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“You’ve only been out of your room for fifteen minutes. This was the first chance I had to say something.”
“No, the first chance you had to say something was two seconds after he said ‘Will you marry me’ and you said ‘yes!’?”
“You weren’t here then.”
“Have you never heard of cell phones?”
“I was a little busy—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Believe me, I know exactly how busy you were. Still, you could have told lovebug to cool his jets for five seconds so that you could call me. Your best friend. Your maid of honor.” Her eyes go round with horror. “Oh my God. What am I going to wear? What are you going to wear? You can’t get married today. Tomorrow, maybe. But not today. I have to get my hair dyed. And—”
“Tori—”
“We need manicures. And pedicures. Facials. Massages.”
“Tori—”
“We can get them after we land in Vegas, but still, more than an hour’s notice would have been nice.”
“Tori—”
“I still have to pack—”
“Tori!”
“Don’t!” She throws up a hand and glares at me out of narrowed eyes. “Don’t you dare even try to say that I’m not invited to your wedding. Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. If you’re going to marry the most eligible bachelor in the country in a rushed ceremony in Las Vegas of all places, I am damn well going to be there to see it! Do you understand me?”
I think of all the reasons I can give her as to why it should be only Ethan and me. The fact that we’re still fragile after everything that’s happened. The fact that we need this time to be by ourselves…to just be. The fact that we want to guard what we have, that we don’t want to share it with the world yet, not after everything that happened when we weren’t so guarded.
But despite all those very valid reasons, the truth is Tori is my best friend and I want her to see me get married. She stuck with me through everything and, save Ethan, there’s no one I want at my wedding more.
r /> “I was just going to tell you to stop talking and get packing,” I tell her with a grin. “Ethan should be back soon.”
“Yes! We’re going to Vegas, baby!” She squeals as she throws her arms around me and squeezes as tightly as she can. “I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes!”
She’s just started dancing her way down the hall to her room when my cell phone rings. It’s Ethan, of course. “Make that half an hour,” she tells me before I hear her bedroom door slam.
“Tori’s coming with us to Vegas,” I tell my fiancé in lieu of a greeting when I answer. “She’ll be ready in an hour.”
The fact that he doesn’t even hesitate before agreeing says everything there is to be said about the man I’m going to marry.
Chapter 4
My plane touches down in Vegas at eleven a.m. and within minutes I’ve got us in a limousine bound for the Atlantis. It’s the hottest casino on The Strip right now and it’s owned by my college roommate and close friend Sebastian Caine.
Chloe is curled up next to me on the seat, her head resting on my shoulder and her fingers entwined with mine while her best friend, Tori, is seated across from us, chattering nonstop about all the things that she and Chloe need to do before the wedding. The list is growing by the second, getting more and more complicated. Chloe doesn’t seem upset by it, though. Instead, she’s nodding along with everything Tori says, even laughing every once in a while at a particularly outrageous suggestion.
She sounds happy. She is happy, and I’m so, so grateful. There’s nothing I want more in the world than to make this woman as happy as she makes me.
And I am happy. Ecstatic, really. How could I be anything less when the woman I love more than my own life has agreed to be my wife? We’re getting married. Today. And then she’ll be mine, forever.
And still, I can’t relax. Can’t let myself enjoy this moment when something just doesn’t feel right. I try to tell myself it’s only the agony of the last week I spent without her—and the pain of the weeks before that as we struggled to come to grips with the mess that is our tangled pasts. And while that’s true, it’s not the only thing that feels off.
Maybe it’s that there’s still so much to work out. Not so much between Chloe and me—she’s mine and I’m never letting her go again. That’s nonnegotiable. But everything else is so fucked up. My brother, her brother. My mother, her parents.
She doesn’t talk about her family much—not that I blame her after everything they did. I’m not absolving Brandon and my mother, or myself, of guilt in what happened to Chloe. But I blame her family almost as much as I blame mine. They sold her out, sold her innocence and her trust, in exchange for capital for their business. That’s not something I’ll ever be able to forget…or forgive.
Just one more knot in the dark tangle of the life we want to build together. The life we are building together.
