And the flight?
Theo is both an angel and a pain in the butt. Despiteallthe ways that my wedding week was horrible for him, he paid to upgrade my flight so I’d be in first class.
Which would’ve been fine if I hadn’t seized on the opportunity to board first.
Boarding first meant every single other person on the plane walked past me and gawked when they boarded after me.
“There aren’t people here,” Jonas says.
“Oh, the staff and housekeeping crew are aliens?”
He grins that movie-star grin, and I lose my breath.
Off men and off relationships or not, knowing he’s recently divorced and claiming he was an asshole or not, I can’t deny that a grinning Jonas Rutherford is the stuff of heart-squeezing, panty-melting, romantic-delusion dreams.
Knowing he’s here temporarily as a blip on my life radar is incredibly comforting though.
I need tonotface that kind of smile from a man right now.
“They’re paid well to keep their mouths shut,” he says.
“There are other guests.”
“Like twenty-three of them, total, between the two resorts on this island, and every last one of them is here to get away from the world. Nobody cares who else is here.”
“Are yousureabout that?”
“The people with the money to come here are the people who don’t want to be seen any more than you and I do.”
The money to come here.
The money to come here.
I’m going to murder my brother.
Ithoughtthis was the wrong resort. IthoughtI didn’t have to take another airplane to get to my honeymoon.
But when I landed here in Fiji, there was a man waiting with a sign with my name, just as Theo said there would be when he texted to tell me he was leaving Hawaii and I should go on my honeymoon solo. And the man with the sign with my name answered the code word exactly as Theo said he would. Except instead of driving through the lush rainforest to get to my hotel, we boardedanotherplane—this one private with only two other people who didn’t look at me the whole time—and flew to a smaller island.
And I was so tired that I didn’t question it. I didn’t even care if I was being kidnapped.
I should’ve asked questions.
“You okay?” Jonas asks.
“My brother accidentally got rich being a mega-star on an adult entertainment website,” I whisper. “Like,stupidrich. I didn’t realize he’d paid to take care of me here too.”
“Is this bad?”
Aside from feeling likethat idiot who needs everyone else in her life to take care of her?“My fi—myexdid really bad things to him, and then Theo paid for my wedding and didn’t tell me, and I think he paid to upgrade my solo honeymoon. And he shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve this.”
“All I did to earn being able to afford coming here to hide was being born into the family that created Razzle Dazzle. How about we just go withit’s okay to be hereand take it from there?”
“That was weirdly self-aware.”
He grins again, and then grimaces again like grinning hurts.
We are both a mess.
