My Sister Stole My Billionaire Husband novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Judge

Alistair names his condition, a judge marries them at dawn, and when her mother and Gwen storm the courthouse steps Tavi signs in front of them.

Alistair didn't laugh, and I was grateful.

He looked at me for a long moment with the rain running off his shoulders.

"Why?" he said.

"Because Reuben can evict a wife from a penthouse," I said. "He can't touch your wife."

"That's a reason for me to say no."

"Gwen will be sick when she hears. That's a reason for you to say yes."

"I don't care what Gwen is."

"Then say yes because I'm standing in the rain with two hundred dollars and I'm asking."

He opened the car door wider.

"Get in, Tavi."

It was the first time he had used my name.

In the back seat he took off his jacket and put it around me.

It smelled like cedar and a clean hotel, and I let it stay.

"Yes," he said, looking straight ahead. "With one condition."

"Name it."

"I won't touch you tonight. You'll sleep in my guest room with a lock on the door."

"That's your condition?"

"The next part is. When you want me, you tell me so, plainly, in words."

"And you mean it. Not because you're angry, and not because you owe me."

My face went hot, which surprised me.

"And if I never do?"

"Then you've got the best lawyer in Chicago and a husband in name only."

He finally turned his head.

"I'd survive that. I don't think you would, after tonight, if I let you think this was a trade."

I thought about the ballroom and the clapping.

I thought about a man who would say that at one in the morning and mean it.

"Fine," I said. "I'll tell you."

Something in his shoulders let go.

At seven the next morning a judge opened her front door in Hyde Park wearing a robe over a pantsuit.

She was seventy and had known Alistair since he was nineteen, and she looked me over.

"You're the florist," she said. "You did my daughter's wedding. The dahlias."

"The dahlias," I said. "Yes."

"Good. I can marry you in the garden or the kitchen. The garden's wet."

"The kitchen."

She married us between her toaster and a bowl of lemons.

Her husband stood witness in his bathrobe, holding a spatula.

Alistair took a plain gold band from his pocket and held it up.

"It was my grandmother's," he said. "She'd have liked you."

"You carried that for how long?"

He didn't answer, but he slid it on my finger above the sapphire.

It fit.

"Do you, Octavia Lasker," the judge began, and the front doorbell rang.

It rang again, and again, with the high, wild rhythm of somebody leaning on it.

The judge's husband went to answer with the spatula still in his hand.

My mother came down the hall in her church coat.

Gwen was behind her, pale, her coat open over the white dress from the night before.

She hadn't slept either.

Two men from Reuben's building stood on the porch behind them, and a neighbor was out walking a dog across the road, watching.

"Octavia Rose Lasker," my mother said. "You will not do this. You have known this man one day."

"I've known him five years," I said.

I hadn't known I knew it until I said it.

A man had bought white peonies from my stall at the Lincoln Park market, five years ago in June.

He had paid with a hundred-dollar bill and refused the change.

"You remember," Alistair said, very quietly.

"You didn't take the change."

My mother's voice cracked up the middle.

"Reuben will ruin you. Reuben will ruin this man. Think about what you're doing to your sister."

"What am I doing to her, Mom?"

"Making her look foolish."

I started to laugh and couldn't stop, there in somebody else's kitchen in a borrowed jacket.

Gwen pushed past her, shaking.

"Alistair," she said. "Don't. She's doing this to hurt me."

"She's doing this because of you."

"You don't understand. He was mine first."

She said it loudly, to the whole kitchen, to the judge and the husband and the neighbor on the lawn.

Alistair looked at her.

"I was never yours at all," he said.

Gwen's mouth opened.

Nothing came out of it.

The judge cleared her throat.

"Do you take this woman," she said, to him, as if nothing had happened, "to be your lawful wedded wife?"

"I do."

"Octavia?"

I looked at my mother, who was crying, and my sister, who was white to the lips.

"I do," I said.

The judge picked up her pen.

I signed my name on the line.

Gwen made a sound behind me like something tearing, and I did not turn around.

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