My Fiancé Skipped Our Wedding To Vacation With His Ex — So I Married The Stranger Next To Me
Part 1
I stood in the echoey corridor of City Hall in my white dress, staring at my phone.
The time for my civil ceremony had come and gone over an hour ago.
Tyler’s voicemail picked up for the twelfth time.
My hands shook as I lowered the device.
His mother, Heather, had made it perfectly clear I was nothing but a charity case.
She constantly reminded me that her son was the sole heir to a massive corporate empire.
I had spent years trying to earn her approval, polishing her marble floors and accepting every insult with a polite nod.
She believed my scholarship and my late mother’s apartment were handouts from her family.
The truth was, my mother had paid for everything before she died, but Heather preferred the narrative where I was a desperate leech.
A notification pinged on my screen.
It was a social media post from Brenda, the woman Tyler swore was just a friend.
The photo showed the two of them clinking champagne glasses in a first-class cabin.
The caption read: Off to Cabo for a three-week vacation with my favorite guy!
My stomach dropped into my shoes.
Tyler had skipped our wedding day to take his ex-girlfriend on a tropical getaway.
He didn’t even have the decency to send a text.
The humiliation burned my throat.
All the years of quiet compliance, of bending over backward to please his impossible family, amounted to this public disgrace.
I shoved the phone into my purse, determined not to cry in a public building.
That was when I noticed a man sitting on a wooden bench nearby.
He was wearing a sharp, impeccably tailored suit that looked entirely out of place in the dreary municipal waiting room.
Our eyes met, and I realized he was holding a small velvet box.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one whose partner had failed to show up.
A reckless, desperate thought sparked in my mind.
I was tired of being the obedient, discarded fiancée waiting like a fool.
I walked over to the bench, my heels clicking sharply against the tile.
I cleared my throat.
“Excuse me,” I said, my voice remarkably steady for someone whose life had just imploded.
“Are you getting married today?”
He looked up, studying my face with a strange intensity.
“I was supposed to,” he replied, his tone even.
“Looks like I’m short a bride.”
“I’m short a groom,” I countered.
“Do you want to marry me instead?”
A heavy silence hung between us.
He didn’t laugh or call security.
Instead, he snapped the velvet box shut and stood up.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“I will marry you.”
The officiant looked confused, but the paperwork was legally binding.
Within twenty minutes, I was legally bound to a complete stranger.
We stepped out of City Hall into the glaring afternoon sun.
He introduced himself as Craig.
He hailed a taxi and offered me the spare room in his apartment since I had nowhere else to go.
The ride was quiet, save for the sound of my erratic breathing.
When we pulled up to a massive, ultra-luxurious penthouse building, I assumed he was the building manager.
The elevator opened directly into an apartment that looked like a modern art museum.
A grand piano sat in the corner, and a designated music space was already set up with acoustic panels.
He noticed my shock.
“I remembered you played the violin,” Craig said, slipping his hands into his pockets.
My head snapped up.
“Remembered?”
I whispered.
He stepped closer into the light, and suddenly the angles of his face clicked into place.
This was the quiet, scholarship kid from my high school class.
The one who had vanished without a trace senior year.
Now, he was standing in a multi-million-dollar penthouse, wearing a wedding band I had just placed on his finger.
Before I could ask him where he had been for the last decade, my phone shattered the silence.
It was a text from Tyler.
He had apparently landed in Cabo and seen the updated marital status on my public profile.
The message was furious, demanding to know what I had done and ordering me to pack my things and wait for his return.
He promised he would ruin whoever I had run off with.
I stared at the screen, a cold resolve settling over me.
Tyler had no idea that the man I just married was the only person capable of destroying his entire empire.
