Nick and Quinn’s Wedding Read online

  NICK AND QUINN’S

  WEDDING

  THE BONUS NOVELLA

  ELIZABETH O’ROARK

  Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth O’Roark

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or

  mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,

  without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief

  quotations in a book review.

  1

  It’s a silent sort of island.

  Lush and mountainous, with cliffs that tower over the

  sea beneath. The kind of place you’d expect to find very few

  people, even fewer homes—and absolutely no churches like the

  one that sits on its shores, its stone facade wind-blown until it’s

  nearly as white as the sand it overlooks.

  I stare at the picture on my laptop, the one that’s popped up

  unannounced while my mother yammers at me by phone. I never

  believed in anything even vaguely magical or supernatural before

  the past few months, but the more I open myself up to the possi-

  bility, the more I see it around me, in the smallest things I’d have

  called coincidence before—and there’s a hum in my blood as I

  look at the photo that tells me I can’t call this a coincidence

  either.

  “I just don’t know what people are going to think,” my mother

  is saying. She’s used this phrase no fewer than twenty times since

  I told her we are getting married. She thinks it’s “unseemly” to get

  married so soon after I’ve called off my engagement to someone

  else, and that it’s even more unseemly to be visibly pregnant

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  E L I Z A B E T H O ’ R O A R K

  during my wedding. “I can’t go telling everyone that you’re

  marrying someone new so soon after you broke up with Jeff. But

  if you wait any longer everyone will know you’re pregnant, and

  that’s almost worse.”

  I wasn’t listening all that carefully in the first place, but now

  with this photo staring back at me, I barely hear her at all. The

  church—how the hell did they build it? It’s surrounded by cliffs

  and water for miles. There is absolutely no way they could have

  gotten limestone there in the quantity necessary except by ship,

  and no ship could have docked anywhere in the vicinity of that

  cove without crashing into the cliffs.

  Nick, sitting across the room, is watching my face. His eyes

  sharpen as they flicker from me to the phone in my hand, and he

  rises. He was protective before. Now that I’m pregnant he treats

  me like Murano glass. If he could bubble wrap me, he absolutely

  would.

  My mother is saying something about Abby and Jeff—no

  doubt about how insensitive I’m being, but I’m not really

  listening closely enough to be certain. “Mom, I have to go. I’ll call

  you back.”

  Nick runs a hand through his hair as I hang up, trying to mute

  his frustration. “I know she’s your mom and I’m trying not to get

  involved, but I’m getting pretty sick of her upsetting you,” he says.

  I bite my lip. “For once it wasn’t her,” I reply. “But come look

  at this.”

  He walks over and leans down from behind me.

  “Wow,” he says. “That’s amazing. Where is it?”

  “The Isle of Eder. It’s somewhere to the north of Saint Lucia.”

  Nick rests his hands on my shoulders. “I wish we had a

  church like that around here,” he says. “That looks like the

  perfect place to get married.”

  He says the words and something begins to seep into my

  blood—contentment and certainty. The same things I felt when I

  Nick and Quinn’s Wedding

  3

  ended up with him—as if some piece of me floating in space had

  finally found its way home. I reach back and cover his hands, still

  resting on my shoulders, with mine. “Yes,” I reply. “It does.”

  2

  Iglance away from my laptop to look out the plane’s window

  again. All I can see is water in every direction. Nick’s eyes

  follow mine.

  “You see anything yet?” he asks.

  “Nothing.” There are storm clouds ahead, the kind a little

  plane like this one shouldn’t be flying through. I bite my lip. We

  are traveling to an island neither of us have ever heard of, a place

  we could barely find on a map, to see if it’s a good spot to hold a

  wedding. Any by the look of those clouds in the distance, we

  won’t even make it there without taking our lives in our hands.

  “Was this insane?” I ask.

  He grins. “I’m just happy you didn’t break up with me at the

  airport.”

  I raise a brow at him. “That joke will never grow old for you,

  will it?”

  “It’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. You can’t

  expect me just to forget.” He presses his lips to my brow. “But are

  you okay with this? Obviously it’s going to have to be a very small

  wedding if we do it here.”

  That part doesn’t bother me at all, actually. It was just the two

  Nick and Quinn’s Wedding

  5

  of us when we married before, and really, the journey that got us

  to this point was ours alone. No one outside could possibly

  understand what we’ve gone through to make this happen.

  “Oddly enough the only person I’d actually want here is

  Sarah.” My throat swells a little at the thought of her. My biolog-

  ical mother gave up so much for this wedding—and our entire

  lives—to be possible. My memories of her are filmy, scattered, but

  love for her sits inside me as solidly as it must have in other lives.

