Matchmaker and the Manhattan Millionaire

by Cara Colter

  “Believe it or not, Skunk Den is our most requested cabin. My dad named them,” Theresa said with rueful affection. All seemed to be occupied by members of the Boyden clan. There was also a growing tent city on the edge of the lake. They could not walk two steps without Theresa being stopped, greetings exchanged, questions asked, introductions made.

  There were cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, until Krissy’s head was spinning with names.

  Every time she was introduced as Jonas’s fiancée, instead of feeling guilty about the lie, it seemed to become more real. She was embraced and kissed and congratulated and welcomed completely into the ranks as if she’d been born to this large, loud, happy clan.

  The sound of happiness was in the air: children laughing, the low hum of conversation, the call of a name, an occasional shout, splashing and shrieking at the beach. Dogs barked and birds sang.

  It was family as Krissy, as a child, had longed for, family like she had read about in books and seen in movies.

  “There are so many people,” Krissy said.

  “We always have the family reunion first before we open for the year,” Theresa told her. “It could be a very lucrative weekend, but its family first for us.”

  Family first, Krissy repeated inwardly, and something sighed within her. Perfect contentment.

  * * *

  Jonas watched Krissy. This was his moment: mission accomplished. She was currently on the opposite team of the tug-of-war. She was pulling with all her might, but still his team was inching them toward the mud bog in the middle.

  Children were shrieking and dogs were barking, but it felt as if his whole world suddenly went silent, his focus sharp around her.

  Her head was thrown back with laughter. Her every muscle was braced. Her hair was free and tumbling around her face, her nose sunburned.

  His team made their move, a sudden jerk and the other team was flying toward them, then stumbling over each other, and then falling in a tangle of limbs and shouted laughter into the mud.

  Krissy was screaming with laughter. She pulled herself up—her clothes absolutely plastered to her—grabbed mud balls in both fists and came after him. He ran, and she ran after him, pelting him with the mud. He turned on her, scooped her up in his arms. She twisted and tried to free herself, but to the cheers of his family, he stomped into the middle of the mud bog and released her.

  Except she didn’t let go. She wrapped her arms tight around his neck, and he lost his footing in the greasy muck, and they went down in the slop together. His nephews led the charge of children who were suddenly all around him, squishing mud into his hair and down his shirt.

  “Enough,” he finally roared, rising to his feet and shaking children off him like a dog shaking off water. He held out his hand to her and she took it, and to the wild cheers of his family, he pulled her hard against himself and kissed her muddy lips. And then he scooped her up again, and with the children racing after them shouting encouragement, he ran into the lake and tossed her and then dived in behind her.

  She emerged clean and dripping and he stared at her.

  “My weakness,” he said in a voice only she could hear, “seeing you wet.”

  The water had been freezing, but the sudden heat in her eyes warmed him through to his core.

  He didn’t care who was watching. He scooped her up again and took her to the cabin they would share.

  Later that night, they sat at the campfire, sparks shooting up into an inky dark sky. Krissy’s mouth was smeared with melted marshmallow and chocolate from the s’mores she had taken from his fingertips. Jonas decided he’d better not look at her lips anymore.

  Chance was nestled between his nephews on the other side of the fire. All three of them were utterly exhausted.

  The guitars came out, an accordion, a tambourine, a harmonica. His brother-in-law, Mike, had a good voice, and he led the sing-along.

  The sing-along was a disaster as always: people sometimes knew the chorus, but not the words. His uncle Fred had too many beers and was singing too loudly and totally out of tune. The kids were getting tired and querulous.

  Including his nephews, who began a fistfight over which one of them Chance loved best.

  Jonas got up from beside Krissy and picked up Danny. His sister was right beside him and picked up Harry. Both boys were asleep on their shoulders before they reached the lodge.

  He tucked Danny into his pint-size racing car bed, and his sister did the same with Harry. She disappeared for a minute and came back with a facecloth, which she handed to Jonas. He brushed the worst of the s’more remains from Danny’s face.

  “You’re going to be a good dad, Jonas. And she’s going to be a good mom. I love the two of you together.”

  He realized, not once had either his sister or his brother-in-law mentioned the bet or the stupid car. They were just genuinely happy for him.

  And when he looked inside himself, he didn’t find a lie.

  He found genuine happiness, too.

  “When are you going to get married?” Theresa asked him. “If this afternoon was any indication, you should make it soon.”

  “This afternoon?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Disappearing into the cabin for an hour.”

  “Oh, yeah, this afternoon,” he said. He was blushing. You didn’t talk about stuff like that with your sister. “We have the license,” he heard himself saying, as if he had to excuse his afternoon excursion to her.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. We’ll just, ah, slip away one weekend and quietly tie the knot. You know, just the two of us.”

  He wasn’t prepared for the look of devastation on his sister’s face.

  “You mean without family? Without me?”

  He realized he should tell her the truth, right now, right this minute. But he could hear laughter drifting up from the campfire. And Jonas was suddenly aware he wasn’t quite sure what the truth was.

