I took a closer look. The purchase had happened shortly before midnight—almost exactly before, actually, as if we had rushed in to get the purchase done before the store closed.
“What is this…Brad!”
“I don’t fucking know, Megan; chill the fuck out,” I said, trying to feign confidence.
“Chill the fuck out?” she said.
The only reason her voice hadn’t risen to an angry screech, I suspected, was that she was still waking up.
“I can’t remember anything after the Chandelier Bar, I woke up to your naked body in my vision, and now I’ve got…this? A wedding ring?”
She gulped. I gulped. She finally said the words that we both knew to be true, no matter how much we wanted to fight like hell to believe otherwise.
“Holy shit. Brad…are we married?”
I scoffed, but that was just an act of denial. When Megan’s face didn’t change, I knew I had to accept the truth.
“Seems that way,” I said. “Fuck me.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“You think I’m happy about this?” I said. “You think I wanted to wake up and learn we got married black-out drunk?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No, because if I did, I wouldn’t have fucking put a rock on it!”
“Fuck!”
Megan got out of bed—even angry, her naked body was a beauty to behold—grabbed her clothes, and stormed to the bathroom.
“We’re getting this shit annulled!” I shouted.
“No shit, Sherlock!” she shouted.
I would admit, if there were anyone that I wanted to wake up naked, hungover, and married to, it was Megan Adams.
But that was the thing. There wasn’t actually anyone that fit those criteria. I liked being rich, hot, and single. And marriage immediately took away one of those and slowly drained on the other two.
It felt like I’d made a fucking deal with the fucking devil. I’d gotten my dream girl last night.
And in return, I’d woken up to the worst kind of fucking nightmare.
Chapter 2: Megan
This was a disaster.
Single and flirting one moment, now suddenly married?
Not just married, but married to Brad Nimico? My rival? The most handsome man I knew? The…the richest guy I knew?
My life was…
Perhaps…
Perhaps not as ruined as I might have thought.
I had stormed into the bathroom enraged, a tempest that wanted to strike down Brad for having us get married last night. Every girl grew up dreaming of finding the perfect man. Absolutely no one grew up dreaming about getting black-out drunk and forgetting their own marriage in Las Vegas. And even though Brad was hot as fuck, a man with brass balls, and the kind of guy that any woman with an active sex drive would chase after, that was a far fucking cry from wanting to get married to him.
But when I had a moment in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the Roman tub, to think and collect my thoughts, a funny thing happened.
If I were to wind up married right now, if I were to say “I do” on paper—if not in memory—if I were to commit myself to one person…
It was him.
In a weird way, this may have just been the ticket I was looking for. I couldn’t believe I was thinking that, but it was true.
Life had put me in such a spot to consider how true that was.
* * *
One Year Before
“Come on, Dad. You’re seventy. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working in this building while everyone else your age goes golfing and travels?”
My dad, with his plump cheeks, balding gray hair, and pimples and scars from far too many cancer treatments, scoffed as he crossed his arms.
“I built this company from the ground up, and I will make sure that I build it as high as it can go before I die,” he said. “So first of all, no, if you think I’m giving up this business anytime soon, you should go find a new industry to work in. Maybe go be a nurse or something.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Second, if I were to give up the company—and that is an if that is not true, but I’ll humor you—it wouldn’t be to you. You aren’t ready to run the company.”
“Excuse me?”
“What, you think I’m going to give it to you out of some sense of nepotism?” my father said, shaking his head.
I did not expect it to be bestowed upon me like a Christmas gift. But I figured my father would have at least told me what I needed to do if I were to someday take over the business.
“Megan, you can’t commit to anything, much less running a multi-billion-dollar business.”
“Oh, come on!”
“You don’t even have a bachelor’s degree! Nor, for that matter, have you found yourself a good man with whom you can have my grandchildren.”
I had to bite my lip. It was the only way to prevent me from launching into a very unprofessional tirade.
“Dad, what I do with my home life has nothing to do with my business life,” I finally said after several seconds of awkward, tense silence.
My father looked at me with almost bemused disbelief. This was far from the first time we had had this conversation, but this was easily the most intense one.
“You know what my requests are, daughter,” he said.
Daughter. I hated when he called me that. It was his dismissive way of not referring to me by name, as if doing so would somehow constitute him bending over backward to accommodate me. It was times like these when I would envision finding the worst guy possible to marry, just to spite him.
Strangely enough, the “worst” choice wasn’t some tatted-up punk. It wasn’t some starving artist. It wasn’t someone who had a rap sheet that would make a nun faint.
He knew who the worst person was. Someone in the business. Someone that he vowed to crush, and yet seemed to outmaneuver him at every turn.
“And in any case, I don’t think it will matter. Women don’t run companies, anyway.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad, it’s the twenty-first century! Haven’t you seen the number of women in high-level positions? Marissa Mayer? Sheryl Sandberg?”
“The exception that proves the rule. Notice how none of them are in our industry.”
God, you piss me off so much.
“And in any case, it won’t matter until you grow up. That’s step one. Grow up and commit to something.”
“So, what, you want me to go back to school? Maybe take some classes at Columbia or something?”
“It would be a start.”
“And then maybe I can find some twenty-two-year-old to marry. I bet that would be really great, someone years younger than me. But hey, I’d be committing; isn’t that right, Dad?”
“It would be a start.”
Now he was just being sarcastic.
“Jesus, you’re that fucking serious about me getting married, aren’t you?”
“Watch your tongue, daughter.”
“I’m an adult, Dad! Tell me what I need to do to have a chance at the company! You know I do great work here, no matter what archaic bullshit you throw my way.”
“You want to know what you need to do?” my father said, suddenly losing his temper. I only felt mildly upset about this. His doctors had strict orders for him to control his temper so his heart would not suffer, but in a moment like this, the only thing I really cared about was my father not acting like he was from sixteenth-century Europe. “You need to go get married, or I need to drop dead. And that is my final order.”