Page 24 of How to Ruin a Wedding

My eyes widen. “Excuse me?”

“Do you want more? Tell me a price.”

I drop my next fry onto the plate and hold up my hands. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me you have twenty thousand dollars to spare? Are you a thief in the night? What exactly is it that you do?” I’ll have Taina vet his funds first thing, though he doesn’t seem like a liar.

“I’m not sure if I should take your shock about my wealth as an insult or not.” He leans back. “You must have been more drunk that I thought, seeing as we had this conversation before. But I own a share of Lightshop—”

“The search engine?”

“Yes.” He nods, casually, like having stock in the second most used search engine in America behind good old Google is no big deal. “Through pure luck of knowing Lucas, meeting him in college. His family created it. He gave me a share one Christmas, before it became as big as it did.”

“That explains affording a stay at the most expensive venue on the planet,” I say, mostly to myself in awe.

“That makes me more than enough, but I still do design on the side—mostly book covers.”

“A joy to be able to work for fun and not for survival.” I blow out a breath. “I didn’t mean that bitterly,” I get out quickly. “I mean, not atyou, specifically. Just in general. I am bitter. But bitter toward, say, the universe itself. Does that make sense? I’m rambling, let’s move on.”

His chuckle is low and light as it reaches me. “So, will you consider my offer?”

“I have to,” I say. Maybe I should be embarrassed about how easily I agree, but the truth is I need the money desperately. That, and eversince I failed at wrecking Eliza’s wedding, I’ve had this wedge of guilt lodged in my throat. I know exactly the heartache she’s inevitably going to suffer through. This could be a chance to redeem myself and clear my conscience of the failure.

“Okay.” I take a glass from his wine flight. “Tell me your reason.”

“Long story short, she and her fiancé will never work out.”

“And short story long?”

He chuckles, then sighs. “There’s so much wrong with the pairing. My sister is just twenty-three, way too young to get married. She’s only just legally been allowed to drink. Now she’s choosing who she wants to be with forever?”

He shakes his head. “My sister is flighty. I love her, but she’s never fully grounded. She loves someone, something, for batches of time, and then moves on to new things, to new people. They’ve only been engaged for a few weeks and wanted to have a shotgun wedding, but my aunt threatened to disown her if she didn’t plan an event the family could celebrate, so now we have some time. This is her fourth engagement, but it’s the only one that’s made it to actual wedding-planning stage, and I need it to end there.”

I cock my head. “Do you think it’s possible this wedding is developing further because they are a better pairing than her past lovers?”

I muffle my laugh when the wordloversmakes him shudder. “No, not at all. I know the guy, John. I used to be his roommate in college, and we were really close. He’s quiet, nerdy, introverted. He never knew how to stand up for himself and was constantly taken advantage of by anyone who asked him for things. He was constantly broke, and if he did manage to save anything from his part-time jobs, he’d get scammed out of it all over again.”

I feel my brows pull together. “Your best friend married your first love, and your sister is going to marry your college roommate.” I blow out a whistle. “That seems difficult.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “You’re not wrong. And maybe that’s part of it; maybe I’m scared that if this doesn’t work out, I’ll lose another friend. I don’t have too many to spare.”

“It almost sounds like you want to ruin the wedding for him.”

“It’s for both of them, really. My sister will break his heart, and he won’t recover. But that doesn’t matter if she’s the one doing the breaking. Whenever my sister dumps someone, she falls into this deep depression. She’s devastated that she didn’t find the one. She spends months in the dark; she doesn’t eat or sleep. When you meet her, she seems so bright, and she is, but when she isn’t, it’s dark. If she makes it to marriage and has to get divorced instead of a simple breakup, I don’t think she’ll recover. No matter how much I talk to her about it, she just pushes me away.”

I place my hands on my lap and let out a sigh. “I know all too well about the mistake of marriage at a young age.” I close my eyes, trying to smother the emotion clogging my throat. I was younger than his sister, but being young hadn’t made it easier to jump back into dating. If anything, it felt even harder to get back out there.

“So you accept?”

I chew on my bottom lip. Of course, Ihaveto accept. I have nothing lined up, Save a Paw is at risk, Mathew is threatening to divorce my sister, and I have no place to live. I should say yes and move on, but something within me tugs to gamble formore. (This kind of behavior is precisely why I can’t go within a hundred feet of a casino.)

“I’m going to take advantage of you by asking this, but how much morecanyou spend?”

He cocks his head to the side and a single wave of hair lands on his brow as he smirks. “Why? You want to empty out my bank account?”

“What you’re offering will help me with the shelter, but if I got more, I could hurry and get my own place again.”

His smirk slowly turns over. “That’s right, you got evicted, didn’t you?”

Some of the pity-party kinship from our first meeting spreads through my chest, and I’m surprised to realize him knowing this about me isn’t as embarrassing as it should be.