Forbidden Game: Seducing the Bride at the Altar novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Low Tide

He opened his hand.

A thin gold band lay in his palm, worn smooth on one side.

"My mother's," he said. "Ida kept it for me since I was fourteen. She said I'd lose it in the creek."

"You would have."

"I would have."

He didn't hold it out yet.

"We're married twice," he said. "Once because you were dying, and once because a judge felt sorry for us."

"She didn't feel sorry. She said I was correct."

"Thalia."

"Sorry. Go on."

"I want one where nobody's dying and nobody's suing anybody. Where you get to pick everything. Will you marry me again?"

I took his face in both hands, the way he'd taken mine on the deck of the Fortune.

"Yes," I said. "On a beach. At low tide. And Ida does it."

"Ida's not a minister."

"She will be by Tuesday."

She was.

She got ordained on the internet by a church in Nevada and printed the certificate at the bait shop.

"It's borrowed authority," she said, framing it. "Like everything good."

Three weeks later the Patience carried everybody out to Morris Island.

The crew. The bait shop woman with a cooler of pies. The man from the seafood shack.

The two paddleboard kids on their boards, towed behind.

The Coast Guard captain in a Hawaiian shirt.

The old lighthouse stood out in the water past the beach, striped and empty.

Five years ago I'd pulled a man out of the sea within sight of it.

The tide was all the way out.

The sand ran wet and shining for a hundred yards, full of little pools with the sky in them.

I wore Ida's pale blue dress with the white buttons, the one I'd married him in at the courthouse.

"You can't wear the same dress twice," the bait shop woman said.

"I can if it's lucky."

Jasper wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khakis rolled to the knee.

We were both barefoot.

Biscuit was the ring bearer.

The band was tied to his red bow tie with fishing line, and he took the job very seriously until he saw a crab.

The big one caught him and carried him back up the aisle, which was a line of shells the kids had laid on the sand.

Ida stood at the end of it with her back to the sea, in a clean pair of overalls, with her reading glasses on.

"Dearly beloved," she said. "We are gathered here on a sandbar, Lord help us."

Everybody laughed.

Then she got serious.

"I took this boy in when he was fourteen," she said. "He was the angriest child God ever made. I prayed every night he'd find somebody who could see him."

She looked at me.

"I didn't know to pray for a fish."

"Ida."

"I'm getting to it."

She read the vows from an index card.

Jasper said his without looking at it.

"I'll keep you breathing," he said. "I said that in a chapel when I didn't know what you were. I know now. I'll keep saying it."

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