Double Contract Love novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Contracts

With the lights on she asks him to marry her for ninety days; each writes a page of terms, they marry in a courthouse with a steel rigging ring, and her stepmother is waiting in the parking lot.

"Ask you what?" I said, though I knew.

"What you came to ask me last night." His voice was rough with sleep. "I want to hear it with the lights on."

I sat up and pulled the sheet over my chest.

My hair was a wreck, and I had a mark on my neck the size of a plum.

"Dal Yarbrough," I said. "Will you marry me today?"

"For how long?"

"Until the wedding. Until I'm done with them. Ninety days, and then we call it a mistake."

He rubbed his jaw and looked at me for so long that my stomach knotted.

"I'll tell you what's funny," he said.

"I came in here last night for a cup of coffee."

"I'll buy you another one."

"Two terms," he said. "Then yes."

My heart did a stupid little jump.

He picked up the hotel notepad from the nightstand, tore off two sheets, and handed me one and the pen.

"Write yours," he said. "I'll write mine. We swap and we sign both."

"Like a contract."

"Like two," he said.

I wrote fast.

Ninety days.

He sits next to me at every family event I choose.

No other people for either of us until it's over.

At the end we part friends and nobody gets hurt.

I did not write the other thing.

I had a second page in my head, with Gwen's name at the top, and I was not going to hand it to a stranger.

He took my sheet and I took his.

His handwriting was blocky and neat, a carpenter's printing.

One, no lies about money.

Two, nobody comes to my house until I say so.

Three, Sundays are mine.

I read it twice.

"What happens on Sundays?"

"Something I'm not ready to talk about."

"Is it a woman?"

"It's the best thing in my life," he said, "and it's not a woman, not like you mean."

I thought about the sawdust and the tired shoulders and the way he'd asked me nothing at all last night.

"I have things you don't know about too," I said.

"I figured," he said. "You haven't asked my last name."

"Yarbrough. It's on your jacket."

"Okay," he said, and he smiled slowly. "Sign it."

We signed both, one under the other, on hotel stationery with a tiny gold crest on top.

Then he pulled his jeans on and I found my green dress on the floor and held it up against me.

"I'm not going to a courthouse in this," I said.

"There's a clothing store on Market Street that opens at nine," he said. "I'll wait outside."

I bought a plain cream wrap dress and flat shoes, and I paid with the card Preston did not know I still had.

At 11:20 we stood in the Jefferson County clerk's office, in a line behind a pair of nervous twenty-year-olds.

Dal had showered and put on a clean white work shirt with the sleeves rolled.

I could not stop looking at his forearms.

"You're staring," he said, quietly.

"I'm checking my husband."

"Not yet."

"Eleven forty," I said.

The judge was a stout woman with reading glasses on a chain who did six weddings before lunch.

She read the vows and looked at us over her glasses.

"Rings?" she said.

I froze.

I had forgotten rings.

Dal dug in his jacket pocket and held up a small, thick, shining circle of steel.

"Rigging ring," he said under his breath. "It's what I had."

He slid it onto my finger, and it was too big, so it dropped to my knuckle and spun.

I laughed out loud.

He gave me a look that was so warm and so startled it took all the breath out of me.

"I now pronounce you married," the judge said. "You can kiss her."

He took my face in his hands and kissed me.

It was not like the elevator.

It was careful, and it lasted just long enough for my knees to forget their job.

When he pulled away, the judge had already called the next couple.

We walked out into the September sun, laughing, hand in hand, and I felt lighter than I had in two years.

"Mrs. Yarbrough," he said.

"Don't push it."

"Lillian Yarbrough."

"I'm keeping Thornbury."

"Then Mrs. Thornbury-Yarbrough."

I opened my mouth to answer.

Across the parking lot, a silver Lincoln was parked in the handicapped spot.

My stepmother stood beside it in a cream suit with her sunglasses pushed up in her hair.

Tabitha leaned against the fender beside her, looking at her nails.

Gwen lifted a hand and waved at us.

"There you are," she called.

"Dalton Yarbrough, isn't it?"

I felt Dal's hand tighten on mine.

"Sunday brunch at the Harlan Club," Gwen said, and she smiled with every one of her white teeth.

"Bring my new son-in-law. I've found out ever so much about him since eight o'clock this morning."

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