A Merry Little Christmas (20 page)

“Wake up! Adonis, wake up, wake up,
wake
up!
Let me out of this bed,” she said croakily.

He finally stirred with a loud snort, abruptly turning over onto his back and releasing her. She sprang from the bed and stared around the room until she could discern a door that might lead to a bathroom. Dashing over, she whimpered in gratitude at finding a great big beautiful bathroom, which she used immediately. After taking care of the most pressing matter, she went over to the marble vanity and looked into the mirror, wincing at what she saw. Her hair was in total disarray, her makeup was nonexistent and her clothes
,
well, they didn’t even merit discussion. She was a pure-d mess, no question about it. But why was she here and how had she ended up in a bed in a strange hotel with Adonis Cochran of all people? She needed some answers and soon.
 
Stumbling back into the bedroom, she made her way to the window and cruelly opened the draperies wide. The brilliant sun streamed through the windows and made her already sensitive eyes water. She groped her way back over to the bed and grabbed Donnie, none too gently.

“Wake up! Adonis, wake up! Why are we here? What’s going on?” she rasped out. Her voice was scratchy and her mouth had a horrible taste. On top of everything else, she was incredibly thirsty. Hitting Donnie in the knee a few times as she called his name, she returned to the bathroom where she found the toothbrush and toothpaste left there for the guests. She brushed her teeth three times with her head lowered against the pain. She managed to rinse her mouth out thoroughly and drank several tumblers of water. After a most unladylike belch she turned to go
back to the bedroom and jumped as she found Donnie standing in the doorway of the bathroom, looking as bad as she did.

“What in the world happened here last night?” he asked, his eyes squinted against the bathroom lights.

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me,” she said with a frown.

“Well, I can’t. And if you don’t want to get to know me really, really well, real fast, you need to scoot,” he suggested.

He didn’t need to tell her twice as she was already out the door. While he was availing himself of the facilities, she took a look around the room, which was actually a suite. Besides the big bedroom with the king-size bed and the plush, luxurious bathroom, there was a living room where she took refuge to think. Her head was still pounding and she felt like she’d been beaten with several bags of wet sand. Other than that, she couldn’t formulate a single logical explanation for how she and Donnie had wound up sleeping in each other’s arms in a luxury hotel suite. She looked down at her rumpled, creased dress and the hose with a giant run in one leg and tried to understand her situation.

Donnie finally appeared in the living room. He’d apparently taken a shower, from the looks of his damp hair and the white terry-cloth robe he was wearing. He actually looked way better than she did
at the moment
, something that annoyed her to no end. He walked across the plush carpet and sat on the sofa that faced the one on which she was sitting. “Well, I feel a little better. I’d suggest a nice, long, hot shower for you, too. I called for the laundry service; they’ll come get our clothes and have them back to us in two hours. I also ordered some room service and some Alka-Seltzer, just in case you feel as bad as I do,” he said.

“My goodness, aren’t you the efficient one,” Angelique said haughtily, and wished she hadn’t. First because there was no need to be rude, and second because talking made her head h
ur
t even
more
.
.

“Look, Angel, why don’t you go take a shower and give me your clothes? We can eat breakfast and figure out what we’re going to do, okay?” He spoke very nicely in an even, calming tone that for some reason set Angelique on full alert.

“Figure out what we’re going to do about what?” she asked suspiciously.

“About this,” he said, holding out a piece of paper.

Through her fog Angelique could
n’t make out a single word.  “Don’t torture me, tell me what the hell that is,” she said grumpily.

Donnie gave her a sexy, crooked smile and spoke as gently as he could.  “It’s a marriage certificate made out to Adonis Cochran and Angelique Deveraux.”

“Oh, holy crap,” she muttered. “What have we done?”

***

In a couple of hours the pounding in her head had lessened and she actually felt better, something she would have believed impossible after Donnie revealed the marriage certificate. She had taken a
very
long,
very
hot shower, shampooing her hair and letting the hot water beat down on the back of her neck and her temples until some of the pressure was relieved. She’d actually been able to eat the breakfast Donnie had ordered, which surprised her. She’d come out of the bathroom wearing the other white terry-robe thoughtfully provided by the hotel, with her hair wrapped in a towel. Donnie wouldn’t allow her to feel self-conscious; he’d escorted her to the living room where the room-service trolley awaited. He’d ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage and biscuits with fresh sliced fruits and a huge pot of steaming, fragrant coffee. Best of all, there was a bowl of creamy-looking grits with a big pat of butter melting in the middle.

“Angel, if you eat something and take the Alka-Seltzer, I promise you’ll feel better,” he said as he filled her plate. Her eyes widened and she uttered the first words he’d heard her say since her reaction to the certificate.

“I can’t eat all that,” she protested.

He laughed and teased her. “I’ll bet you can. I’ve seen you eat, remember?”

She did manage to eat quite a bit of the well-prepared food and felt a lot better after the pain reliever started taking effect. She finally felt well enough to look directly at Donnie, something she’d avoided since she went into the bathroom to shower.

“Thank you. I think I’m going to live now,” she sighed. “Although I’m not sure I want to. Adonis, what does that certificate mean? We aren’t really ... We didn’t
…” 
She stopped and took another sip of coffee. Somehow she couldn’t say the words.

“We aren’t really married?” Donnie said quietly. Angelique nodded her head. His next words made her crumple in her chair.

“I’m afraid we are, Angel. While you were taking a shower I made a few phone calls. First of all, we’re at the Bellagio. We checked in late last night—well, early this morning, I should say. We
are
legally married; it’s not some kind of weird joke. I called the wedding chapel where we did the deed and it’s a legitimate marriage. As to why it happened, I’m still pretty fuzzy on that. I was hoping you remembered what we were up to last night.”

