As promised, Cayce brought Jess by that evening. I admit that when I heard he was a homeless vet, I had imagined someone visibly broken. He didn’t look the part.
He was tall, a bit lanky, with coal black hair and sharp blue eyes. The clothes were a bit wrinkled, mostly with fold lines, but they were clean. So was the rest of him.
Soft spoken, he knew what he was talking about when it came to horses. He was courteous, even when I asked questions that had to make him uncomfortable—at least judging by the way I was sweating bullets while asking them. He had a soothing voice I knew the horses would love. So would some of their owners. Fact was, he would appeal to the male customers as a man’s man, just as much as he would appeal to the women.
In the end, I signaled Cayce my acceptance of having Jess handle the stables. The two of them cleared out Cayce’s place on Sunday, most of the furniture going in the apartment attached to the stables. I spent the day hiding out except for a run to one of the big box hardware stores in Austin to get the supplies Jess would need for repairing the apartment.
We got the marriage license on Monday. The county imposed a seventy-two hour waiting period before we could actually get married. Cayce wanted to use the time to put together a small gathering and find someone who would come to the farm to officiate. I insisted we do it at the courthouse instead.
That Friday afternoon, after a few hours spent on the same bench with an accused heroin dealer and his attorney, we were called before the judge. The man was somewhere in his seventies and he spent several minutes eyeballing us in silence. With a gravelly voice, he called for the marriage license to be handed to him then spent as much time studying the document as he had spent scrutinizing me and Cayce.
With a scowl, he looked from the marriage license to the small bouquet of white roses that Cayce had arrived with.
“Fact,” the judge announced. “Four out of five marriages that start in a courthouse end in a courthouse.”
I forced a smile to my face, my hands strangling the stems on the bouquet.
The judge jabbed a finger at me then at the accused heroin dealer then back at me.
“Some day, you’re going to have kids. When your little girl asks you what your wedding was like, you’ll have to admit Mr. Lawson was an usher.”
A cross-dresser waiting to have the judge hear his prostitution case stood up and waved.
“Can I be the maid of honor, your honor?”
The gavel came down with a sharp crack. “You looking to spend another weekend in my jail, Sullivan?”
The cross-dresser clasped his hands together near the big bulge standing out from his tight skirt. His shoulders rocked forward as he tilted his head and peered up through thick false lashes. “No, sir.”
His honor pointed the fat end of the gavel in my direction. “Start in the courthouse, end in the courthouse.”
“I tried to tell her, Judge,” Cayce chuckled. “Maybe you can order her to go with the small gathering I tried to put together. Make it contempt of court if she disagrees.”
My mouth fell open, my chin practically buried in the valley between my breasts before I pulled it out so I could turn and glare at Cayce.
“If only I could,” the old judge lamented. He pointed at me again and repeated the earlier statistic. “Four out of five, you understand that’s an eighty percent divorce rate?”
“I’m an accountant,” I said, smoothing my tone before it landed me in the cell next to Sullivan. “I understand four out of five…your honor.”
I had to bite my tongue to keep from revealing that Cayce and I already knew we would be one of those four—that we were planning on it. If I had let that slip, there wouldn’t be a single judge in all the state who would marry us.
The old man shrugged and went through the formalities. Cayce pulled out the simple blue steel wedding bands I had ordered on Amazon with free two-day shipping. Seeing them, the judge coughed but otherwise offered no opinion. A few minutes later, he announced that we were married under the laws of the great state of Texas.
I extracted my hand from Cayce’s and turned to leave.
“Approach the bench, Mr. Gerard.”
Cayce obeyed, not an ounce of tension in his body. I had to shove my hands behind my back to hide the sudden shake that infected them. The shake intensified when the judge poked a finger in my direction.
“You shall wait outside my courtroom, Mrs. Gerard.”
My mouth opened, but then Sullivan gently gave me an elbow prod. “It’s a three-day weekend, sugar. Don’t do it.”
Mortified that I needed advice from a hooker, I spun on one heel and raced from the room to wait in the hall. As I waited, other people filtered in. Looking back, I saw the judge lean forward as Cayce stretched up.
They shook hands.
“What the hell was that about,” I whispered as we left the building.
“He told me I better not be one of the four,” Cayce laughed, walking me to the parking lot before we headed home in separate vehicles. “I promised him I wouldn’t.”
I rolled my eyes as I popped the door lock on my car. “And how the hell do you plan on accomplishing that impossible task?”
“That’s what he wanted to know.”
Opening the driver side door for me, Cayce grinned, the edges of his mouth curling with mischief.
“When I told him my plan, he made me shake on it.”
Breathing became difficult. I didn’t have enough air coming in to protest when Cayce gently folded me into my seat and pulled the safety belt across my breasts.
There was something in that grin that didn’t bode well—at least it didn’t bode well for me.
“What did you tell him?”
“That every time you needed a spanking, I would do my job as a husband and give it to you.”
Leaning in, he kissed my cheek.
“See you at home, love.”