My Ex Is Engaged to My Stepsister, and I'm Still His Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Escort
At her ex's engagement party to her stepsister, Marlee arrives with a hired bodyguard, takes her dead father's guitar off the den wall and kisses the bodyguard in the driveway before his contract ends.
I hired an escort for my ex's engagement party, and I paid him by the hour.
Not that kind.
Hardaway Protective Services calls it executive escort.
It means a man in a suit stands on your left and keeps you away from whoever you're afraid of.
I was afraid of the groom.
The man I hired was named Josiah Hardaway.
He met me at the curb of my father's old street at seven o'clock on the dot.
He was six-two and broad through the shoulders, with gray coming in at his temples and a trimmed beard.
He shook my hand once, and after that he looked at everything but me.
"Three rules, Ms. Dunavant," he said.
His voice was low and so level that my ear placed it on a G and found it never moved.
I have perfect pitch, and I notice things like that about people.
"If I say we're leaving, we're leaving. I touch your elbow or your back, never your hand. You don't drink what you didn't see poured."
"What if I want to hit somebody?"
"Then you tell me first," he said, and his mouth did not move at all, but his eyes did.
I laughed for the first time in six weeks.
Six weeks was how long the marks on my wrist had been fading.
The party was in the backyard of the house I grew up in.
A white tent strung with lights held two hundred guests and a band.
My stepmother had kept my father's 1962 Martin on the den wall for two years, as a trophy.
She had told me I could take it home if I came tonight, smiled, and sang one chorus with Colt for the label's page.
The guitar was the only reason I was there.
Josiah's palm settled at the small of my back as we crossed the lawn.
It stayed exactly where a professional's hand stays, and I noticed it more than I noticed the crowd.
"Marley!" my stepsister called from the dance floor, wrong on purpose, as she had been since I was seventeen.
Haylee came at us in a camel coat with her ring hand already out and her smile already on.
"You brought a date? Oh, honey. Is he, like, paid?"
"I'm contracted, ma'am," Josiah said.
Haylee laughed too long, and I understood she had meant it to land and it hadn't.
The band stopped, and the groom took the microphone.
Colt Satterfield has three number-one singles, a black hat, and a smile that turns on when a camera does.
I dated him for six years.
"I want to thank the family that raised me a bride," he said, and two hundred people said aww.
"And my favorite harmony in the whole world. Come on up here, Mar. Sing our song."
Our song was "Fifty Dollar Chapel."
I wrote it with him on my father's couch in an afternoon.
He told every reporter in Nashville it was about a girl he made up.
I stayed where I was.
"No, thank you," I said, and it came out clear in a tent that had gone quiet.
Colt put the microphone down and came across the floor smiling for the room.
He took my left wrist in his hand and closed it, and his thumb found the faded marks.
"Don't do this," he said, very softly. "Sing for your family."
I could not feel my hand.
"Mr. Satterfield," Josiah said. "Let go of her now."
He had not raised his voice.
It stayed on its one low note, and it carried to the back of the tent.
"Who the hell is this?" Colt said, still smiling. "The rent-a-cop?"
Josiah did not answer him.
He laid his hand over Colt's, and he lifted Colt's fingers off my wrist one at a time.
Colt's smile slipped on the third finger.
"She's my backup singer," he told the crowd, a little too loud. "She's always been my backup singer."
I took my wrist back.
"He's with me," I said.
I had never once said no to Colt in public.
I walked through two hundred people, in through the French doors and into the den, and I took my father's Martin off the wall.
It hummed against my chest when I lifted it, a low open E, the way it had when he lifted it.
"Put that back," my stepmother said from the doorway.
She is fifty-six, and she smiles only when someone is filming.
Nobody was filming in the den.
"Dad's will," I said. "Page two. Read it."
"Marlee, you are ruining your sister's night."
"She's not my sister," I said, and I walked out with the guitar.
The guests had followed us.
They stood in the front yard under the porch light, with their phones up, and Colt stood among them with his hat in his hand.
Josiah was waiting at the curb beside a black Tahoe, with the passenger door open.
I stopped in front of him.
I put my hand flat on his chest, and I felt his heart under the suit, and it was not level at all.
"Ms. Dunavant," he said, very low. "The contract runs until midnight."
"Then I'm still your client," I said, "and I'm telling you what to do."
I went up on my toes with my father's guitar in one hand and kissed him in front of two hundred phones.
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