She smiles and after a moment I head to the shower. “How long does it take to get to San Francisco?” I call before I step beneath the water.
“It’s over nine hundred kilometres,” Biba says from the doorway. “Going a rate of speed—Mase seems like a fast driver—I’d say it would take you at least eight hours. Probably more like eight and a half, depending where the house is.”
I poke my head around the curtain. “Thanks. Guess there’s lots of time for my hair to dry.”
And to figure out a way to make his family accept me.
Mase
Twenty-sixminuteslater,Fionameets me in the lobby.
I didn’t want to believe she’d show up. I might not have. I gave her an out and she didn’t take it, so what am I supposed to do now?
Fiona rolls her suitcase over to me, in the same flowery dress she pulled on earlier but without the smeared eye makeup. Her hair is damp and a cloud of ringlets riot around her face.
I can’t help but wind a curl around my finger, smiling ruefully as it springs back when I release it.
“It takes a while to dry,” Fiona explains. “But I’d have a head of frizz if I used the hair dryer.”
She sets her carry-on bag and purse on the ground, topping it with the floppy hat, and tucks her arms around me.
“Let’s go meet your family,” she says brightly.
I want to stay there with her arms around me but instead, I pull back and look down at her with a frown. “Fee, I don’t know what you think, but this isn’t going to be fun.”
“Who said marriage is fun?”
That gets a bark of surprised laughter from me. “Well, this is really not going to be fun.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
Even though I want to hug her again, my answer is to grab her suitcase and begin rolling it to the door, leaving Fiona to hurry after me. I know I’m being a jerk, but my stomach has been twisted into knots as soon as I saw Carter’s face onscreen. Carter, not Riese.
Carter has always been the bringer of bad news.
All the times I’ve been the recipient of that bad news—or the one who caused it—swirl around my shoulders like a hurricane, complete with driving rain that doesn’t let me see straight.
I don’t know what to do. The other times I’ve been summoned home, I never had anything to lose. It was easy to back out, to allow my mistakes to be rectified with money or a swiftly made call from the family lawyer.
This time is different. It’s Fiona. I know what they’re going to want me to do, and I don’t want to let her go.
But I’m not sure I have enough in me to fight my family for her, and that makes me sick to my stomach.
“Rachel heard from Demi,” Fiona says loudly as I ask the doorman to get us a cab. “They’re almost in Colorado.”
“Did she find out what happened?”
Fiona shakes her head just as a cab pulls up at the door. “Something about Tad getting someone mad, and Chrissa kind of made it worse.”
I hold the door open for her as the driver puts our bags in the trunk. “I can see that. At least for Chrissa. Tad… That doesn’t sound like him anymore.”
“I guess this weekend is for doing things out of character.” She smiles at me, and I melt a bit at the sight of her, knowing that smile is just for me—until the knot in my stomach tightens. “Where are we going?” she asks after I give the driver the name of the hotel.
“Circus Circus has a helipad,” I say shortly.
“We’re taking a helicopter?”
“It’s quicker than driving. Grandfather doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”