  I’ve always missed her, I think, the same way I always missed

  Nick. I just never knew what to blame for that sense of loss, so I

  blamed myself. “Are you okay with the fact that it’d be a small

  wedding?”

  “If it were up to me there’d be no one there but us. I could do

  without an entire evening spent with your mother comparing me

  unfavorably to Jeff, among other things.”

  I smile at him and lean my head on his shoulder. “She never

  compared you unfavorably to Jeff.”

  “No, she just brought up the fact that he’s your hometown

  hero ten times during a one-hour dinner and said something

  about football being more manly than swimming.”

  “You should have reminded her that you’re the one who

  knocked me up with twins the first time we slept together. That’s

  fairly manly.”

  He flashes me a brief, all-too-cocky smile. “I thought about it.

  Speaking of which, have you found anything?” he asks, nodding

  at the laptop in front of me, where I’ve been combing over the

  files I downloaded from Sarah’s hard drive. In a little over eight

  months, I will give birth to twins who will eventually be able to

  disapp
ear at will. If there’s a way to control them, to keep them

  safe, I feel certain Sarah would have let me know, but after hours

  of searching, I’m beginning to have my doubts. “All garbage so

  far. It’s bizarre—mostly term papers, really badly written ones

  with no names or dates.” I turn the open laptop toward him.

  “A history of the liberation of Paris at the end of World War

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  E L I Z A B E T H O ’ R O A R K

  2,” he reads. “She had a home there. Maybe it was just idle

  curiosity.”

  My lips press together. I didn’t give it too much thought before

  but now that I am, it’s not adding up. “Why save all of it though? I

  wonder if maybe she was there?”

  “She told you she wasn’t good at traveling from place to place.

  France during the mid 1940s seems like a bad place to visit if you

  can’t really control where you’re going to end up.”

  He’s right, and while I don’t remember everything about her, I

  know she was never reckless. “I just don’t know why she’d save all

  this crap and not leave a single word behind to help us out.

  Maybe she thought I’d just travel back in time to see her.”

  His jaw shifts. I feel dread at the prospect, but I know he feels

  something ten times that. “She must have known you’d have

  babies at home. And that you’d refuse.”

  My nod is small, symbolizing my desire to agree with him and

  my inability to do so. Because the truth is that if we don’t find

  something soon, if I don’t figure out how to protect our daughters,

  there won’t be any other option. I push the laptop toward him.

  “Feel free to take a look if you’d like. This stuff is all blurring

  together.”

  “What I’d like to find out is some information about your

  dad,” he says. “You had to have inherited a mutated gene from

  him too, so it’s possible he still has family who time travels.”

  I push a hand through my hair. “I haven’t really been looking.

  There’s only one reason that palm reader would have been reluc-

  tant to tell me who he was.”

  Nick frowns. “What are you talking about? I can think of a

  thousand reasons she wouldn’t want to tell you.”

  Nick wants to see the best in me. He’s incapable of believing

  anything bad—even telling him I played a role in his brother’s

  death didn’t make a dent. I’m less able to see things that way.

  “Come on. He had to have done something bad. And I mean

  Nick and Quinn’s Wedding

  7

  really bad. She probably thought I’d be better off not knowing

  that’s half of my DNA.”

  He laughs. “Don’t you think you’re sort of jumping to conclu-

  sions? Maybe it’s because he died tragically, and you’d already

  been through too much. Or maybe his family doesn’t know about

  you and she needs to prepare them first. Your mother loved him.

  How bad could he have been?”

  I exhale slowly. “Well there’s nothing in my mother’s files so

  far and I have no idea where I’d even start looking for him.”

  Mostly, the issue is that I haven’t even tried to think of how I’d

  look for him, and Nick calls me on it. “Quinn, you haven’t looked

  at marriage records, at birth records, at anything. Sarah said he

  died in that house, and that he died before you were born. So I’d

  say we start by looking up the address of her house in Paris and

  see if anyone died there around that time.”

  I guess he’s right. And maybe it’s better to just know outright

  whatever terrible thing my father did than to sit here stewing

  about it. Until I know for certain, all the worst things are possible,

  and perhaps the truth is only moderately terrible—maybe he was

  just a petty criminal or went to jail for tax evasion. “I’ll look it up

  when we land.” I glance out the window. “If we land.” The clouds

  ahead of us are a charcoal so heavy, so dense, they look drawn into

  the sky with a heavy hand, and we’re heading straight for them. I

  don’t know a lot about planes, but I know this tiny eight-seater

  was not cut out for conditions like the ones we’re heading toward.

  Nick’s hand tightens around mine. “Why the fuck isn’t he

  trying to go around the storm?” he asks. “I’m going to go talk

  to him.”

