Chapter 60
Lucky got off of the bed and began pacing the room, his intense headache now the least of his concerns.
“Elizabeth, my dad can’t know about this. If he finds out..... well, he won’t, so that doesn’t matter.”
“He’s going to find out, Lucky, he always does, don’t you know that by now?” Liz asked, rubbing her temples in a futile attempt to clear her head.
“No, he won’t. We’ll get it annulled before he has a chance to.”
Liz sighed and stood up, walking over to the table. She picked up the marriage certificate and studied it for a moment. “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.”
“Why not? People do it all the time, and I’m sure it’s even more common here! in fact, there’s probably an ‘Annulments R Us’ right around the corner!”
“Lucky, you’re forgetting something kind of important here,” she said, putting down the certificate and looking up at him. “There are some pretty specific rules that have to be met in order to get a marriage annulled. One of the first things they’re going to ask is whether or not it was consummated.”
“Oh,” he muttered, looking down at the floor. “Um, if someone did ask that.... what would the answer be?”
Liz sighed and sat down at the table, resting her head in her hands. “I have no idea, but considering how we woke up, I’d say the chances are pretty good that it was.”
“So, you think that we....?”
“I don’t know, what do you think?” she asked, looking up at him again. “Can you honestly say that you’re 100% positive we didn’t make love last night?”
He frowned, trying to think back, to remember something, but all he could think about was how she felt in his arms when he woke up that morning, all warm and soft....
“Um, no, I can’t,” he said, quickly shaking his head to stop that line of thought from going any further. He groaned and slumped down on the bed, looking up at the mirror. “I guess all that’s left is divorce, then.”
“And what do you think the chances are that sometime during the divorce proceedings, Luke will found out?” she prompted, starting to think they were doomed.
“Pretty damn good,” he answered bitterly. “Why couldn’t he just leave us alone? If it wasn’t for his stupid schemes, this would have never happened. We would have never been on that trip together in the first place!”
“While I agree with you on that, this part of it was our own fault. Luke didn’t make us drink, and he certainly didn’t make us come to Vegas. Speaking of which, why did we end up here? More importantly, how did we get here? There’s no way we could have driven here from New Jersey!”
“We probably took my plane,” Lucky mumbled, staring at his reflection. He looked like hell, his eyes were bloodshot, his face was pale, and his hair was standing on end. “Which means my car is back at the hotel in Jersey.”
“Wait, you have a plane? Of your own?”
Lucky nodded, running a hand through his hair in a feeble attempt to fix it.
“I thought only the President had his own plane!”
“No, a lot of celebrities have them. It’s easier that way, safer too. Anyway, my point was, we can’t go home yet, we have to go back to that hotel and get my car, which means my parents are going to start getting suspicious. If we hadn’t taken this detour, we would have been home by now.”
“So, call them, before Luke starts investigating.”
Lucky sat up and looked at her in amusement. “And say what? ‘Oh, hi Dad, sorry we’re not home yet, but we stopped in Vegas on the way. We’ll be home soon, don’t wait up?’ Might as well just send him a copy of that video tape while we’re at it!”
“Well, obviously we can’t tell him we’re in Vegas! Just say there was car trouble or something, and that we’ll be back by.... I don’t know, how long do you think it will take for us to get home from here?”
“Not until sometime tomorrow, and that’s only if we leave right away. By the time I call for my plane to come back here, and we get to the airport, it will probably be noon, maybe even later. Figuring in the length of the flight and the time difference, by the time we land in New Jersey, it will be evening there. We’ll probably have to stay the night, and leave first thing in the morning.”
Liz thought about that for a moment, afraid of what might happen if they had to share another hotel room. “Um, why couldn’t we just drive home at night?”
“Because we’ll be tired, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t exactly feel up to driving a car today!”
“Hm, good point,” she sighed, getting up from the table and stumbling over to the bed. “Move over.”
“What are you doing?”
“I need to lay down. Unlike you, I didn’t inherit my alcohol tolerance from Luke Spencer. This hangover is killing me, and I feel sick.”
Lucky scooted to the edge of the bed as she laid down on her back next to him. “Well, just try not to hurl on me, okay?”
She looked over at him and rolled her eyes. “I think I can get to the bathroom in time, if the need arises, thank you.”
“All right, so I’ll call my parents and make up something about car trouble, tell them we’ll be home tomorrow. What about the divorce? Do you think we can get it here before we go?”
“Don’t ask me! I haven’t exactly done this before, you know!”
“I never said you did.” He thought for a moment, then sat up as something hit him. “Wait! I know someone who has!” he exclaimed, then quickly grabbed his head, regretting his sudden movement.
Liz groaned as the shifting of the bed made her stomach churn. “Who?”
“Alexis. She and Jax were married in Vegas, and they got a divorce about a year later. If anyone would know, she would, and besides, she’s a lawyer, so she can probably do the whole thing for us!”
Liz rolled her head to the side and squinted at him. “No offense, but I think you killed a few too many brain cells last night, that is, assuming you had them to begin with...”
“Can you please take a break from the insults and just get to the point?” he groaned. “What’s so wrong with my idea?”
“We can’t tell Alexis about this, let alone ask her to do the divorce. She’s a friend of Luke’s, how do we know she won’t run right to him with this?”
“Alexis isn’t his friend, she’s a Cassidine, remember?”
“Maybe, but she also worked with him to try to kill Helena once. When two people conspire to murder, they form a bond with each other, like it or not!”
“How did you know about that?” he asked, looking over at her.
She shrugged, gazing up at her reflection. “He told me about it once. I don’t remember when, exactly, but it was after Katherine died the second time. I think I was at Luke’s, and he was drunk, so he started telling me about all of his adventures. He did that a lot, actually.”
“Oh,” Lucky mumbled, feeling sort of jealous that she had been so close to his father while he was on the road. “Well, I’m sure we can trust Alexis not to tell him, if we ask her to be discreet. Anyway, I can’t trust some stranger with this, they could leak it to the media, and then my reputation would be destroyed.”
Liz looked over at him angrily. “Destroyed? Why, because you married me?”
“No, because I got drunk and flew to Vegas to marry someone I don’t even like, then got a divorce! It kind of ruins the image my managers worked so hard to develop.”
“Oh, yes, your precious image. We certainly wouldn’t want to destroy that!” she grumbled sarcastically. “Fine, we’ll use Alexis, but if she tells Luke, I get to say I told you so! Anyway, how do you know that the press don’t already know about it? Somehow I don’t think we were being very discreet yesterday. Between using your plane, the wedding itself, and checking into this room, there are probably all sorts of records out there that anyone can see!”
Lucky sighed, not having thought of that before. She was right, they probably knew everything already. “I don’t know. If it gets out, we might have to go along with it for a while before getting that divorce.
“Go along with it? Are you crazy? You mean, actually act like we’re married?” she asked incredulously, praying she heard him wrong.
“Yeah, not for too long, though, just long enough to make it seem like the whole thing was real. A lot of celebrities get married, then break up after a few months. We can just say you couldn’t handle me being on the road all the time or something.”
“I can’t believe you’re being serious about this! You really have lost your mind.”
Lucky merely shrugged, too tired to say anything else.
Liz looked up at the ceiling again and groaned. “As God as my witness, I am never drinking again!”
