Married One Night

“Yeah, about that.” Olivia cleared her throat and crossed her arms over her chest, shifting from one black-heeled boot to the other. “How did you find me exactly?”

“I had to call in a few favors,” Gerald admitted. “In the end, it was my publicist who was able to nail down your current address. You’re not an easy woman to find, Olivia Lewis. Particularly in the middle of a hurricane.”

She looked toward the glass doors leading onto the veranda. Nobody had dared to brave Mother Nature and sip their drinks outside this evening as they did most other nights at the tavern. Seeing the sturdy wooden chairs being whipped about by the wind and the soaking wet, weathered planks of the floor, she frowned at him. “You drove through this to get to me?”

“Yes,” Gerald confirmed. And there was that hint of sheepishness crawling into his eyes. He blinked and interest filled them, chasing away the momentary embarrassment as he jerked his thumb toward the bay. “Is it always like this?”

“Only occasionally, during the latter months of hurricane season. I’ve seen way worse,” Olivia told him. “Why?” When he looked at her in question, she added, “Why were you so desperate to track me down that you couldn’t wait for the storm to pass?”

Gerald cleared his throat and dropped his eyes to the floor. “Perhaps we’d both better have a drink.”

She stared at him a moment, the muscles tightening around the smile on his mouth. “Yep,” she agreed with an answering nod. “You might be right about that.”

* * *

OLIVIA STILL COULDN’T get over the fact that he was here. The man who, despite Olivia’s best efforts, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about for three weeks. Particularly when she was in bed, alone. Or making coffee in the morning. She’d hardly been able to shower without thoughts of him rising with the steam in the bathroom.

Monica had brought their drinks to a table in the corner of the tavern, farthest away from the bustling bar and the two pool tables and televisions broadcasting sports and the weather radar. Gerald had taken off the wool jacket as well as the sports jacket he wore beneath it. The sleeves of his crisp, green, button-down shirt were rolled up over the muscles of his forearms.

Olivia watched those muscles flex as he gripped the pint of Sam Adams. Gerald brought it to his lips, tipped it back and made a sound of assent. “Bloody good draft.” Shooting a glance at her over the rim, he added, “Have you always been in the tavern business, Olivia?”

She pursed her lips. “You’re the one who had your publicist track me down. Shouldn’t you know that already? Stalkers usually do a background check, right?”

Gerald chuckled, his shoulders moving under the shirt. What kind of material could look so soft yet be able to fold on a knifepoint as his did at the collar? It looked pricey. Olivia wondered if it had cost as much as a man like Gerald could potentially cost her. “Details aside, love, I’m not stalking you,” he explained. “I actually had a very practical reason for tracking you down.”

“And that is...?” Olivia asked.

Gerald jerked his chin toward her untouched pint. “You should drink first.”

She gestured to the bar. “I’m a busy woman, Gerald. I don’t have much time.”

He leaned forward in his chair and braced his elbows on her table, those nice, solid shoulders settling over his bent arms. “What memories do you have of our time in Nevada?”

“Our one-night stand, you mean?” Olivia asked.

He grinned. “Precisely.”

She sighed, lifting a hand. “Oh, I don’t know. Not much, to be honest. Tequila has a debilitating effect on my ability to retain information.”

“As it does for all us mere mortals,” Gerald acknowledged with a thoughtful nod. He turned serious, almost grave. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached out and covered her hand with his free one. “I hope you don’t take this too hard, but it seems on that night in Las Vegas somewhere along the line we happened to find ourselves embedded in a wedding chapel.”

Her lips twitched in wry humor. “A wedding chapel. You’re kidding me, right?” When those grave green eyes neither smiled nor strayed from hers, she fumbled. “You’re...you’re not? Kidding?”

Gerald took a breath. “No. Apparently, Elvis presided over the ceremony. It’s a bit hazy to me, too. Two ladies by the names of Roxanna Honeycutt and Adrian Carlton—who, I’m assuming, were the friends you were in Vegas with—served as witnesses. By all accounts, the entire wedding party was inordinately pissed.”

“No,” Olivia said. She snatched her hand out from underneath his. Her heart plummeted down to her toes. She shook her head in automatic denial even as dread crawled over her. “You’re wrong. We didn’t. I didn’t.”

