A Matter of Heart (53 page)

I nearly laugh at this non
sequitur. “It’s nothing.”

He strokes my cheek softly,
his thumb dragging across my bottom lip. “Let’s go first thing in the morning
instead. Get some sleep first.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,”
he says, and I can feel all the stress rush out of his body.

We pack light. Jonah reasons
that we’ll be there for one night, so it’s not like we need to bring the entire
house with us. When I stuff a change of clothes in my bag, I have to tell
myself to keep myself in the present. To not think about someone else and what
this will do to him.

Jonah is almost like an
entirely different person this morning. It’s as if a weight lifted from his
shoulders. He’s all about the things we need to do as soon as we get back to
Annar: apartment hunting, furniture buying, even reception planning (which,
admittedly, is at the bottom of his to-do list). Hearing him like this is a
good thing. His good mood is a weight off of
my
shoulders.

Before we leave, Jonah says
to leave our cell phones behind. When I ask why, he adds, “I want today to be
about us. Think about the last time we went anywhere and one of our phones
didn’t ring with some sort of crisis.”

Rome flashes bitterly
through my mind. I’m still annoyed with Giuliana over that. I concede and set
my phone down on the counter. His joins mine. “What if there’s an emergency?”

A
note joins our phones:
Will be back tomorrow by noon.

We’re just about to enter
the portal to Las Vegas when a loud voice hollers, “WAIT!”

“Oh, fuck me,” Jonah
mutters. I follow his gaze and spot Cora, with Raul on her heels, running
through the throng of travelers toward us.

“How does she know we’re
here?”

Jonah shrugs and his bad
mood that was so prevalent over the last few days creeps right back before my
eyes.

“Maybe we should make a run
for it,” I joke, but he mutters something about it not mattering.

Cora skids to a halt in
front of us and doubles over, out of breath. Raul, on the other hand, barely
looks winded. No pun intended.

Jonah’s all business.
“What’s so important you had to chase us down, Cora?”

She holds out a hand, still
gasping.

“More importantly,” I ask
suspiciously, “how did you know where to find us?”

“I tell her she needs to
exercise more.” Raul’s smile is one of embarrassment, though.

Cora shoots him the evil eye
and he quickly shuts up. She waves her hand around. “I need to talk to you.
It’s an emergency and you weren’t answering your cell.”

Jonah gives me a pointed
look that basically says,
see what I mean?

“Can’t this wait until
tomorrow?” I ask, but she reaches out and grabs my arm.

“I need to talk to you.
Now.”

“Cora—”

“Now, dammit!”

“You might as well go,”
Jonah says, clearly annoyed.

Cora shrinks under his
glare, but drags me out of earshot anyway.

I cross my arms, matching
Jonah’s annoyance. “Not cool, Cora.”

“Where are you going?” she
asks, assuming the same stance.

I stare at her for a long,
hard moment. “Las Vegas. But you already knew that, since you managed to find
us at exactly the right portal.”

“Why are you going to Las
Vegas, Chloe?”

Old habits die hard. “Why is
this your business?”

“Stop it,” she snaps. “Just
answer the damn question!”

“Fine. We’re eloping.”

Her surprise is riddled with
curse words.

“If that’s all, then I—”

“No.” She clamps down on my
arm again. “You need to stop and listen to me.”

“Whatever you have to say
can wait—”

“You told me some things
recently about you, and Jonah, and Kellan. And I told you that I have your
back. This is me having your back, Chloe.”

Okay. She’s got my
attention.

“I got a call this morning,”
she continues. “Crack of dawn early. From Kellan.”

Yeah, right. There’s no way
in hell that Kellan would call Cora unless it was an absolute emergency. He
hates her.

“To make a long story short,
he knew what you guys were going to do and was, well, I’d say upset, but he
sounded more pissed than brokenhearted.”

I manage to croak, “How . .
.?”

“I guess he and Jonah have
this weird thing that happens sometimes, where they inadvertently release
information to one another. I think in dreams—I . . . well, he was saying all
this so fast I didn’t catch all the details. But somehow, he got the
information from an unaware Jonah early this morning.”

Shoot. Me. Now.

“He asked if I knew. And
out-of-looper I am, I told him that you wouldn’t ever do something so stupid.
And yet, here you are—so I have to ask, are you stupid, or what?”

Hey now. “Excuse me?”

“Chloe,” she says in this
withering, judgmental voice, “you were sick as a dog last week with an ulcer
aggravated by stress over these two. If I’m not mistaken, you’re also suffering
from depression and insomnia. No, don’t bother to argue; I’m a Shaman and by
saying
I’m not mistaken,
I’m saying
I already know.
So I can’t
help but ask, has something changed? To make Jonah the easier pick? Because I
saw you and Kellan together. There’s no way to mistake the feelings between you
two. If I didn’t know you were with Jonah, I’d never have any doubt who you
were meant to be with.”

The walls around me close
in. “I . . . I thought, because Jonah was so unhappy . . .”

“Are you telling me that
you’re eloping because Jonah is unhappy?”

I swallow hard. It’s not
that cut and dry, but yeah, that’s basically the gist of the situation.

“So you’ll be okay being
around Kellan now, being married to his brother?”

I whisper, “You don’t
understand.”

“You’re right about that.
But more importantly,
you
don’t understand. You’re a wreck over these
two. Marrying Jonah today won’t make this situation better. You need to take a
good, long, hard look at what’s what. You need to think about what’s best for
you
—not
Jonah, not Kellan. You gotta look out for
numero uno
, baby.”

I sag against a nearby wall.
“I don’t know what to do.”

