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 of 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,
