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Always would be that way.
She wasn’t alone. No matter how she’d been feeling over the past weeks, she wasn’t ever going to be alone. Liam and Gabi and her...they’d been three misfits in college. Liam with his screwed-up dad. Gabi with her family who leaned on her but didn’t understand the world she lived in, and her, with parents who didn’t know how to love each other or to let each other go. Somehow three eighteen-year-old kids who’d needed family had found each other.
And formed a family of their own.
“I love you,” she said to Gabi now.
“I love you, too. You want me to go tell them the wedding’s off?” Gabi didn’t seem disappointed in her. Or happy, either.
“No,” Marie felt like the Mona Lisa when she smiled. As though she now knew the secrets. “Mom told me last night that when he’s the right man, you’ll need to marry him more than you fear being hurt. And...well... I need to marry him.”
Gabi’s silent smile, her tight hug, said everything else Marie needed to hear.
The door to the chapel burst open—and would have hit them if they hadn’t both jumped back. “Oh, there you are,” Liam said, sounding as though he’d just gotten out of bed and hadn’t been up close to twenty-four hours. “I’m going to walk you down the aisle,” he said to Marie. “I believe it’s fitting that I give you away.”
Marie laughed out loud. And nodded.
“But first, I must escort this lovely lady to the altar, so she is there, standing by you. Now and always,” he said softly, offering his arm to his wife.
And revealing the flowers he’d been holding behind his back in the process. “Oh,” he said. “Here are your flowers.” He handed a small bouquet of white roses to Gabi.
“And yours.” Marie got an identical, but much larger,
bouquet.
“Are we ready?” he asked, looking at the two of them.
“Yes,” Marie said, but stepped forward when he offered Gabi his arm a second time. She was on his left. Marie hooked her arm through his right one. “We’re ready,” she said.
Together, at three o’clock that Saturday morning, the members of Threefold walked up the chapel aisle.
And with Liam and Gabi holding hands beside her, Marie Bustamante agreed to be Elliott Tanner’s wife.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE PRACTICAL THING would have been to take a nap.
He noticed Marie looking at the shiny new ring on her finger as she walked beside him, holding his hand—the hand with the shiny new ring. He wasn’t a jewelry kind of guy.
They were on their way to a wedding breakfast before going up to their rooms to change, pack and head to the airport. If there was time, they were going to stop at a jeweler’s and buy Marie a diamond to go with her new band.
His wedding gift to his wife.
His wife.
He was married. Had the signed and witnessed certificate in the inside pocket of his jacket. His mind wasn’t wrapping around the idea. But he was happy.
Maybe stupidly so. Because now that he’d come down off his high, he knew that his happiness was built on sinking ground. He’d married Marie under false pretenses. She had his heart, but she didn’t know his truth.
He’d just sentenced himself to a life of hiding. And of constantly being aware that at any moment his happiness—and Marie’s—could be snatched from them. If she ever found out that her mother had hired him...
Liam and Gabrielle walked a few feet in front of them. Breakfast was their treat, and Liam was looking for a place he considered worthy of the occasion.
Because, in Vegas, there were choices, even at three in the morning.
Elliott was more interested in setting up a home with Marie. Making a concrete life before the sand shifted.
“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but I’m assuming that you’ll want to stay at the Arapahoe,” he said when what he should have been doing was telling Marie how happy she’d just made him.
