Page 136 of The Bad Wedding Date

“Yeah, they threatened me.”

“With me?”

“No. They’d never threaten me with your safety, Charlotte. That much, I’m certain of.”

Staring at him, I scowled. “What does that mean?”

Jonah ran a hand through his hair. “Look, I can’t stand the guy. I don’t particularly like any of them after what they did to me, but I’ll only ever tell you the absolute truth, and that was that your name was like some holy fucking messiah in that apartment. Whatever went down, and from the bits of conversation I heard, you were to be protected at all costs, no matter who or what got destroyed in the process.”

“Including you, apparently,” I arched a brow. “And no amount of heroics will ever make that okay.”

He placed a hand on my thigh, smiling over at me with no light in his eyes whatsoever.

“Don’t look at me like that, Jonah.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re on their side.”

A short laugh escaped him. “Definitely not on their side. If I wasn’t so sure that they’d kick my arse with far too much ease, I’d love to spend a minute alone in a room with each and every one of them so I could use their faces as human punchbags.”

“Yes. Say more things like that. Get angry with me.”

“I only think that because they dented my pride, Char. They took away my freedom when they had no right to.”

“Exactly. We should go to the police about them,” I said, but even as the words fell free, I couldn’t deny the way the thought of that stabbed at my gut, making the nausea rumble there again. It must have shown on my face, too, because Jonah gave me another one of those looks of his, and I hated that he could see straight through me.

Placing my coffee to the table in front of us, I dropped my head to my hands and let my control slip.

It needed to.

My heart had been broken. It was still breaking now, each fissure and crack like a bullet to a new part of my body, leaving me as a dying woman who was somehow still able to function… barely.

Jonah shuffled closer, his arm around my back before he pulled me to him and let my quiet sobs fill the room.

“Shh,” he soothed. “Let it out.”

“H-how are you so… so calm?” I stuttered, my voice muffled by my palms.

“I’ve had time to process it. When it was first over, I spent a few days like this, too.”

“They have no right to do this to people.”

“You mean he had no right to do this to you,” Jonah whispered.

Blinking against two hands full of tears, I sniffed up and swallowed my emotion, looking up at him through bleary eyes.

“You’ve fallen hard, haven’t you?” he asked.

“I’m an idiot.”

“That’s not what I asked, Char.”

“I fell hard,” I admitted quietly.

With a sympathetic look, he pulled back and ran his thumb under both my eyes to wipe away the tears. A fruitless task, given that another set of tears fell straight after.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” he asked me.

---