Angelique’s face went blank and she started to shake her head but the residual pain made her stop. “I don’t remember anything about us getting married,” she said. “All I remember is getting off the plane and going to some chapel with Matt and Nicole. I remember having to wait around forever because it was Valentine’s Day. There were lots of people who wanted to get married and it took forever, I think. I remember ...” She paused. “I
think
I remember them getting married.” Her face puckered with the effort to recall the events of the previous night. “I think we
picked out a dress for Nicole to wear because she didn’t want to get married in jeans. And I definitely remember drinking a lot of champagne.
Lots and lots of champagne, in fact.”

“Do you remember what happened to Matt and Nicole? They’re not staying here, I checked. At least, they’re not registered under Matt’s name or Nicole’s.”

His words penetrated the last of the fog that surrounded her. “They wen
t on their honeymoon. They left,
” she squinted with the effort of recall, “to catch this really early flight to some island someplace. They’re going to be gone for a week and then they’ll be back in D.C.”

“In Washington, D.C.?
Is that where they live?” Donnie asked.

Angelique attempted to nod again,
then
put her hands on her temples when that proved too painful. “Yes, they do. Matt is a pro
fessor at Gallaudet University, you know that famous
college for the deaf and hearing-impaired
.
Nicole has a studio in Georgetown where she makes jewelry. Really beautiful jewelry,” she said. Thinking about her friends made her smile in spite of everything. “They’ve been my best friends since high school. We were always together, the three of us. Whenever I’d get into trouble in Atlanta, I’d take off for D.C. until the heat was off.” She laughed
softly
. “I don’t know what I’d have done without them.”

Donnie was drinking coffee while she made this recitation and he tried to listen to her every word but for some reason he kept focusing on how cute she looked in the too-big robe with the towel wrapped around her head. She really was a beauty, sitting in the sunlight without a speck of makeup to disguise her natural prettiness. He should have been more upset about the situation, but was surprisingly relaxed and calm.

“Why are you so calm about this? You don’t seem the least bit upset,” she accused
him
. “You’re acting like this is just nothing, like it’s all a big joke.”

What Angelique didn’t know was that this was the real Donnie; he was always a cool head in a crisis. One of the reasons he’d been so successful in business was because he was clearheaded
,
logical and unflappable. His relationship with Angelique may have been out of his control, but when chaos reared its head he was definitely the man to have on your side. Acknowledging her concerns with a nod he set his cup down and reached for her hand across the table.

“I’m sorry, Angel, I don’t want you to think that I think this is a joke or something. I guess you don’t know me well enough to know how I roll, but this is just the way I handle things,” he said with a squeeze of her hand. “But trust me, baby, I’m not trying to treat this like it’s nothing. Here’s the thing, Angel: we can get this annulled with no problem. We can do it here or we can wait until we get back to Detroit.
 
Nothing to it, we just say never mind, we were just kidding and it’s like it never happened. We just go on with our lives and no one will have anything to say about it.”

Instead of taking away her concerns, Donnie’s words seemed to multiply them. She suddenly couldn’t look him in the eye and excused herself. When Donnie came into the bedroom to find
her, she was sitting in the middle of the bed looking lost. Alarmed by what he saw, Donnie joined her on the bed, sitting on the side.

“Angel, what is it?
You should look relieved, baby;
we can make this all go away,” he said soothingly.

Angelique didn’t answer at first, but then she looked at him with an expression so bleak it wrenched his heart. “I don’t know if I can make you understand. If my family knew about this, they’d flip out, all of them. This is like the worst thing I’ve ever done and for me that’s saying something. Nobody in my family has ever screwed up as much as I have and this is just the topper. I got drunk in Las Vegas and got married in some sleazy joint to somebody who can’t stand me. That’s just disgusting, Adonis, it really is,” she said sadly. She was sitting
yoga
style and suddenly leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands.

Donnie watched her obvious misery for a moment before swinging his legs up onto the bed and pulling her into his arms. “Don’t do that, Angel. It’s not like you were in that sle
azy joint by yourself, you know;
I was there, too. And I was at least as drunk as you were, so I’m no paragon of virtue, either,” he said comfortingly.

“Oh, don’t be nice to me,” Angelique said. “That just makes it worse because you’re not like me. You’re
good,
like that perfect family of yours and those perfect brothers of mine. Nobody’s going to think any less of
you
because of this, but they’re going to be on me like white on rice. And I can’t blame them, honestly I can’t. Crazy stuff follows me around, it always has.”

By way of answer, he pulled her onto his lap and held her closer. “Angel, nobody’s going to find out about this,” he told her fiercely. “And if they do, they’d better mind their own business if they know what’s good for them. We’re adults, we’re not children. This is between you and me and nobody else, okay?”

Angelique was so enjoying the novelty of being comforted that she didn’t say a word, she just leaned farther into his shoulder and sighed, a soft sound so poignantly sad it wrenched his heart.

“Now what is it, baby? Why do you sound so sad?”

“Because.
Because nobody in my family or your family has ever made
a mockery of marriage like this;
it took me to really screw it up. Marriage is supposed to be sacred and forever and important, it’s not supposed to be something that happens because you’re too drunk to know what you’re doing. I never really thought I’d get married, but now if I do I’ll always know that it’s not really my first marriage. I don’t care what annulment means, this is still my first time getting married and look at what a mess it is. This is so typical of me,” she said with a slight hiccup. “You don’t even like me.” She buried her head in his shoulder, making the turban fall off and her still-damp hair fall forward in disarray.