Amber Leigh Williams - Married One Night

“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?”

He lifted his finger and pointed at her discerningly. “There’s a lovely bed-and-breakfast next door to the tavern. If my publicist’s sources are correct, it’s your cousin who owns it. I’ll stay on there for three weeks, just long enough for you to prove to me that what we shared in Vegas was indeed nothing.”

Olivia frowned at him. “If I were to agree, you realize you’re betting on a losing hand, right?”

“Maybe,” Gerald said with a considering nod. “But my gut is usually right. And it tells me that the place I need to be, at least for the time being, is right here in your charming little hometown.”

She narrowed her eyes as she considered him. Damn it. She did love a good challenge. Especially one where all the odds were in her favor. “Hmm. What are the stakes?” When Gerald’s brows arched, she added, “What’s a wager without stakes?”

“Oh, right.” He grinned, lifting a hand to scratch his chin in a pensive manner that made her stare a moment too long at his wide-palmed hand with its narrow, creative fingers. “If you win, I will humbly admit defeat and hand over the divorce papers. And I’ll pay whatever legal costs filing them incurs.”

“And if you win...?”

Gerald’s eyes shined anew with the light of promise. “Then what do you say we give this a shot, aye? You and me. I have a feeling it’ll be worth it. And on a hunch I’m rarely wrong.”

Olivia weighed him and his challenge. When he extended a hand for her to shake in agreement, she sighed and lifted hers to take it. “What the hell? You’ve got yourself a deal, Mr. Leighton. I hope you’re not a sore loser.”

Gerald didn’t shake her hand. He squeezed it warmly and leaned forward until his green eyes yawned before hers and that aftershave of his washed over her in a splendid wave she was sure never to forget. “I rarely make wagers, Mrs . Leighton. But when I do, I play to win. And I’ll be damned if I don’t win this one.”

Olivia swallowed, then released his hand and lifted her pint to take a gulp of Sam Adams. She had a feeling she was going to need it—and perhaps a few more—if Gerald was indeed sticking around.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS CLOSE to midnight, but Olivia got in her old burnt-orange 1980s-model Ford pickup she liked to call Chuck and drove through the rain band currently battering the shoreline. By morning the storm would not only have made landfall but be sweeping its way west toward Texas, hopefully bringing the sun back out to dry this part of the coast.

However, Olivia didn’t want to wait until then to confront her friend Adrian Carlton. The florist and single mother lived a few blocks south of the tavern in the old fruit and nut section of Fairhope. It was a quiet neighborhood, particularly at this late hour. Olivia pulled the truck into Adrian’s driveway and ran to the small porch underneath the gable that crowned the front of the snug but well-kept cottage.

Balling her hand into a fist, she pounded on the door, then hugged her arms around herself, huddling as close to the door as she could to keep from getting whipped to death by wind and sideways rain.

It took several moments, but she heard the small sound of several locks clicking before the door opened and dim light silhouetted the small, redheaded woman who peered out at her in disbelief. “Liv? Is that you?”