“We were drinking, love,” Gerald reminded her gently, as if he were treading on eggshells. He watched her face closely. Concern rose through the gravity as her dread became apparent. “There’s no shame in it.”

“No shame?” Olivia muttered, disbelieving. Damn it, how had she gotten herself into this situation? Hadn’t she learned enough the first time? It didn’t matter that she’d gone several rounds with Señor Cuervo. She’d gotten married. In Las Vegas. To a complete and total stranger.

“Olivia,” Gerald said. He uttered her name again, reaching out to touch her shoulder and bring her back to him. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she snapped, then checked herself and cleared her throat. “I’m fine.” It wasn’t his fault. If he was right, everyone involved had been plastered. There was no way her cynical friend Adrian in her right mind would have let her elope with a stranger. And Olivia liked to think, without the influence of alcohol, Roxie wouldn’t have allowed her to do something that stupid, either.

She took a deep breath and gripped the edge of the table in front of her. “So...what do we do about it?”

Gerald trained his gaze on some point over her shoulder. “Well, I’ve already spoken to my attorney. He’s assured me that he will take care of it with little fuss if we decide to go the route of separation.”

“Okay, good,” Olivia said, relieved. But that relief dissolved little by little as she watched him take another long sip from the pint. “Wait. You said ‘if.’ Why is there an if?”

Gerald pressed his lips together, either savoring the Sam Adams or bracing himself. She had a very frightening suspicion it was the latter. He planted his elbows on the table again and leaned toward her, smile warming the lower half of his face. “I have a wee bit of a suggestion.”

“If it’s not related to annulment or divorce, you might not be walking out of here in one piece,” Olivia pointed out, trying to smile. He couldn’t be crazy enough to suggest that they actually remain married, for heaven’s sake.

Could he?

Gerald made a thoughtful noise in his throat. “Well...”

Olivia’s smile fled and she looked at him as if he were crazy. “Okay, now you’re scaring me.”

“Just hear me out,” Gerald advised, lifting a hand in plea.

“No,” she said and snorted out a mirthless laugh. “No,” she said again just to get her point across. “I have no idea who you are. You don’t know anything about me, despite what your publicist or whoever might have told you. The only thing we have in common is one drunk night in Las Vegas.”

“How do you know that, love, when, as you say, we don’t know each other yet?” Gerald challenged.

Olivia’s mouth dropped open. “Because this is me,” she told him, lifting her arms to encompass the tavern. “And you’re...well, you’re expensive shirts and tailored suits and spicy aftershave, which I have no doubt costs more than our sham wedding. We’re clearly from different parts of the world as a whole. How could you possibly think there’s anything there?”

Gerald’s eyes locked on hers and sobered once more. “Because of what I felt, the morning after.”

Olivia fell silent. “What you felt?”

“Yes,” he acknowledged with a dip of his head. “I...” He sighed, shook his head and narrowed his eyes on the windows next to the table as if trying to see the squall beyond the weeping, wind-buffered panes. “Well, suffice it to say, I felt more in that one morning than I’ve ever felt during any one of the lengthy relationships I’ve had throughout my entire adult life. And I think that’s worth something.”

Olivia’s mouth opened, then closed and opened again. “It was the drinks, like you said.”

Gerald gave her a baleful stare. “We both know we were clean and sober the next morning, Olivia. Can you honestly tell me that night or what was shared between us the following morning meant nothing to you?”

She chose to ignore the fact that she’d been thinking of little else since her flight back to Alabama with the girls, and simply lifted her hands and shoulders in a helpless gesture. “It couldn’t. There was nothing. It was nothing.”

Gerald studied her carefully for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, a slow grin crept over the lower half of his face, warming his eyes. The smile was like a sucker punch to her resolve. And damned if he didn’t know it, Olivia thought. He took another sip of beer, leaned back in his chair and hooked one loafer-clad ankle over the opposite knee. “I’d like you to prove that.”

“What?”

“A wager, if you like,” he told her. “Come now, Olivia. You’re a small business owner. Small business is a gamble at one time or another. And you strike me as a woman who enjoys a challenge.”

“So what if I am?” Olivia asked. “How would that change anything?”