“Exactly. And let me tell
you this: if you get married today, without at least having the balls to tell
Kellan first, you’ll destroy him.” She turns and notices Jonah and Raul
watching us intently.

“Take a walk with me.” She
yanks me around a corner. Then she hands me a phone. “Either call and tell him
you’re marrying his brother, or text him you’re not. Don’t be a coward. You’re
not a coward, Chloe Lilywhite.”

“I . . . I thought you loved
Jonah,” I stammer, staring at the phone.

“I do. The worlds don’t seem
to make sense if you and he aren’t a pair. But it turns out there’s another
person in this equation, and whether or not I think he’s the one for you, he
doesn’t deserve the blindside.”

My fingers stroke the
buttons. “He called you?”

“Yeah.” The corners of her
mouth curve up. “Hell froze over and pigs flew. You know he’s got to be
desperate if he came to me for help.”

I told Jonah I’d marry him.
Today. If I was to cry off now, he’ll be so pissed and hurt that I can pretty
much guarantee the ulcer’ll be back by night’s end. On the other hand, marrying
Jonah today will hurt Kellan so much that the ulcer’ll be back by night’s end.

I am worse than screwed.

“Don’t cry,” Cora says,
alarmed. I touch my face; it’s wet and I didn’t even know it.

It’s because I’m numb.

“What do I tell him?” I
whisper.

“Anything.” There’s an
urgent, sad tone to her words. “Use Lizzie. Meg. Alex—me, for gods’ sakes. Tell
him there’s an emergency and I need you. Just do not go through that portal
today, Chloe. You need time to think about what is best for you. Getting
married is the worst thing you can do today.”

Which is, of course, a
direct contradiction to what Jonah’s been saying.

She loops an arm around me
and pulls me close. “Tell him that you’re not going to Las Vegas today.”

So I do:
I’m not going to
Las Vegas today
.

I don’t bother putting my
name. He’ll know.

And
then, I turn around and make my way back to Jonah and pray that whatever excuse
I come up with will be okay.

I
can’t speak for Kellan, but it’s hard to believe, with his personality, that he
likes Cora nowadays. Even after she went out of her way to help him.

I pretty much can speak for
Jonah at the moment, though. He’s so furious that I’m surprised he didn’t
strangle Cora in the middle of the Transit Station. Poor Raul was forced to
practically shield her from Jonah’s wrath.

She did her best to not
cower under the weight of his anger, but I could tell she was rattled. I wonder
if Jonah will now feel the same way about her as his brother does. Kellan
blames Cora for breaking us up and leading me back to Jonah.

Jonah, it appears, will
blame Cora for stopping our elopement and leading me back to Kellan. Or, I
suppose, the concept of Kellan, because I don’t actually go to him. In fact,
the excuse I made up to stop us from going to Vegas was just that—an excuse.
But he had the class and grace to pretend it’s something more. “I’ll meet you
back home,” he’d said, and then stalked away without even a kiss goodbye.

I spend the next few hours
in Etienne’s office, drinking Elvin tea and pretending to gossip, keenly aware
of the horrible pit festering in my stomach. Maccon doesn’t join us; he’s in
the midst of his own relationship hell with some kind of wedding contract
negotiations. Everything Etienne tells me goes through one ear and out the other.
I’m surprised he doesn’t call me out on my abysmal attention.

That night, when I get home,
I find Jonah standing in front of one of the big windows in his living room.
He’s staring out, arms crossed, but it’s not in a defiant way. It’s more sad,
thoughtful.

I don’t need to announce my
presence. The pull between us does it for me. “Is everything taken care of?”

Hell no. Now it feels like
everything is fifty times worse. I’d spent the better part of one of Etienne’s
salacious stories wondering if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. So
I make a small noncommittal answer and move closer.

“It’s interesting,” he
notes, “that Cora knew exactly where to find us.”

“She’s uncanny, that’s for
sure.” It’s not exactly a lie.

I wonder if he knows that
it’s all because of Kellan.

“We should go somewhere,” I
offer, wrapping my arms around him and leaning my head against his back.
“Somewhere warm. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere no one else we know is at.”

Somewhere in between here
and Las Vegas.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”
I smile against him. “Now.”

Jonah and Kellan have a
house in Tahiti—well, by some standards, it’s a house, but to me, it’s perfect
paradise: a wooden, stilted jewel hovering over turquoise water, accessible by
a long, golden deck which juts out from the shore.

It’s possibly the most
beautiful place I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

The house is fairly open,
with wide doorways and very few actual doors. Much of the windows are quite
large, offering breathtaking views in every direction. Two bedrooms are on
opposite sides of a sprawling living room that leads into a fairly modern,
expensive looking kitchen. In the middle of the living room, below a coffee
table made of driftwood, is a glass floor that looks down into the ocean. Both
bedrooms house huge canopied beds, and a singular bathroom has an enormous
round tub covered in abalone shell. Outside the living room, on a deck that
expands a good forty feet out past the house, is a square, tiled fire pit
surrounded by a number of comfortable looking Adirondack chairs.

I am stunned and giddy at
the same time. “This is
yours
?”

He drops our bags onto the
floor. “Yours, too.”

It’s a pointed statement,
one that’s meant to dig. “I love it here.”

“I knew you would.”

“Jonah,” I say softly,
pulling him down on the couch next to me, “please, don’t be angry. Not here.
Not now.”

He
doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t pull away from me, either. My heart aches
when I feel the breath shudder in his chest. And the cramping, so recently
removed, comes back with a vengeance.

Although there is a beach
nearby that is one of his favorite surfing spots, Jonah doesn’t surf during our
trip. He withdraws in a way, becomes less talkative, more brooding. Like he’d
been all of the last week before I agreed to elope.