When I Flash-Married a Billionaire, My Ex Went on a Hunger Strike novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Next of Kin
Mina walks into a hospital at 3 a.m., is disowned by her father and her fiance in the corridor, and the surgeon holding her wrist offers the only legal way out.
I walked into the emergency room at twelve-forty in the morning with a stolen phone in my fist.
A trucker had dropped me at the doors and driven off before I could say thank you.
I had been in a cellar for nineteen days, and the fluorescent lights hurt.
"Ma'am, can you tell me your name?" the triage nurse said.
"Mina Pemberton. I was kidnapped on the second of October."
She stopped typing.
Ten minutes later I was in a curtained bay, and a man in navy scrubs pulled the curtain shut behind him.
He was tall, with wavy light-brown hair that needed cutting and a day of stubble.
His badge said Dr. L. Greer, Trauma Surgery.
"I'm Lachlan Greer," he said. "I'm going to check your wrists. You can say no to any part of this."
"Check them."
He sat on the stool and took my left hand in both of his.
His hands were enormous and completely steady.
He turned my wrist to the light, and the rope marks showed raw and purple, and he didn't flinch.
Two fingers settled on my pulse.
I felt it jump under his touch.
"Fast," he said quietly. "That's fine. That's what it should do."
"I got out through a coal chute," I said. "I don't know why that's the part I keep thinking about."
"Because it was the way out."
He wrapped each wrist in clean gauze, slowly.
I didn't want him to stop.
That surprised me enough that I looked away.
At three-thirty the curtain ripped open.
My father, Leopold Pemberton, stood there in a charcoal coat over pajamas, with his rimless glasses crooked and a folder in his hand.
Behind him came Preston, my fiance, in a quarter-zip, and behind Preston came my half-sister Cordelia, in a cream coat, holding her phone like a flashlight.
Nobody ran to me.
"Mina," my father said. "Thank God."
He said it to the room, not to me.
"You're alive," Preston said, and he stayed in the doorway.
I stood up, gauze and all.
"Nineteen days," I said. "They called you."
"We handled it," my father said.
He opened the folder.
"This is a seventy-two-hour medical hold. You've been through trauma, you're confused, and the family has to make decisions for you. Dr. Greer, I'm her father. I'll sign."
"She's not confused," Lachlan said, from behind me.
"She walked out of a cellar and asked for a nurse. That is the most organized thing I've seen all week."
"This isn't your business, Doctor."
"She's my patient."
Preston cleared his throat.
"Mina, I need to say something, and I want to say it kindly."
I waited.
"I can't do this," he said. "I don't know what happened to you down there. Nobody does. And I can't marry that."
The word landed in the middle of the room like a plate.
"That," I said.
"I'm saying it badly."
"You said it fine."
Cordelia looked at the floor with her pretty mouth pressed shut, and I knew she had known he'd say it.
"The engagement is over," my father said. "I'm sorry, but it's the practical thing. The press will want a story, and Mina's will be a hospital stay. Her accounts are closed as of tonight. Your grandmother's money is gone, you understand that. You are not to be given a cent."
My stomach turned.
I knew the sentence he was saying.
I knew what he thought Gran's money was.
I knew where it really was, because Gran had told me, with her hand on my face, three years before she died.
I kept my mouth closed.
I let him think he was taking everything.
"Sign it," he said to the nurse behind him. "The psychiatrist arrives at eight."
He turned his folder to Lachlan.
"After that she'll be under my care, and my lawyers'."
The nurse hesitated.
Lachlan said, "A hold can be refused by a spouse."
"She's unmarried," my father said. "Her fiance just left her."
"Then she'd have to be married."
He was looking at me.
He said it as flatly as he'd said my pulse was fine.
"Marry me. Today, before eight. I know a judge who owes me a favor and a clerk's office two blocks from here. It's a signature. You'd be free of him the minute it's filed."
"Are you crazy?" Cordelia said.
"No," said Lachlan. "I'm awake."
My father laughed once.
Preston looked at me with pity, and that decided it.
I turned my back on all three of them and held out my wrapped wrist.
"Where's the courthouse?" I said.
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