I paid Chase well, let him pick half of our destinations, and holed up in hotel rooms while he hooked up with random men from dating apps, but what if the wanderlust faded? What if he met The One and decided to put down roots? I couldn’t imagine being tethered to a physical location. Even now, the urge to run and keep running was strong enough that I began looking at our next stop as soon as we arrived at the last. Other than the hellish years with my family, Blackstone House was the longest I’d stayed in one place, and look how that had turned out.
“Great. You want six extra pillows?”
“No, but I will need bed linen.”
The obvious answer would be to ask Nolan, but I hesitated. I’d seen the way Marielle practically salivated over him. He obviously didn’t have any issues making “friends,” while I was an abject failure in that department. But I did have Chase. And Chase was, by all normal measures, devastatingly handsome. He’d been working part-time as a model when we met, albeit not a particularly successful one—not gaunt enough for the runway, not bulky enough for the fitness industry, too restless to stick around in LA or New York where the work was. He turned heads everywhere, mostly female ones, unfortunately for both him and them.
Anyhow, I figured I’d let Nolan get entirely the wrong idea about us. Being pushed away had hurt quite enough without him thinking I’d failed at life in the years since as well.
“Forget the linen; we’ll share the bed.”
“Oh?” Chase raised one perfect, annoying eyebrow.
“I mean, where would we even find Egyptian cotton out here? This place is in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’m sure for a week, I could cope with whatever Nolan has in his linen closet.”
“A week? You think we’re going to be here for a week?”
“Okay, two weeks.”
“Try two days.” I’d fix the damn laptop, and then I’d hightail it out of here, far away from Nolan and Marielle and the damn dog. “Just keep that mutt away from me.”
“The dog’s cute,” Jez said as she wheeled the last of my suitcases through the door. “If Sin was here, she’d be trying to smuggle Juno onto the helicopter.”
“Urgh.” I shuddered. Sin was our resident bleeding heart. She fostered dogs for the local shelter whenever she wasn’t busy deleting assholes, and she was forever trying to convince me that her three personal pets weren’t razor-toothed menaces.
“Only seven bags this time? You’re travelling light.”
“Well, I left Vegas in a hurry, didn’t I?”
“Whose fault was that?”
“You could be just a tiny bit grateful.”
“And you could be just a tiny bit less meddlesome.”
“Meddlesome? Did you take a wrong turn out of eighteenth-century England?”
“Okay, fine, you could try being less of an annoying little witch.”
“Ladies…” Cole stepped inside, and although I’d only met him a day ago, the weeks I’d spent monitoring him and Jez as they travelled from Nevada to the Caribbean made me feel as if I knew him so much better. He was perfect for her. Calm, steady, willing to accept that she shot people on a regular basis… And apparently happy to indulge her freaky side too, if the bruises on her throat were any indication. Having a man’s hands wrapped around my neck was my worst nightmare, but she got off on it. Go figure.
Then Nolan decided to come join the party.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, and honestly, was he really that dense?
“There are six pillows that I don’t need, and no desk, which I do need.”
“Ah, yeah, we had to finish the cottage in a hurry when we heard you were coming.”
“The word ‘finish’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.”
He ignored that. “I thought you could set up in my grandfather’s old study. There’s a desk in there.”
Nolan wanted me over in the house with him? Talk about awkward. “Can’t you bring the desk from the study and put it in here?”
“No, it’s enormous. I don’t even know how Grandpa got it through the door. He must have had a carpenter build it in the room.”
