My Groom Chose Her Again, So I Married My Billionaire Boss novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Groom Walks Out
Trevor leaves the altar for Whitney, Joanna calls Elias, he brings a dress and a license, and she marries him; Trevor's father says Elias has signed his own death warrant.
At three o'clock, two hundred guests watched my groom walk out of his own wedding.
The ballroom was full of white roses.
I stood at the front in a dress with red wine down the skirt and a torn back seam, and Trevor's phone was still lit in his hand.
"It's Whitney," he said. "She's at her brother's grave. She can't breathe."
"Trevor, the vows are in one minute."
"She just lost her brother, Jo. Give me ten minutes."
It was three years since her brother died, and Whitney had been "grieving" at every birthday, every holiday and every dinner I cooked since.
Trevor pushed through the double doors, and they swung shut behind him.
Nobody in the room moved.
Then the whispering started, row by row, from the back of the room to the front.
The dress had been fine an hour earlier.
Whitney had come to the bridal suite with coffee for me and a hug that lasted too long.
"You look perfect," she'd said. "I'm so happy for you both."
Then she lifted a full glass of red wine to toast me, and somehow it ended up down my front.
She caught herself on my back as she fell, and the seam split open to my waist.
She burst into tears.
Trevor ran in and looked at the dress, then at me.
"It's a dress, Jo," he said. "Don't make her feel worse today."
I could have stayed in the suite and cried.
Instead my best friend Bea pinned me shut with eleven safety pins, and I walked down that aisle in the ruined dress with my head up.
Now there were no safety pins left to hold anything together.
Ten minutes went by, then twenty.
Trevor's mother pressed a tissue to her mouth in the front row.
Trevor's father sat with his arms folded and watched me instead of the door.
Bea came up the aisle and took my hand. "Jo, we're leaving. Right now."
"No."
"Honey."
"I'm not walking out of here so they can say I ran."
I opened her clutch, took my phone out of it, and called the only person who had ever said Trevor wasn't good enough for me.
Elias Stannard picked up on the second ring.
He had been my boss for three years, the most feared man in the city, and the only person at that company who ever learned my coffee order.
The day I quit for Trevor, he'd stood at his office window and said, "You deserve better than a man who asks you to shrink."
I had been angry about it for a year.
"Joanna," he said now. "Where are you?"
"In a ballroom full of roses. Alone. Trevor left me at the altar for her. Again."
The line stayed quiet, and then I heard a chair scrape back.
"Stay where you are. Don't let one guest leave," he said. "Twenty minutes."
"Elias, why would you..."
"Because I told you once what you deserved, and I'm tired of watching you not get it."
He hung up.
Barely twenty minutes later, the ballroom doors opened.
Every head turned, and it wasn't Trevor.
Elias walked down the aisle in a black suit with a garment bag over his arm, and a man behind him carried a leather folder.
He didn't look at the guests.
He looked at me, at the wine, at the seam, and his jaw went tight.
"I opened a bridal shop on Marlow Street for this," he said quietly. "My lawyer has a marriage license from the county clerk's office. It needs two names."
"What?"
"Marry me, Joanna. Today, in front of every person who watched him leave."
I stared at him.
"Is this a joke?"
"I don't joke. One year, then you walk away with my name and whatever you want. Nobody will ever make you stand alone again."
My voice came out smaller than I meant. "Why me?"
"Because you called me," he said.
That was all he gave me, and it was enough.
I thought of Trevor's face as he said Whitney's name.
I thought of three years of waiting to be chosen first.
So I said yes.
Bea zipped me into a dress that fit perfectly, and she was crying when she did it.
Elias waited at the front.
The license lay open on the little table, and he put the pen in my hand himself.
"Write your full name," he said. "Your father's name goes on the line beneath."
I wrote Joanna Marie Doheny, and under it, Frank Doheny.
He looked at that second line far longer than he looked at anything else.
Then he signed.
The judge in the front row, a friend of Trevor's family, stood up, read the license, and looked at him for a long moment.
She walked to the front.
"Do you, Joanna," she began, and the whole room leaned in.
The doors banged open at the back.
"Joanna!" Trevor shouted.
I didn't turn around.
"I do," I said.
Elias's mouth came down on mine, hard and sure, and two hundred people gasped.
Trevor's father stood up in the front row.
"You have just signed your own death warrant, Stannard," he said.
Elias lifted his head and smiled at him.
"I know," he said.
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