QB! Look what you made me do! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: City Hall

A quick wedding and a kiss for the cameras leave Sorcha shaken, and Trent warns her outside that Thurston wants the notebook faster.

"You knew him," I said.

Cade stood in the study doorway with his arms crossed, filling the frame.

I hadn't heard him come down the hall.

My pulse hammered in my throat.

"I knew him," he said. "He coached my youth team in Bridgeport."

"You never said."

"You never asked."

"I'm asking now."

He looked at the photo, then at me, and something in his jaw worked.

"He pulled me out of a county cell when I was seventeen and told me to stop hitting people who weren't hitting back."

"That's all?"

"That's enough."

I wanted to push, but Mavis's voice called us both from the hall for lunch.

He didn't ask what I had been doing in his study.

He was far too calm for a man who had caught his new wife beside his safe.

"Come on," he said. "You need a dress."

The dress Marlo found at a consignment store on Halsted was simple ivory crepe with a tight waist.

Cade's stylist sent three others.

I wore Marlo's, and she cried in the dressing room anyway.

"You're marrying a rugby player," she said, fixing my hair with a bobby pin in her teeth.

"I'm signing a contract with one."

"With those shoulders."

"Marlo."

"I'm just saying God is good."

Wednesday, November eleventh, the county clerk's office was packed with reporters on the front steps and flashes through every window.

I had expected a wedding.

I got a stampede.

Cade held my hand all the way up the stairs, and I let him.

His palm was rough and huge, and his thumb moved once across my knuckles.

Mavis sat in the front row of the chamber with her cane across her knees.

The judge read the vows in four minutes.

I said "I do" to a man I had known for four days.

Cade said it.

"You may kiss," said the judge.

I had been dreading that part since I picked up the pen.

Cade turned me toward him.

The cameras went off behind him.

"Look at me," he said low.

I looked.

He bent his head and kissed me.

It was supposed to be a show, a quick press of lips.

Then his hand slid into my hair and his mouth opened mine and the room fell away.

He tasted like coffee and mint, and he kissed me.

My fingers curled into his lapel without permission.

A sound came out of me that I'd have given a year's pay to take back.

When he lifted his head, his eyes were dark and his breathing wasn't even.

"That's for the cameras," he said, rough.

"Of course," I said, and my voice was gone.

Neither of us moved.

Mavis tapped her cane twice on the floor.

"That's enough, children, the clerk needs the room."

On the courthouse steps Mavis caught my sleeve while Cade was posing for a photographer.

"I've watched that boy kiss women for cameras since he was twenty," she said.

"He's never once looked afterward like he'd lost his place in a sentence."

"It was a show," I said.

"Mm," said Mavis. "Then he's better at it than I thought."

She let go and tapped away on her cane.

The sun was hard and the crowd was loud.

Cade got me through it, one arm around my waist, answering questions with a grin that made the women in the crowd sigh.

I smiled until my face hurt.

When the driver finally opened the car door, someone caught my elbow from the side.

"Hello, Sorcha."

Trent stood at the curb in a sharp navy coat with his hair gelled flat.

For two years I had thought that face was my future.

Now I wanted to throw up on his shoes.

"Don't touch her," Cade said, and he was suddenly beside me, a wall.

"Easy, captain," Trent said, hands up. "Just congratulating the bride."

He leaned toward me and lowered his voice until only I could hear.

"Uncle Thurston says to stop admiring the furniture."

"He wants it faster."

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