Downgrade My Ride? I'll Upgrade My Groom! novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Fifty-Two Minutes

Clay and Sydney pull Liv from the wreck and a judge marries her to Clay in her chambers, and then Liv walks into the reception just as Niles raises a glass to his bride.

The green Land Rover came up Sheridan Road on the wrong side of the median, and it was the most beautiful thing I'd seen all day.

Clay was out before it stopped rocking.

He was in a navy suit with no tie, the suit he'd worn to stand in the fourth pew of my wedding.

Sydney tumbled out of the passenger side in her bridesmaid's green, holding her heels in one hand.

"Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God, Liv, your face."

The woman in running clothes stepped back to let them through.

Clay crouched by my broken window.

He didn't touch me at first.

He looked at the blood on my veil, the glass in my lap, the empty driver's seat.

"Where's your driver?"

"He walked away."

"Before the police?"

"Before anybody."

Something moved behind his eyes and went very still.

He pulled the door open, and it groaned on its hinge.

"Can you stand?"

"I can do better than stand."

He laughed once, short and surprised, and held out both hands.

I took them.

My knees wobbled on the curb, and he caught me by the elbows and didn't let go.

"Ambulance first," he said.

"No."

"Atwood."

"It's a cut. I've had worse from your tree house."

"You fell out of my tree house because you wouldn't let me go first."

"And I'm still not letting you."

Sydney was pressing a folded napkin from her clutch against my eyebrow.

"I walked out," she said. "The second she came through the doors in your mom's dress. I stood up in the front row and walked out, and one of your aunts told me to sit down."

"Thank you."

"I'm not done. I took the cake knife."

She held it up. It was silver, with a white ribbon on the handle.

"Nobody's cutting my cake for that woman," she said.

I started laughing, and it hurt, and I couldn't stop.

Clay put his jacket around my shoulders.

It was warm from him and smelled like cedar.

"Are you sure?" he asked quietly. "You don't have to decide anything today."

"He decided today," I said. "In front of three hundred people. I'm just answering."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he took out his phone and made one call.

"Gran. I need your judge. The one from your birthday."

He listened.

"Yes. Today. Within the hour."

He listened again, and the corner of his mouth went up.

"Yes, Gran. It's Liv."

I could hear her through the phone from three feet away.

"About time!"

Forty minutes later I was standing in a judge's chambers on the nineteenth floor of a building on Clark Street.

The judge was a small white-haired woman in reading glasses who had been at Clay's grandmother's eightieth birthday.

She looked at my slip, my bloody veil, Clay's jacket and my bare feet.

My shoes were somewhere in the SUV.

"I'm going to assume nobody is holding a gun on anybody," she said.

"No, ma'am," I said.

"Then let's go."

Sydney stood beside me with her phone propped up, recording, mascara running down her face.

"Somebody has to film the right wedding," she said.

The judge read the words fast.

Clay said "I do" before she finished the question.

The judge looked at him over her glasses.

"Let me finish, young man."

"Sorry. I do."

When it was my turn, I looked up at him.

He'd been my best friend since I was seven and he was nine and he'd let me win at checkers until I caught him doing it.

I had never once looked at him like this.

His jaw was tight, and his eyes were wet, and he wasn't hiding either.

"I do," I said.

"Rings?"

We didn't have rings.

Clay pulled the gold signet ring off his little finger.

It had his grandfather's initials on it.

He slid it onto my ring finger, and it fell straight off and bounced on the carpet.

Sydney snorted through her tears.

Clay picked it up and put it on my thumb instead.

It fit.

"Close enough," he said.

"By the power vested in me by the State of Illinois," the judge said, "you're married. Kiss her or don't, but sign first, I have a two o'clock."

We signed.

My hand shook so hard my signature came out crooked.

Then I turned around, and Clay was right there.

I don't know which of us moved first.

I think it was me.

I took his shirtfront in both fists and pulled him down.

His mouth was careful for a moment.

Then it wasn't.

He kissed me like he'd been holding something shut for years and it had just come off its hinges.

One big hand slid into my hair under the ruined veil.

The other spread across the small of my back, over the silk, and pulled me flat against him.

I made a sound I'd never made in my life.

He tasted like coffee and he was shaking.

I pushed up on my toes and kissed him harder, and his breath went out of him in a rough rush against my lips.

Somebody cleared her throat.

"Two o'clock," said the judge.

Clay rested his forehead on mine.

He was breathing like he'd run up all nineteen floors.

"Liv," he said.

Only my name. Nothing else.

The judge handed me a long envelope.

Inside was a certificate with a gold seal and two signatures.

Mine was crooked.

His was steady.

Sydney checked the time on her phone.

"Fifty-two minutes," she said. "From the van to the seal."

Then she looked up, and her grin went sharp.

"The reception started twenty minutes ago."

The Kenward Grand ballroom was on the second floor, and I had picked every flower in it.

White peonies. Silver candles. A string quartet I had booked fourteen months ago.

Clay held the door to the ballroom foyer for me.

I could hear the microphone through the doors.

Niles's voice, warm and easy.

"Thank you all for being so flexible today."

People laughed.

I pushed the doors open.

He was standing at the head table with a champagne flute raised.

Bailey stood beside him in my mother's gown with my mother's pearls in her ears.

"To my bride," Niles said.

Three hundred glasses went up.

I walked in barefoot, in my bloody slip and Clay's jacket, holding the envelope.

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