Page 13 of Making the Save
At the end of the video I poured Sydney into the back seat of an Uber and crawled in after her. The door shut. The car pulled away.
Show over.
“What happens now?” Sydney asked, her voice shaky.
“What do you mean?” I said. “This must happen all the time in Vegas. It probably wasn’t even legal?”
“Oh, it was very legal,” Beatrice said. “The paperwork from the chapel has already been filed with the county. So the marriage is official. The only thing to do now is to get an annulment or file for a divorce.”
Sydney buried her face in her knees “No!”
“Sadly, yes,” Beatrice told her.
I still didn’t get it. “We file for divorce. You put out a statement. I’ll put out a statement. It’s a little embarrassing, but it’s not the end of the world?”
She was still shaking her head, her hands covering her face.
If I wasn’t a gentleman, I might have told her all that shaking was creating a gap in her robe so that I could see the swell of her right breast.
Only I was a gentleman, so I averted my eyes instead.
Which wasn’t easy. Honest-to-god, Sydney Malloy was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen in my whole life. She had been the first time I saw her perform at the Grammys. The first time I’d gotten tickets to see her in concert. Every time she broke the internet with her love life.
In person – she took my breath away. She was strong and fragile. Sweet and sexy.
When I spotted her at the golf outing pulling up in the cart behind us, I’d literally gotten star struck. Something as a professional athlete, who had been around famous people for years, I didn’t get.
My brother, Liam, made it a point to know everyone. In music, acting, across all sports. There wasn’t a significant pop culture person whose number he didn’t have in his contact list. Since he would occasionally drag me to some of these events, I had met plenty of stars.
None of them left me feeling the way Sydney did. It was something about her green eyes that just leveled me. Like she was this elfin princess who’d been trapped in human form and needed someone to help her return to fairyland. Or something.
Whatever.
“Why are your cheeks red?” Sydney asked, her hand touching mine.
“It’s hot in here,” I said.
It wasn’t. She just had me turned inside out.
When I saw Baker Gafford come up behind her and grab her ass, I’d nearly lost my mind. Protecting her had been a no brainer and I’d thought, if nothing else, I could rub it in my brother’s face that I’d spent some time on the golf course with Sydney Malloy.
What I didn’t expect was for her to be so funny. And real. And exciting. Like a bolt of lightning in the middle of my life. Like anyone, when he realizes he’s had a brush with something rare, I tried to bottle that lightning.
Marriage had seemed like a logical conclusion to the night, given the amount of tequila involved.
However, I stood by the fact that this girl was special and I hated seeing her stressed out by what we’d done.
“We need to return Tyler’s calls. He’s been ringing you every five minutes,” Beatrice said quietly.
“Who’s Tyler?” I asked.
“No, Bea,” Sydney begged. “Please. You know what he’ll say.”
“Sadly, I do, but this is his job.”
“Who’s Tyler?” I asked again.
“Tyler is my publicist. He controls my image, and he’s going to tell me this, a quickie Vegas wedding and a divorce, isn’t good for my brand.”