None of this seems to match what I know about him. About them. “But, Jonah lives in a shoebox!”
“He wanted to live next to you, and that’s where you could afford.” When I simply blink at him in response, he adds quietly, “The plan is to get a bigger place after the wedding, right?”
Awkwardness explodes around us. I don’t bother to answer. Instead, I think about what he’s just told me, and how it’s incredibly difficult to wrap my mind around, despite the evidence in front of me.
“Give me a number,” I demand.
“Huh?”
“I mean, here’s yet another secret! How much is he worth? Do I look like a pauper next to him?”
“That’s a question for him, not me.”
Sometimes, my insensitivity is a royal pain in the ass. “I’m sorry—”
“I don’t really know too much about Jonah’s finances, so I can’t tell you what you want to know.” He takes my hand, plays with my fingers. Touches the ring that symbolizes my relationship with his brother. Then he sighs and lets go. “But I think I can say he currently has more than me, considering I bought this place and everything in it.” His cuff twists around and around.
“I didn’t mean to be so nosy,” I say.
“No. It’s fine. It’s just—we were sort of raised to never talk about money, so it’s . . .”
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “I don’t need to know—”
“No,” he says again. “You can always ask me anything. But, if it’s okay, let me only answer questions about myself.”
This I can do, despite my raging curiosity why Jonah failed to ever tell me any of this. So I ask Kellan instead about his finances, not so much because I care about amounts, but more because this was yet another facet to him, and Jonah, that I never knew about. Which is humbling, considering I thought I knew them better than anyone.
Why are these things secrets? Does Jonah not trust me? It’s not like I’m crazy with money. I’m actually pretty frugal. I can get why Kellan didn’t tell me before—what with the distance we’ve been trying to put between us and all—but I live with Jonah. We’re supposed to marry. When was he going to tell me? Right after I say, “I do?”
“This isn’t a big deal,” Kellan says quietly. He must sense my confusion and hurt—I haven’t bothered to put up a shield with him since he asked me not to last night.
I give him a tiny smile. “So what you’re saying is, you’re super rich.” He raises an eyebrow, so I add, “In addition to being drop-dead gorgeous and freakishly intelligent. Wow. How do you live with yourself?”
It’s enough to make us both laugh, even if just a little.
When Kellan asked where I wanted to go, I told him to surprise me by picking one that would make him happy.
A couple hours later, we’re inside a small house on the coast of Costa Rica, near a town called Playa Hermosa. The house itself is immaculate, decorated with white furniture, bleached wood floors and pale blue striped curtains.
As I wander the rooms, I discover a locked closet in the hallway. Curiosity gets the best of me. “What’s in here?”
Kellan pulls out a key and opens it. And I chuckle, because there are surfboards in there. “Seriously? Surfboards get locked up, but anyone can pick up a pot and find a key to the house?”
These boys and their apparent lack of concern for security.
“What if I wasn’t able to bring mine from home? I need a board, C. It’s good to have extras.”
This is so typical Kellan. “I take it there’s a good surfing spot nearby?”
“Obviously. Joey was a Tide, remember? He refused to live anywhere that wasn’t close to water.”
Even though he wasn’t their biological uncle, Joey influenced these boys straight to their cores. “Because I’m sure you’d never want to surf baby waves, there must be some good ones here, right?” I lean back against the closet; he traps me there, hands pressed against the wall on either side of me.
I was so stupid, thinking that maybe we could come here just as friends. Because here we are, not twenty minutes in Costa Rica, and I’ve just mentally undressed him.
“Absolutely.” He grins, and I’m breathless. He is so. Incredibly. Sexy. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hit them up while we’re here.”
The guilt in me is masked by lust. To be fair, there’s a hell of a lot of lust raging around me right now. “Could I stop you?”
“Absolutely,” he says again, and I beam, because part of me knows that I could.
One look into his eyes, at the sight of his open and matching lust, incinerates my renewed hope for willpower and resistance into a pile of ashy good intentions. I take the equivalent of a mental deep breath and officially let myself go.