  He heard a loud popping sounds.

  “Somebody is setting off fireworks,” she said.

  “I hope it doesn’t wake the boys.”

  “It won’t.”

  They walked back out of the lodge. Down at the edge of the lake, the fireworks were starting. He found Krissy. Someone had given her a blanket, and she opened it up, inviting him to sit on the bench beside her.

  A firework exploded in the sky above them, and she leaned into him.

  “This one’s called Bite Your Tushy,” he told her.

  “Fireworks have names?” she said skeptically.

  “They do.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Nope. And this one is called Chasing Booty.”

  “Are you serious?”

  As the fireworks went off, he named them for her—One Bad Mother, Hot Dog, Loyal to None—loving her giggle at the crazy, slightly off-color names, her sighs of awe as the night sky lit up and reflected in the lake.

  It seemed there was so much that he wanted her to know, so much that he wanted to show her, so much that she knew and that she could show him.

  A lifetime wouldn’t be nearly long enough, he thought, and his lips found the top of her head and kissed it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “WHAT’S GOING ON down there?” Krissy asked Jonas the next morning. They were sitting out on the small deck of their cabin, sipping coffee, the dog at their feet. Krissy was not sure she had ever felt like this: such a sense of belonging, of happiness, a pure contentment.

  The perfection of the morning was marred only by the staccato pounding of a hammer.

  “My uncle Fred is a minister. He holds a church service the Sunday of the reunion. He appears to be building something.”

  “Are we going?” she asked. “To the church service?”

  “Huh? Why wouldn’t we? Everybody goes.”

>   “I’ve never been a churchgoer, but I’m pretty sure the devout would regard what has been going on between us as a sin.”

  “You know the guy leading ‘Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ last night? After having consumed at least that many? That’s Uncle Fred.”

  “And he’s a minister?”

  “Yeah. So you know what they say about stones. Not that what has been going on between us feels anything like a sin.” He smiled at her with bone-melting wickedness. “Feels more like heaven to me.”

  “Fred, the leader of drinking songs, is also a minister?”

  “Welcome to that crazy, convoluted thing called family.”

  She laughed, but then grew serious. If what had been going on between them didn’t feel like a sin—and it certainly didn’t—something else did.

  “That’s how I feel, Jonas. I feel welcomed to your family. I don’t know how we’re going to tell them it has all been a charade.”

  “Has it felt like a charade to you, Krissy?” he asked quietly.

  “No,” she said. “It hasn’t.”

  “Not to me, either,” he said, his voice a low growl that tickled along her spine like his touch. “I think we should see where this could go.”

  She stared at him. She could feel tears pricking her eyes. “Me, too,” she whispered.

  He reached out and put the back of his hand against her cheek. He leaned into her, but something below them crashed, and was followed by some pretty liberal cussing.

  “Is that your uncle Fred?”

  “None other,” he said drily. “What the heck are they doing down there? They’re building something. That’s strange. What would they need to build for a service?”

  Krissy got up with her coffee and stood at the deck railing. She craned her neck. “It’s an arbor,” she said.

  “Really? That’s—

  “Good morning, lovebirds.”

  It was Theresa coming up the steps to their cabin. “Jonas, I’ve had the best idea!”

  “Oh-oh,” he said, raising an eyebrow at his sister. “Why are you making me nervous?”

  “I couldn’t even sleep last night, thinking about what you told me. That you and Krissy are just going to go and get married by yourselves somewhere. It doesn’t make sense. It’s something we all want to celebrate with you. Why not do it here?”

  Krissy sneaked a look at Jonas.

  He looked utterly gobsmacked. His eyes met hers. He looked away. They had agreed they were going to see where this was going, but he was not prepared for this. How could he be?

  “Krissy, what do you think?” Theresa asked. She was so excited. “He’d never forget your anniversary. It would fall on the reunion weekend and his birthday!”

  “You mean have a wedding?” Krissy asked, not sure she could be hearing right. “At next year’s reunion?”

  “No! Right now!”

  Krissy’s heart was nearly pounding out of her chest. She dared not even look at Jonas, afraid her heart would be broken in two by his reaction to his sister’s crazy suggestion.

  “Look, I know you mean well, Theresa, but Krissy doesn’t even have a dress. You don’t just get married in your shorts. Do you?”

  Krissy shot him a look. All the things he could have said, and he was worried she didn’t have a dress?

  “I have a dress,” Theresa whispered.

  “Nobody has an extra wedding dress just lying around,” Jonas said. “Look, you’re ambushing us, and—”

  “Ambushing you? You said you were going to do it anyway. You said you had the license. I bet you even have a wedding band, don’t you? I mean, probably not with you, but—”

  “I have it with me,” he said.

  Krissy felt her eyes go wide. He did?

  “I haven’t taken it out of my pocket since I bought it,” he confessed, his voice low.

  There was something in his voice—uncertain and pained—that Krissy heard. He’d been carrying that ring around with him?

