Accidentally Married As The Wrong Bride

ROMY'S POV

I paid a man five thousand dollars to marry me, and he didn't even have the decency to show up.

I had been standing outside the marriage license office of the Los Angeles County courthouse for two hours in a white dress I had altered myself the night before, and my groom was still not here. My thumb tapped the screen of my phone. I dialed him again, and it went straight to voicemail without a single ring.

"Hey, it's Brice. Leave a message."

"Brice, it's Romy. I'm still at the courthouse. Please, just text me back."

My battery dropped to nine percent. Four couples had arrived after me, signed their paperwork, and left as husband and wife. The security guard near the double doors had stopped pretending not to stare at me. I knew what I looked like standing there: a woman in a white dress, completely alone, checking her phone every thirty seconds. A woman who had been stood up in a public building on a Tuesday morning.

The worst part of it was that none of it was supposed to be real.

Brice Tolliver was a model my stepsister had introduced to me as a friend who did this kind of arrangement for extra cash. We would marry, post a few curated sweet videos online for six months, and get people talking about my name again after months of dead silence. Then we would file for a quiet, mutual divorce. I had paid the deposit using almost every single dollar I had left in my savings account.

"If anything comes up on the day," Paloma had told me while scrolling through her I*******m feed, "the agency will send someone else to cover. Just relax."

Paloma was very good at making complicated things sound simple. She had been the center of attention in every conversation in our house since she was nine years old, and she knew how to make everyone else feel like an extra in her life.

I'm an actress. Or at least, I was one before my personal life became a punchline. My last audition had ended with the casting director looking at my headshot and asking if I was "the girl Raff Pembroke dumped in public," and after that afternoon, my agent stopped returning my calls.

My phone buzzed against my palm, and for one fraction of a second, I let myself hope.

BREAKING: Rafferty Pembroke proposes to actress Tamsin Holt in Malibu.

There was a photo attached to the notification showing Raff down on one knee at sunset on the sand. The diamond ring on Tamsin's hand looked enormous even through the compressed pixels of a mobile screen. Three months ago, Raff had left me crying alone in a West Hollywood restaurant while Tamsin's car waited outside in the valet lane, and somebody at the next table had filmed the entire thing.

I pressed the phone face down against my thigh.

It's six months, Romy, I told myself. You can survive six months of pretending.

The hallway went quiet.

A man turned the corner with a phone pressed hard to his ear, and the security guard straightened up from the wall. The man was tall, wearing a charcoal suit that fit with the precise, expensive tailoring of something that had never seen a retail clothing rack. His jaw was locked tight.

"I'm here, Grandma," he said into the phone. "Yes. I see her."

His dark eyes moved down the empty corridor and stopped on me, standing alone in the white dress. He ended the call with a sharp tap of his thumb, crossed the open marble floor in a few long strides, and wrapped his hand around my wrist.

"Let's get this shit over with," he said, his voice low and sharp, "so my grandmother can finally be happy."

"Excuse me?"

He was already turning back toward the service counter, and I was being pulled along behind him by brute momentum.

"I don't know how much she promised you, and I honestly don't care," he continued, not looking down at me. "Six months. You play the wife, I play the husband, and when it's over, we go our separate ways."

Six months.

It was the exact length of my contract with Brice. The agency will send someone, Paloma had said. Had Brice backed out at the last minute? Was this the replacement they had arranged? Nobody had told me a single detail about a replacement, but then again, nobody in my circle ever bothered to inform me of anything.

"Wait. Did Brice send you?" I asked, stumbling over my heels to keep up with his pace.

"I have no idea who Brice is, and I'm not interested in your boyfriends."

"Then at least tell me your name."

He stopped walking so suddenly that I nearly collided with his shoulder. When he turned to face me, his eyes were dark, cold, and entirely exhausted by my presence.

"You're going to stand there and pretend you don't know my name?" He let out a harsh, humorless laugh. "You cried to my grandmother for months. You begged her for this exact arrangement. And now you want to act innocent?"

"I've never met your grandmother in my life. I think you have the wrong.."

"Don't."

It was a single word, spoken quietly, but it shut my mouth.

At the counter, the clerk looked up, took one look at the man standing beside me, and sat up straighter in her chair. "IDs, please."

He pulled his leather cardholder out, dropped his identification onto the counter, and went back to typing on his phone without sparing me another glance.

I stood frozen, holding my own ID card in my hand, refusing to move.

Every couple sitting in the waiting area was watching us with open curiosity. Somewhere out there in Malibu, Raff was watching Tamsin admire her engagement ring. My phone buzzed one last time against my leg and then went dark as the battery died, taking with it any remaining chance of reaching Brice or Paloma to sort out whatever mess this was.

I had two choices. I could walk out of this building in this white dress and let Paloma laugh at me across the dinner table tonight, or I could sign.

I laid my driver's license on the counter beside his.

The clerk picked up both cards. "I just need to read the names back to you.."

"We've checked them," he said, without looking up from his phone. "Just show us where to sign."

She hesitated, glanced at his face and slid the license across without another word.

The officiant had barely opened his leather-bound book when the man beside me cut him off mid-sentence.

"We are gathered here today.."

"I do," he said over the officiant. "She does. Where do I sign?"

The officiant blinked, looking past him to me. I opened my mouth to object, but no sound came out. He took my silence as confirmation, pointed a finger at the dotted line, and handed over a pen.

The man signed his name in one fast, aggressive stroke and shoved the pen toward me. I pressed the tip to the paper below his signature, and my name came out crooked.

He was already turning away before the ink was even dry.

"My people will contact you with the details," he said over his shoulder as he walked toward the exit. "Don't make me regret this."

Then he was gone, pushing through the heavy glass doors into the morning sun.

The clerk handed me my pink copy of the certificate with a mild, pitying smile. I looked down at the paper, needing to know the identity of the stranger I had just legally bound myself to.

I looked at the signature line directly above mine.

It wasn't Brice Tolliver.

It was Evander Pembroke.

I read the name a second time, and the paper began to shake in my hand.

Pembroke.

The exact same family name as the man who had just proposed to Tamsin Holt on a private beach in Malibu.