dismissive. “We can do better. Julie should know better than to fuck around with fake garbage.”

  I frown. “That is worth more than everything I owned, combined. It’s pretty and not at all garbage.”

  He eyes me. “We can do better. We’ll stop and see Abner on the way, get you something real.”

  I sigh. “Paxton. On the way where?”

  “Your first official function as my fiancé.”

  My heart hammers, and I try in vain to swallow. “And what would that be?”

  He grins, and it’s that mischievous smirk that always gets me in trouble. “A business dinner.”

  “Business, or politics?”

  A shrug, his eyes twinkling. “In this case, both. The couple we’re meeting are heavy-hitter angel investors, and they’re interested in investing in a company I’m launching this spring. He is also a colleague—he’s the personal secretary to the Majority Whip. We’re having an informal discussion about some topics I’m trying to get pushed through, and I’m hoping he can get his boss’s support.”

  “Why not go through the actual person?” I ask.

  “Because I’m a lowly first-term House rep—I don’t get a meeting with the Whip, I’m just not important enough. But I know Matthew from Princeton, and I’ve done him some favors. He owes me, and I’m calling one in. Get my bill in front of your boss, and I’ll make sure your measure gets pushed through the House without any major restructuring.”

  “I see. You did him favors back in college, and you call it in all these years later?”

  A shake of his head. “Not in college, no. More recently."

  “What did you do for him?”

  He tilts his head. “It’s not really my place to say.”

  I blink, my eyes widening. “Oooh, mysterious. Something nefarious, I bet.”

  He chuckles. “Ehhh, who are you gonna tell? Just don’t let on that I told you, okay?” He sighs, thinking. “Matt has a gambling problem. He counts cards, and he’s good at it—too good, and therein lies the problem. He likes to win, and he does, a lot. Too much. He got into some trouble in Atlantic City, the kind of trouble that can start piling up and get real dangerous real fast. I made some calls, greased some palms, and got him out of hot water.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Not what I was expecting.”

  He grins. “And yes, I helped him out because I knew he’d owe me a favor.” A wink. “But I also did it because he’s my friend and I really didn’t want to see him being fished out of the river on the evening news.”

  My eyes widen. “That kind of trouble?”

  He makes a face. “Yeah, that kind of trouble.”

  “Maybe he should stay out of casinos, then.”

  Paxton laughs, a loud guffaw. “His wife would agree.” A thoughtful frown. “Although, he doesn’t go to casinos, he’s too high a roller for that. He goes to the kind of games that happen in a secret back room where you have to get invited and know a verbal code and a handshake and put a deposit down just to get dealt in.”

  I laugh. “I always figured that was only in movies.”

  “I mean, I’m exaggerating for effect a little—there’re no codes or handshakes, but it is secret, and it is invite only, and he really does have to buy in for amounts that would make even me hesitate.”

  I nearly choke at that. “You didn’t bat an eye when I spent a hundred grand today.” I frown. “Or, rather, when Julie did.”

  “Exactly. He plays in very rarified circles. Millions of dollars—tens of millions, even—get won and lost at these games. Thus the trouble he was in, and why the favor I did him means I get the bill in front of his boss when I’d otherwise never get the time of day.”

  I shake my head, laughing. “What a strange world you live in.”

  Paxton shrugs, nodding. “You’re not kidding.” He waves at me. “Okay, well, you look incredible. Let’s go politick, shall we?”

  “I’m not wearing makeup, and my hair is a disaster.”

  He eyes me, bobbing his head side to side. “I mean, I personall
y think you don’t need that shit, but this being a pretty important meeting, I guess I’d better call Amanda.”

  “Who’s Amanda?”

  “A one-woman glam squad. I’ve worked with her for years, getting people ready for events.”

  “People,” I say, drily.

  He arches an eyebrow. “I make neither apologies nor excuses, Makayla, and I hope you don’t expect them.” He doesn’t wait for a response from me, but dials a number. “Amanda. I need you here. Right away. No, just something quick and minimal. She doesn’t need a lot—you’ll see. Okay, thanks. See you in fifteen.”

  I marvel. “She just drops whatever she’s doing?”

  “Well, yeah. I pay her a premium on top of her usual rates and, in return, if I call her in, she doesn’t ask how high when I say jump, she just starts jumping.”

  He pours us each a glass of red wine from a decanter and brings them to us, and we continue munching on the charcuterie.

  “So, what do I do at this dinner?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Be yourself. Smile, laugh, tell jokes, listen.”

  “Why are you bringing me?”

  “It’s a dinner with my friend and his wife—it would be awkward and uncomfortable for me and them if I showed up alone. Makes talking shop impossible—then his wife either has to listen to our conversation, or we can’t talk shop for fear of boring her stupid. Having a date is vital—makes the whole dynamic work.”

  I cringe. “So I have to be girly and social with a woman I’ve never met?” I laugh bitterly. “You definitely hired the wrong chick for this, Paxton.”

  He narrows his eyes at me over the rim of his wineglass. “I didn’t hire you, Makayla. This isn’t a business arrangement. I’m not paying you. You’re not doing a job.”

  I sigh. “Feels like it.”

  “Well, then, you need to fix that misapprehension real fucking fast. That attitude will stink on you worse than shit-stained underwear.”