  She looked at his face. He was looking at her. He had the look on his face that she had seen ever since the first time they had made love.

  It was the look of a man who couldn’t believe his luck. It was a look that was protective and tender and awed. It was the look of a man who had been swept away by an unexpected current in his life.

  By a river.

  And the river was called Love.

  She knew it, suddenly, to the bottom of her bones. Jonas loved her. And she loved him. There were people who would say that they hadn’t known each other long enough, that they could not know if it was love after such a short period of time. There would be people who would say it was an infatuation. Chemistry.

  But there was a place in her soul that knew. She knew deeply and completely. She might have known from the moment she laid eyes on him outside the front door of Match Made in Heaven.

  She belonged with this man. He belonged with her. To her.

  This was what her aunt had believed. This was what her aunt had always tried to tell her. That love was a cosmic force, powerful and immutable. That there were people who were made for each other, and Aunt Jane had believed it was her calling in life to find those people and bring them together.

  Had this been her aunt’s final match? What if even death could not stop her aunt from doing what she felt was her sacred duty?

  “What do you think?” Theresa asked, looking back and forth between them.

  “What do you think?” Jonas asked Krissy. And she heard the oddest thing in his voice. He was the most confident, self-assured man she had ever met.

  And yet there was no mistaking that was fear in his voice. Jonas Boyden, millionaire, self-made man, was afraid that Krissy Clark, a schoolteacher, did not feel the same way as him right now.

  “I think that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  Jonas let out a whoop. He turned from where he’d been standing at the deck to lift her out of her chair.

  But Theresa inserted herself between them. “Uh-uh. After you’re married.”

  “It’s just a little late for that,” Jonas said grouchily, gazing over his sister’s shoulder at Krissy’s lips with such wanting that she shivered from it.

  “Come on,” Theresa said to Krissy, “we’ve got lots to do. And you,” she said to her brother, “go see Mike. And make sure you have that ring with you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jonas said meekly.

  * * *

  Jonas felt as if he was in a dream. The best dream he had ever had. Somehow, this crazy family of his had, in a matter of hours, put together a wedding.

  The arbor that they had been building that morning was now so thickly braided with balsam fir boughs that he could not see the structure underneath it. As the summer sun drenched it, the fragrance enveloped him. Beyond the arbor, the lake where he had grown, where the days of his boyhood had unfolded, winked and sparkled.

  Mike was at Jonas’s side, and his family was slowly filling up the chairs that had fragrant boughs attached to them with burlap bows. He was aware, as perhaps he never had been before, how this gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins and nephews all held the spark of his parents’ blood. His parents were gone, and yet here, too.

  For the first time, Jonas understood. What was best about them had gone on. What was best about them demanded he be brave enough to accept this gift that had been given to him. Love.

  Their love was here, standing with him, in each of these people gathered, and that love went on and on.

  With that realization, everything around Jonas took on a shimmering radiance: birdsong, bees humming, blades of grass, the wrinkles on his aunt Martha’s carefully folded hands, the cobalt blue of his uncle Hal’s shirt.

  His cousin Shandra placed a flute to her lips, and the sound that came from that flute increased Jonas’s sense o
f being on heaven’s door. The melody lifted and soared, dipped and fell, rose again.

  Harry and Danny came first: in shorts and little plaid shirts, with ties. Harry’s tie was already askew, and Danny’s cowlick already defied Theresa’s efforts to tame it. Chance was sandwiched in between them, burlap pack bags slapping him on either side. The boys were pulling leaves and wild white daisies from the sacks and throwing them in the air and at the assembled with just a little too much enthusiasm. Aunt Vera caught Harry’s arm and said something stern to him that subdued his flower tossing.

  Jonas smiled at that, and then the smile faltered. His breath died like a breeze would die in the hottest part of the day. Down a shaded path that curved through beech and hemlock and oak, he caught a glimpse of Krissy coming.

  She was wearing a short white dress that pinched at her waist and then flared out and flowed over her like water. Her shoulders, sun-kissed, were bare. So, too, were her feet, he noticed. She was wearing a ring of flowers on her head, the snowy white of Queen Anne’s lace interwoven with waxy green leaves and the soft lavender of dame’s rocket. In that intricately woven ring, he saw the hands of the matriarchs of all these clans weaving her into the family.

  Her hair flowed free, untamed, gorgeous, from under that ring of flowers. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and in them was a bouquet of deep blue lupines, his mother’s favorite flowers.

  Jonas had never seen anything, or anyone, as beautiful as the woman gliding toward him.

  Confident.

  Not a queen.

  And not a warrior.

  Not even a princess.

  Something better.

  A woman who did not have to play any role at all. Who had found herself and had found her way of being in the world. So sure of herself, so genuine, so authentic that it shone from her. She was pure love.

  She was a goddess.

  Her eyes never left his face.

  And in those eyes was every man’s deepest dream, a dream he did not even know he had, until it walked toward him with sun kissing delicate curves and joyous tears streaming down a serene face.