Page 10 of Accidentally Hitched (Unintentionally Yours #1)

Callum

“ Y ou were supposed to stay in Vegas,” Amanda says, and my frown deepens.

“I’m sorry?”

“This…this is not real. You are just some guy I met in Vegas at my sister’s bachelorette and none of this is real. Which is kind of sad because this is exactly the way I hoped the inside of Hardin Records would be. Better than I’d hoped, actually.”

It’s official.

I’ve hired a lunatic.

Maybe Noah was right.

I should pay more attention to the people we hire before we hire them.

But that’s what my team is for. I vetted a team that knows exactly what I want so that I don’t have to sit through countless, agonizing interviews with every clown who thinks they have what it takes to write for Hardin.

I won’t be making that mistake again.

“If this is a dream, I want to play that Martin before I wake up. I doubt I’ll ever touch anything that expensive in real life.” Amanda walks towards the wall, but I stop her.

“Don’t touch that!” my voice booms and I literally see the hairs rise up on her arms.

I also can’t stop staring at her ass.

She’s wearing a black, pleather skirt that bunches around her curves just enough to give me flashbacks of the other night. It looks phenomenal. Though, I have to admit, I prefer it bare, bent over and open for the taking.

I shake the memory from my head and focus. “Don’t touch anything. Just sit down.”

Amanda walks over to a leather chair and sits curtly, keeping her knees together and arching her back to sit straight.

I’ve seen that back arched before. I’ve been responsible for that back arching before. And I’ve parted those legs before too. I could do it right now, if I wanted to. Hike that little skirt up, rip those black tights wide open and suck the moans out of her.

“You need to calm down,” I tell her, displacing the command.

“I am calm. But this…feels like a joke. If it’s not a dream, it has to be a joke.”

I take a few wide steps towards her, closing the space between us and look down at her. She lifts her chin to look at me, but her expression is anything but weak.

She’s sassy as hell, I’ll give her that.

I’ll break her of that…

“Do I look like a joking man?”

“I don’t know. I mean, you did pretend to marry me less than forty-eight hours ago.”

Against my better judgement, I bend down, grabbing the chair on either side of her, caging her against the back of it. “You will never speak of that again, do you understand me? Not here, not to your friends.”

There’s a hint of fear in her eyes, but she blinks once and it disappears, replaced by the brattiness again. “What happens in Vegas and all that.”

I stand up, needing to get away from her pheromones. She smells like black current and it’s fucking with my head.

I don’t like my head being fucked with.

“This is just my luck,” she sighs.

“I don’t believe in luck,” I mutter, mentally sifting through the shit in an attempt to find a way around this. “Only odds.”

Amanda snorts a small laugh. “Those seem pretty low too right now.”

“I need you quiet while I try to figure out how we are going to go about this.”

“Well obviously you’re going to fire me.”

My eyes slice back down to her. “Don’t tell me what I’m going to do. As long as you’re standing in this building I am your boss.”

“Well then I resign.”

“Why the fuck would you resign?” I bark out.

But Amanda doesn’t slink back the way most people do when I use that tone. Instead, she stands up, locking her eyes on mine, though she has to look up at me to accomplish it. Even in her black, heeled boots I still have a good six inches on her.

“Because we slept together,” she whispers.

“And?”

Amanda blinks.

“And…” she fumbles for a response, but I talk over her.

“Do you want the job or not, Amanda? Everything else aside, your portfolio was better than the rest.”

“It was?” There’s a lilt in her voice and it almost annoys me. The girl is good. Better than good. And she should know that. She should be confident in that.

“By a landslide. So, if you still want the job–”

“I do. Everything that happened, never happened as far as I am concerned. I will forget all of it, never speak of it to anyone.”

“Your sister knows,” I point out.

“So does Noah.”

Touche.

“He wants to talk. Keep your sister in the dark. I doubt that’ll be too much trouble since she probably doesn’t look away from a mirror long enough to recognize anyone else.”

“Hey–” Amanda tries to cut me off, but I bulldoze over it. We’re not about to get into why she shouldn’t let her sister trample her anymore. I only have the patience for one shitshow at a time.

“All of your focus will be on work. Nothing else.”

“Yes, sir,” she complies and, my fucking God, do I like the way it sounds.

“In the meantime, I will figure out what to do about the obvious issue.”

“And what’s that?” she asks.

I narrow my eyes on her. “Did you forget what else we did in Vegas?”

She blinks, clearly lost. Jesus Christ, tell me she wasn’t that drunk.

“We’re married,” I blurt out.

Amanda laughs and it actually catches me off guard.

Once she sees my face, which I am sure is not holding even a hint of a smile, she goes on.

“What? It wasn’t real. That chapel and the ‘minister’?

” she uses air quotes. “The whole thing was a joke. The guy does it for the cash. He pretends to marry us, charges way too much for a photo and a fake license and?—”

While she’s talking, I pull up the man’s info on my phone. The word ordained comes up in bold lettering.

“Oh…shit.”

“Oh shit, is right.” I shove my phone back in my pocket.

“We’re married? Like till death do us part and all of that?”

I bite my lips, and she presses her hands to her face.

“No. No, no, no. This can’t be real. I can’t marry you! My sister is getting married. She’ll kill me!”

“Will you stop worrying about your sister for five goddamned minutes?”

“I thought it was fake!” she blurts out. “I thought because the minister was an actor–”

“You do know that a minister in Vegas, right?”

Amanda has the spice to shoot me a full-blown glare and it lights a Godzilla level fire inside me.

Mostly in my crotch.

“Of course I know that. Don’t be an ass.” She stops, blushes, goes on. “Respectfully. I’m serious though, Callum. He didn’t look like a professional. I doubt that it was a real church.”

“I doubt the place would even pass OSHA. But that’s not what matters right now. What matters is that you and I, intentionally, or not, got married.”

Amanda takes a deep breath and lets it out, pacing the floor next to me. “Okay. Alright. We can fix this. We can call whoever we need to call, and we can get divorced. Or annulled. It’s only been a few days. No one will ever know it happened, and we can move on and–”

“Or,” I hold up my hand and she stops. “We don’t.”

“I’m sorry what?”

I pause, questioning the words funneling their way to my mouth and say them anyways. “Maybe…we stay married. And kill two birds with one stone.”

“Why the hell would we stay married?”

A smirk tugs at my lips. “Think about it. That night was hot.”

“Hot enough to get married? I’m not a relationship counselor but I don’t really think that’s a solid enough reason to say I do.”

I take a step closer to her, my bottom lip dragging through my teeth. “We can forget about this. About everything we’ve done. Everything we did to each other. Though that might be kind of hard considering we’ve been naked together.”

Amanda holds her posture but her cheeks flush. I forgot how much I love that. How it spread from the swell of her breasts that are beautifully showcased right now by a tight, lace, plum colored top.

“Again, not a reason to get married.”

“You can’t deny we had chemistry…”

“We had alcohol.” Amanda is trying her best to counter my words with her own. But her body is telling me she feels differently. Then she manages to ask, “Why would you want to be married to me?”

“Because it could be very advantageous. For both of us.”