Page 5 of The Exception

Emma sighed. “That’s you. Always imagining every possible outcome instead of just waiting to see what happens.”

“You think you know me so well.”

“Oh, I do know you so well,” Emma shot back with a smirk that faded too soon. “Can you at least tell me why you decided to elope?”

Emma was asking the hard questions, and from the way she was sitting there with her head cocked to one side, one eyebrow raised, her lips pursed, and her arms folded across her middle, whatever story she was about to hear better be good.

Sonya sighed. “I had two big reasons.” Written in their own mini-list, but Emma didn’t need the details. “First, the one thing Marcus and I always argued about was my inability to go with the flow. I wanted to prove to him that I could. Second, you know I want my dad to walk me down the aisle, and he’s been a lot better recently, but I don’t want to push him too far too fast.”

Emma’s face softened a bit at the mention of Sonya’s father, and it made Sonya shift uncomfortably in her seat.

She cleared her throat and continued. “I figured if I eloped, he could take more time to focus on getting healthy and I wouldn’t need to worry about him so much.”

Those words weighted the air between them and it felt odd because she’d never allowed herself to say them out loud. Even when Marcus had asked her what had made her agree to elope, she’d just shrugged and said something about always wanting to get married on a beach.

“I’m so sorry, Sonya,” Emma whispered. “For you feeling that way, for Marcus hurting you, for all of it. You deserve better. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah. It happened, now it’s time to move forward,” Sonya replied, parroting the mantra that had been running through her head for days.

“That’s true,” Emma agreed with a nod, “but even if you two weren’t in love-love, you loved him or you wouldn’t have flown halfway around the world to marry him.”

Emma had a way of seeing right through Sonya no matter how hard she tried to hide it. She had loved Marcus and some of his appeal had come from his stability. That stability was supposed to make her less likely to get hurt, but he’d managed to hurt her anyway and that had her reeling.

“Have you talked to him since you got back?” Emma asked, and Sonya shook her head.

“No. We haven’t spoken since the breakup. I’m kicking myself because I should’ve made him hook me up with a flight home considering it was his idea to elope. Instead, I had to spend hundreds of dollars for a middle seat on a cross country flight.”

“Ugh!”

“And there was a medical emergency on the plane,” she continued, remembering the event that made her flight from hell even worse.

“Really? What happened?”

“Nothing that exciting. A passenger had a hypoglycemic episode.”

“Oh,” Emma groaned, her excitement clearly knocked down a few notches. “At least it was an easy one. They always have glucose tablets in the plane’s first aid kit.”

The mention of those damn glucose tablets brought back every memory of the Almost Paramedic that she’d been trying to block out—his cocky smirk, the wink he’d given her while he was still posing as a doctor, and the way he’d arrogantly dismissed her suggestion to use the tablets.

“You aren’t going to believe this but there was some guy on the plane posing as a doctor.”

Emma’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious? Isn’t that illegal or something?”

Sonya shrugged. “It’s definitely frowned upon, and the idiot was only in his last year of paramedic training so he shouldn’t have responded to the emergency call in the first place.”

“Did he actually tell them that he was a doctor?” Emma asked, her interest back to where it had been or maybe even higher.

“He claimed that the flight attendants just assumed but he didn’t correct them. Why would he, though? I think one of the flight attendants was five seconds from inviting him to join the Mile High Club.” She wasn’t sure what irritated her more. The fact that the flight attendants hadn’t listened to her or that they were fawning all over the poser like he was God’s gift.

“The odds of a paramedic being hot is right up there with firefighters, so I can believe it.”

An unbidden image of dirty blond hair, messy from running his hands through it, cobalt eyes, and tanned, toned arms folded over a broad chest flashed through Sonya’s mind. She quickly slammed the door on that line of thought. She was still kicking herself for the inexplicable attraction that had bubbled up inside of her during their last encounter in Dulles.

Despite her claims to the reverse, the imposter hadn’t been stupid. He knew what he was talking about, it was his reasoning that had been misguided. When he’d stopped her to make his case in the airport, the way he’d held his ground had made her feel some things. Unfortunately, she was going to have to add intellectual arguing to her list of turn-ons.

She snorted. “He might’ve been hot if he wasn’t so annoyingly loud and wrong.”

Emma laughed. “So what happened?”

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