Dumped at the Altar, Claimed by a Hidden Tycoon novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Left on the Floor
Colby walks out of his own wedding, Becky answers Vanessa's call, and she asks the wheelchair groom in the hallway to marry her.
"Colby, the ceremony starts in five minutes. You can't walk out now."
Becky Farrant held his sleeve with both hands, and her bouquet crushed against his arm.
Two hundred guests sat in the hotel's west ballroom, facing an arch of white roses.
The officiant stood under it with his book open.
Colby had checked his phone, gone white, and turned away from the aisle.
"Let go," he said. "It's Vanessa. She was in an accident and they've taken her in. She has nobody else. I have to get there."
Becky's stomach dropped.
Vanessa Sholes was his first love.
Becky had been with him for five years, and in all that time one text from Vanessa had been enough to make him leave dinner, leave bed, leave Becky in a parking lot.
This morning Vanessa had texted Becky too.
I'm so sorry I can't be there. The flu has me flat in bed, but I'll be thinking of you both all day.
Becky had cried over that text, because it was kind.
"Hurt how?" she asked now. "She said she had the flu."
"I don't know. It's different. Move."
"Then call the hospital from here. Stay for the vows and go after, I'll go with you."
"Becky."
"I'm begging you, Colby. Please. Not today."
The guests had stopped pretending not to listen.
Becky could see his mother in the front row with her hand over her mouth, and her friends from the pastry shop, standing up in the back.
Colby pulled his arm free.
"You're making a scene," he said. "It's a ceremony. We can hold it next month. If something happens to Vanessa while I stand here, that's on you."
"That isn't fair."
"Move!"
He shoved her aside with his shoulder.
Her heel slid on the polished floor, and she went down hard on one hip with the dress pooling around her.
Becky sat there with the bouquet in her lap and watched him go.
He pushed through the double doors and did not look back.
Nobody in the room said a word.
Then her phone rang inside the little bag clipped to her sash.
She answered without thinking, and a woman spoke softly.
"Becky, it's Vanessa. Please don't be angry with him. I'd never want this."
It was Vanessa.
She did not sound sick, and she did not sound hurt.
Behind her voice Becky heard an engine turning over and a car door shutting.
"I told him not to," Vanessa said. "But you know Colby. He could never say no to me."
Then her voice went flat and pleased.
"He's already on his way to me. Thank you for letting him go, Becky."
Becky looked down at the white dress she had paid for with her own overtime.
Five years.
She had paid half the rent on his first apartment, and she had paid for the course that got him his job.
She had waited for a kind word from his mother and learned to say nothing at his family's dinners.
She had told herself that loving him meant being the one who stayed.
It had never been love. She had been a place he stopped between Vanessa's calls.
Becky got up.
She straightened her dress, because her hands needed something to do.
Then she laughed, one short laugh with nothing warm in it.
"You can stop thanking me, Vanessa," she said. "I'm not done. There will be a wedding today."
"You can't be serious. He's gone. You have no groom."
"I don't need that one."
There was a pause on the line.
"Tell Colby something for me," Becky said. "He's yours. Keep him. I hope the two of you are very happy."
"Becky, you don't want to do this to yourself."
Becky hung up.
She looked at the guests.
Two hundred people looked back at her, and none of them was her family, because she had none.
"Give me ten minutes," she said, and her voice held.
She walked out through the side door, gathering her skirt in both fists.
The service corridor was warm and smelled of lilies and floor polish.
She had no plan. She only knew she would not go back in alone.
At the end of the hall she came around a corner and stopped.
The corridor ahead was full of men in black suits.
There were at least a dozen. They wore earpieces, and they were opening doors and looking behind the flower carts.
Across the hall, the doors of the east ballroom stood shut, with two more guards in front of them.
Becky had walked past those same doors at eight this morning, when a second florist's van had been unloading white roses at the other end of the building.
In the middle of the guards, a man sat in a wheelchair.
He wore a black tuxedo that fit him perfectly.
He was young, with dark hair and a hard, still face, and the guards stood angled toward him.
Even from twenty feet away he looked like a man no one had ever told no.
"The ceremony is supposed to be starting," he said to the man beside him. His voice was low and even. "Have you found her?"
"Not yet, sir."
"Keep looking."
Then his eyes lifted and found Becky standing in her wedding dress, with her bouquet bent in her fist.
Becky thought about what she had told Vanessa.
There doesn't have to be that one.
She walked straight up to the wheelchair.
The guards turned. One of them reached for her and the man in the chair raised two fingers, and the guard stopped.
"I don't know who you are," Becky said. "But you're dressed for a wedding and so am I. Marry me."
Nobody moved.
The man looked at her for a long moment.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"No."
Something changed in his face, so slightly that she could not have said what.
"Then say it again," he said. "And mean it, because I will hold you to it."
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