  He reaches for his seatbelt just as we hit our first bump and I

  grab his hand. “Don’t,” I beg. “It’s too late. You need to stay

  belted in.”

  “It’ll just take a second, hon,” he argues, but before I can even

  reply we hit a bigger bump, and then another, and finally knock

  8

  E L I Z A B E T H O ’ R O A R K

  into a wall of clouds so hard that I can feel the plane shudder and

  slow in response. Nick’s arms encircle me like a vise, though

  there’s nothing he could do to protect me at this point. My head is

  pressed to his chest and I can feel his heart hammering just as

  hard as mine. We bounce again and the plane wobbles and seems

  to still. For one breathless moment I wait, ready to feel us freefall

  from the sky. But instead we bounce again and then leave the

  clouds entirely.

  The island appears just ahead of us, bathed in sunlight, even

  more beautiful than in the photos we saw. There is not a cloud in

  the sky.

  Nick and I exchange a look. Nothing about our desire to get

  married here has been normal. But what just happened seals it.

  Something has driven us to come to this island. Something

  unnatural.

  3

  We land in the middle of nowhere, on a tiny landing

  strip surrounded by trees. If I hadn’t already

  decided as we plowed through that storm that we

  couldn’t hold our wedding here, I’d know it for certain now.

  “There’s not even an airport,” Nick says, quietly astonished.

  I tuck my passports back into my purse. “There’s no way we

  can hold a wedding here.”

  He wraps an arm around me and sighs. “Yeah, I guess we’re

  back to the drawing board, but I’m not going to complain about

  two days alone on a tropical island with my gorgeous fiancé.”

  I smile up at him. “I’m not complaining either. Although I am

  wondering how the hell we get to our hotel. I’m going to go out

  on a limb and guess that Uber doesn’t have a strong presence on

  this island.”

  He tips his chin at the Range Rover sitting in the grass beside

  the tarmac. “I think that’s probably ours. The hotel set it up.”

  “They sent a Range Rover?” I ask. “Good grief. How expensive

  is this place?”

  He picks up our bags and starts toward the car, grinning at me

  10

  E L I Z A B E T H O ’ R O A R K

  over his shoulder. “I thought we agreed it was best that I leave

  you in the dark about the cost of this trip.”

  It’s exactly what we agreed, because while I have a great deal

  of money coming in and am about to marry a guy who makes a

  very good living, I still have a hard time stomaching the kind of

  prices Nick doesn’t blink a
n eye at. “You can tell me.”

  He shakes his head and leans down to press a quick kiss on

  my mouth. “Not a chance. We’ve got two nights here and I’m not

  spending them camping on the beach because you think the

  hotel room is unreasonably priced.”

  He puts our bags in the back and we climb in. The hotel has

  already programmed their address into the GPS, so we follow its

  commands, heading down one long road and up another, toward

  the cliffs on the island’s eastern side.

  Our hotel is built into the cliffs, impossibly chic even from the

  outside. Staff members step forward before I have time to gawk or

  —again—ask Nick how much it cost. We are hustled forward to

  the check-in desk, where a girl stands—smiling at us so broadly I

  actually look back over my shoulder to see if she’s looking at

  someone else. There is no one there.

  “Welcome, Dr and Mrs. Reilly,” she says. “This is a great

  honor.”

  Nick’s gaze flickers to mine— a great honor? —and then he

  smiles a little awkwardly. “Uh, thank you. We’re excited to

  be here.”

  He tries to hand her a credit card and she waves him off.

  “That won’t be necessary. Your trip has been paid in full.”

  Both of us still. What she’s saying just isn’t possible. We didn’t

  tell a soul about this trip. Not our friends, not our parents. “Paid

  in full by whom?” I ask.

  She glances at her computer. “Cecelia Boudon? She’s

  upgraded you to the presidential suite as well.”

  “Are you sure?” Nick asks. “I don’t think we know anyone by

  that name.”

  Nick and Quinn’s Wedding

  11

  She nods. “That’s what it says here. There’s a gift bag for you

  as well,” she says. “Let me get it from the office. I’ll be

  right back.”

  The second she’s out of sight I turn to him. “Did you tell

  someone?”

  He shakes his head. “Not a soul. And I definitely don’t know

  anyone who could have afforded the presidential suite. That

  room costs fifty grand a night.”

  My jaw drops. “Fifty grand? For one night? My God that’s…”

  “Insane,” he agrees. “For once I agree with you on that. Do

  you know anyone named Cecelia? The only person I can even

  think of is that palm reader in France, but obviously it couldn’t

  be her.”

  The girl emerges and hands me a gift bag full to bursting, and