He Left Our Wedding for a Sprained Ankle, So I Married My Ex-Boss novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Name Card
Gillian hears Dillon run to Chloe on their wedding day, calls the boss who proposed, and swaps the groom's name card. The real groom arrives with a judge.
"Two feet left," I told the florist. "The photographer wants the arch dead center under the chandelier."
The florist dragged the iron frame across the ballroom stage.
"There?"
"Half a foot more."
It was ten in the morning and my wedding was at two.
I had been up since four with the caterers, the chairs and a groomsman who was already drunk.
My dress hung in the bridal suite upstairs.
I was wearing jeans and a tank top with dust on my sneakers.
Dillon stood by the stage door in his tuxedo trousers, scrolling his phone.
His bowtie hung open around his neck.
He had not made one decision all morning.
"Do we need this many white roses?" he asked.
"It's our wedding, Dillon. You signed off on the flowers in March, and your mother asked for extra."
He frowned and went back to his phone.
"Put it away. We still have the seating chart."
"Put my cousins at table four."
Then his phone rang.
He answered before the second ring.
He always did, for one caller.
The speaker was loud and the ballroom was quiet, so we both heard her cry.
"Dillon. Please."
I knew the voice. Chloe Danvers, his oldest friend.
My stomach dropped.
"Pipe, what's wrong?" Dillon turned his shoulder to me.
"I fell. I went up to the attic for a box and the ladder slipped. My ankle. I think it's broken."
"Did you call an ambulance?" I said, loud enough for the phone.
For one beat the line was silent.
Then she cried harder.
"Please don't be mad, Gillian. I'm alone in this house. Since Mom and Dad, there's nobody. I'll just crawl to the road."
"I'm coming," Dillon said. "Stay awake."
He ended the call and reached for his keys on the nearest table.
"The ceremony is in four hours," I said.
"She's hurt."
"Ambulances have paramedics. You do financial analysis."
"Don't do this now."
"Dillon."
"Her parents died, Gillian. Our families go back thirty years. She needs somebody she trusts."
I stepped into his path. "If you go through that door, you're picking her over me. Again."
"She has anxiety. You know she's never been right since the funeral."
"That was eleven years ago."
"She's my family," he snapped.
"In four hours I'm your wife."
He shoved past me.
I caught his wrist and he tore it back so hard I stumbled.
"I'll be back before you've even got the dress on," he said.
"Remember last winter, when I had a fever of a hundred and three?"
He stopped, one hand on the brass door handle.
"You told me to take an aspirin," I said. "Then you went to play golf."
"That's not the same."
"Since Chloe came home from overseas six months ago, you have dropped everything for her ninety-nine times."
"What?"
"I kept a note on my phone. Dinners. Movies. My birthday. Our anniversary. Today makes a hundred."
His face twisted.
"You've been counting? That's sick."
He pushed the heavy door open and jogged across the front lawn to his car.
He did not turn around.
He would take the long way, I knew. He always drove the extra forty minutes around the lake road to get anywhere near her house, and he never told me why.
The door thudded shut and the sound ran through the whole ballroom.
The caterers had stopped.
The florist was staring at me.
The planner came over slowly with her silver clipboard held to her chest.
"Gillian? Should we pause the setup?"
I looked at the closed doors.
A laugh came out of me, short and dry.
"No," I said. "Keep going. The wedding is today."
She nodded, confused, and went to find the catering lead.
I took my phone out of my back pocket.
I scrolled past the florist, past my mother, past Dillon.
I stopped at a name I had not called in a year.
Vaughn Stroud.
My old boss. The man who had asked me to marry him, in his own office, the day before I told him I was marrying Dillon.
My thumb hovered.
I was not going to be the bride who waited at the altar.
I was not going to spend my life coming second to a dead couple's daughter.
I pressed call.
He answered on the second ring.
"This is unexpected," Vaughn said.
"Hello, Vaughn."
"You should be walking down an aisle in a few hours."
"There's been a delay." I leaned on a catering table and turned a champagne flute by its stem. "I need to ask you something."
"Ask."
"A year ago you asked me to marry you. Is the offer still open?"
The noise behind him stopped.
"Are you drunk?"
"I'm completely sober."
"Gillian. You're marrying Dillon today."
"Dillon just left to run to Chloe Danvers's ankle. Again."
He gave a low, dry laugh.
"I don't lend my name out," he said. "If I say yes, it's a marriage. You don't get to use me to make him jealous and go home to him tomorrow."
"I don't want him back. I want a husband who is in the room."
His voice changed. The amusement went out of it.
"Where are you?"
"The Grand Plaza."
"Stay there. I'm coming."
He hung up.
I looked up at the white roses on the arch.
Dillon thought he'd be back to a crying fiancée and a smiling bride for the cameras.
I smiled.
"Planner!" I called.
She hurried over. "Yes?"
"Change the card at the head table. Take Dillon's name down."
"And put up whose?"
"Vaughn Stroud."
She opened her mouth and shut it.
She wrote it on her clipboard.
I headed for the stairs and the dress upstairs.
Twenty minutes later the ballroom's front doors swung open.
Vaughn Stroud came in alone, in a black suit, with a gray-haired judge a step behind him.
"I brought someone who can marry us," he said. "Is the arch where you want it?"
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