My Fiancé Butt-Dialed Me Mid-Affair, So I Married His Brother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Courthouse

Joanna marries Hayes at nine in the morning. Brandon bursts in and she answers him with the clause.

"Say it," I said.

It was past midnight in the club parking lot, and the ballroom lights were still on behind us.

Hayes stood by his truck with his hands in his pockets.

"September fourteenth," he said. "I was at the hotel to meet a boat broker. I saw Brandon and your friend at the elevators."

"And you said nothing."

"I didn't know you well enough to say it."

"You knew me well enough to be at my engagement party tonight."

"I came tonight because Constance's lawyer sent me the guest list."

That was not an answer, and we both knew it.

I wanted to scream at him.

But I also had thirty days, six million dollars and a father who had gone gray in front of two hundred people.

"Here is what I'm doing," I said. "I'm using you. You're using me. That is the only reason this works."

"Understood."

"After nine o'clock tomorrow, you owe me the rest of it."

"All right," Hayes said.

I slept in my old bedroom at my father's house, and I did not sleep.

At seven I put on a white suit I had bought for my own rehearsal dinner.

My father stood in the kitchen doorway holding a cup of coffee he had not drunk.

"I can sell the house," Dale said. "I can sell the cabin."

"That's maybe two million, Dad."

"I can work."

"You're sixty-one."

He put the cup down.

"I can't watch you do this because of me."

I kissed his cheek.

"You didn't do this to me, Dad. Constance did. I'm going to see her face when it fails."

The Greenwich courthouse had a metal detector and a line of people waiting for parking tickets.

Hayes was at the top of the steps in the same ill-fitting suit, with a license form in his hand.

He had already filled in his side.

His handwriting was square and blunt.

"Thirty-one days," he said. "Thirty and a morning now."

"Don't get sentimental," I said.

The clerk who married us was a gray-haired woman with a stack of forms and a tired voice.

She asked for rings.

Hayes took a plain steel band out of his jacket pocket.

"Where did you get that?"

"My father's," he said. "It's all I have."

It was a little big for me.

I closed my fist around it so it would not slide off.

We had just reached "in sickness and in health" when the courtroom doors banged open.

Brandon came in with his tie loose and a man in a gray suit behind him.

His left cheek had a faint red mark where I had hit him.

"Stop this," Brandon said. "Joanna, this is insane."

"Sir, I need you to sit," the clerk said.

"I'm the groom!"

"No, you're not," I said.

The man in the gray suit came forward and held out a folder.

"Miss Sayre, I represent the Lathrop family trust. My client's position is that the agreement requires a ceremony approved by the family."

"Which clause is that?" I asked.

He opened his mouth.

"Page and paragraph," I said.

He opened the folder.

I had read the agreement eleven times in two months, looking for a way out, and I knew it by heart.

"It says the note is released upon the marriage of a Sayre daughter to a Lathrop son," I said. "It does not say the family approves."

"The intent of the clause is..."

"The words are all I have," I said. "It's also all your client wrote."

The clerk looked at the lawyer over her glasses.

"Counselor, are you suggesting this court should not marry two consenting adults?"

He closed the folder.

Brandon stared at me, and then at his brother.

"You'd marry him?" he said. "You'd rather marry that?"

"He's never called me a bank loan," I said.

Hayes stood very still beside me.

"Continue," I told the clerk.

She cleared her throat.

"By the power vested in me by the State of Connecticut, I now pronounce you husband and wife."

Hayes looked at me.

I knew what we had agreed.

We touched when someone was watching.

Brandon was watching.

So I put my hand on the front of Hayes's jacket, and he bent his head.

His mouth was warm and certain.

It was supposed to be for show, and it lasted longer than a show.

I felt his hand settle against my waist.

I felt my own fingers close on his lapel.

When we pulled apart, his breathing was not quite even.

Neither was mine.

"Well," the clerk said. "That's a first."

Brandon walked out without a word, and his lawyer went after him.

Hayes took the signed certificate from the clerk and folded it into his pocket.

We went out through the metal detector together.

On the steps he held the door for me, and I stepped into the morning sun.

Across the street, beside a parked taxi, stood a woman with red hair and a green suitcase.

Kendall was looking straight at me.

She lifted one hand halfway, and then she let it fall.

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