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
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 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
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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
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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