no reason to hide the truth. It wasn’t long now before my one-night fling with this handsome stranger would be over.
“My fiancé and I broke up.” I shrugged, trying to downplay it. “It was over a year ago. But I couldn’t stay there after… so I quit and moved out here.”
Vicious rage slashed through his expression. “That bad?”
“Yeah.” I bit down on my lip before I confessed any more about a bad situation that had turned worse. Knowing I left a fiancé was enough to get the gist of the story.
“I can’t believe these places are open at three a.m.,” I murmured, changing the subject as I watched chapel after chapel pass by in the window.
“I don’t know what happened, Carrie,” James murmured. “But I can’t believe someone who was lucky enough to have you would risk letting you get away.”
My eyelids that had felt drowsy snapped open as my gaze whipped to him. I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry and sticky from the shocked rush of air I drew into my lungs. I searched his eyes for something—anything to tell me he wasn’t that serious or he was that drunk. And I came up empty-handed.
“Would you?” I heard the words slip into the space, and there was a full second before I realized I was the one who asked them. Heart hammering, blood pounding, my hands itching to touch… to memorize a man I’d only just met.
A man who’d made me feel safer, more important, and more cherished than my ex had ever done.
“Which?” our Asian Uber driver intruded into the conversation, demanding with an accent which chapel he was taking us to as his hand waved frantically toward the Strip.
I looked out of the window, my eyes catching on a single sign. “What about that one?”
The Fast Track.
“Is that a…”
“A drive-through wedding chapel?” James finished for me.
This time, when our eyes met, it was as though the heady sincerity of the previous moment had been wiped clean, replaced with the amused astonishment of finding a chapel where you didn’t even have to get out of the car to get married.
I cupped a hand over my mouth and chuckled.
“Take us to that one… the Fast Track,” James told the driver whose eye roll I could hear from the back seat.
The man didn’t speak much English and was clearly annoyed by his decision to accept our ride. Oh well. We’d grab our photo and be done in a minute.
The alcohol was really starting to kick in when it felt like I blinked and we were pulling into the small line of cars.
As we entered into the drive-through, the sight set James and me off on a tangent of drunken jokes and laughs about the whole premise of this business.
A. Drive-through. Chapel.
“I wonder if you pull up to the window to order a Happily-Ever-After Meal?” James asked, with a wink, “Or what kind of toy is included with the purchase?”
That one made me laugh and cross my legs to stop the rush of moisture between them.
I saw us moving up to the window, our driver forced to explain why we were there as we tried to control our laughter from the back seat.
“Shhh,” I shushed James, realizing they were making us sign some sort of consent. Probably not to use the photo for commercial purposes.
“Sign,” our driver turned and instructed with a wide grin, handing me the clipboard.
As I looked down, all the words blurred together and, to make it more impossible, a plastic veil, plastic top hat, and plastic rings landed on top of the paper.
Props. How perfect!
“They must get a lot of these scavenger hunts here,” I chuckled and scribbled my signature near the one giant ‘X’ before handing the clipboard to James.
If he went to read it, it was only for a second before I reached over and tried to put the top hat on his head.
“A man of many hats tonight,” I teased. His hand slashing over the paper and shoving it back to the front seat as he returned the favor by trying to attach the short, flimsy veil to my head.
It was funny how they read off a few ceremonial lines.
It was funny how we’d said ‘I do’ instead of ‘Cheese’ as they snapped our photo in the back seat of the car.
But there was nothing funny about the way they told James’ to kiss his bride—and the way he took full advantage.
Somewhere between lips and tongue, we managed to get the