The Fake Fiancée Who Sang at Her Own Wedding novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Seconds Longer
On a Nashville stage, the fake engagement kiss runs three seconds past the rehearsal, and Joanna's uncle is watching.
The rehearsed kiss was supposed to last one second.
Joanna Breckinridge had timed it with her silver watch in the hotel hallway that morning.
"One second," she said. "Lips only. Then you look at the crowd and smile."
"What if I want to smile first?"
"Then you smile after."
That was this morning, four days after we met and ten hours before the biggest night of her career.
Now I stood on a lit stage in a Music Row ballroom, in a yellow sundress and borrowed heels, holding her hand.
Three hundred people in boots and cocktail dresses were looking at me.
Behind us a banner read Breckinridge Radio, Forty Years on the Air.
Joanna's mother sat in the front row, and she was smiling so hard.
Beside her sat Joanna's uncle Boyd, who was not smiling at all.
He had a white mustache, a pressed western shirt, and the deciding vote on the whole company.
Joanna took the microphone from the host and tapped it once.
"Most of you know I don't do speeches," she said.
Everyone laughed, because it was true.
"So I'll say it plain. This is Callie Crowell, and she's agreed to marry me."
The room made a sound.
Cameras flashed in a white line along the edge of the stage.
My heart was going so fast I could feel it in my teeth.
Four days earlier I had been singing "At Last" at a cousin's wedding in a barn.
Four days earlier I had owed my landlord four thousand two hundred dollars.
Now a woman in a gray suit turned to face me, and her red lipstick was perfect.
"Ready?" she said, so quietly the microphone missed it.
"No," I said.
"Good. One second."
She put one hand at my waist and the other against my jaw.
Her palm was warm, which surprised me.
I had expected her to be cold, the way she was in meetings.
Then she kissed me.
It was a nice kiss for the first second.
It was dry and careful and exactly what the contract said.
At the end of the first second she did not pull back.
Her thumb moved once along my cheek.
I heard myself make a small noise in my throat.
Her hand tightened at my waist and drew me an inch closer.
The crowd was cheering, but it sounded far away.
She tasted like mint and a little like champagne she hadn't finished.
I kissed her back, because it would have looked strange not to.
That is what I told myself on stage, and it was only half a lie.
At three seconds I felt her breathe in sharply against my mouth.
At four seconds she let me go.
Her eyes were wide, and for one moment she looked about twenty years old.
Then she smiled at the crowd, and the exec came back over her face.
"That's my girl," Joanna said into the microphone, and the cheering doubled.
I smiled at the crowd too.
My knees were not entirely working.
She walked me down the stairs with a hand at my back, and we stopped behind the curtain.
"That was three seconds too long," she said under her breath.
"It was your kiss," I said. "I just followed it."
She opened her mouth to answer, and a heavy voice behind us answered first.
"Well, now," Boyd Breckinridge said. "That one I believed."
He stood at the end of the curtain with a glass of tea in his big hand.
He looked at her, and then at me, and then at the way her fingers were still on my hip.
Joanna took her hand away fast.
"Uncle Boyd," she said.
"The tour starts at seven tomorrow," he said. "Knoxville's the second stop, and I'll be there."
He took a slow drink of his tea.
"I vote on the twenty-eighth day, Joanna. Twenty-eight days of that, and I'll believe you've settled down."
He tipped his hat to me and walked away.
I watched him go, and then I turned to her.
"Twenty-eight days of that," I said.
Joanna was looking at my mouth.
"Yes," she said, and she did not sound like a woman who minded.
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