“Fuuuuck.”
She swallowed and wiped her mouth with her hand. “I guess it’s better than Mongolian horse milk.”
Was that a compliment?
As Nolan lay in bed that night with Alexa in his arms, he googled Mongolian horse milk, and no, it wasn’t a compliment, not unless her palate was faulty. But despite the rough start to the day, he couldn’t fault the ending. Hey, maybe someday, he’d even thank Marielle for showing up in bitch mode?
If he’d realised that he’d never get the chance, known just how badly things were about to unravel, he’d have loaded Alexa onto an airplane and gone to sample the Mongolian milk in person. But ignorance was bliss, and Nolan’s mind was too blown to think straight. Too tired to see the red flags.
So he closed his eyes and dreamed of his girl.
CHAPTER 30
ALEXA
When Barbie told me to get therapy because I was missing out on way too many mind-blowing orgasms, I thought she was exaggerating about the mind-blowing part. But no, my brain had been scrambled, fried over, and put through a blender, much like the breakfast Nolan had served me before he left for Sacramento with Juno to get her booster shot. The veterinarian in Mason’s Hill had retired two months previously, and Nolan said finding a replacement was proving to be tricky. Few people wanted to move to the middle of nowhere.
I’d been one of them, but the peace was growing on me.
And there was no chance I’d be giving up Nolan, not now we’d finally found each other again.
He’d brought me a smoothie, fluffy scrambled eggs, and pommes Lyonnaise on a tray so I could eat as I carried on working. Thanks to an early morning call from Priest—and by “early,” I meant three a.m.—I was already running on coffee and irritation. Who cared if some congressman’s email got hacked and the unencrypted emails he’d sent to his mistress leaked? Okay, so the mistress was allegedly a Russian spy, but that wasn’t my problem either. I’d spoken with Demelza, who hadn’t been swayed by my argument that we should follow Darwin’s theory of natural selection and get dumbasses out of Congress, and then I’d spent three hours tracing the breach to a middle-class home in Maryland. A SWAT team had rousted the sixteen-year-old culprit and confiscated his computer, and I thought that when he got released from custody, I might see if he was interested in an internship at Astela because it hadn’t actually been a bad hack.
By the time that was wrapped up, I’d been too wired to sleep, so I’d read through my emails, including one from Noah Weekes, the wet-behind-the-ears Special Agent assigned to investigate Sasha Cheesel’s murder. I replied with two sentences that basically said I worked on my own terms and not his, and then I sent a three-word message to Willard Branning: What the fuck?
As I pressed “send,” a box of goodies arrived from Paris, and with Chase still overseas and Nolan gone as well, I was forced to do manual labour and stow the snacks away myself. Then it was time for coffee.
Nolan’s old coffee machine had been passable flavour-wise, but it was slow, so I’d had Teo move it to the employee break room. My new machine had arrived last week, a glorious feat of engineering that made a double espresso in less time than it took me to set three of my freshly delivered macarons onto a plate. I hesitated for half a second, then pushed the button again. This new blend didn’t have the same kick as the last one. The beans came from a Colombian acquaintance of Priest’s friend Black, and rumour said the guy’s main exports were coffee and cocaine. I half wished he’d mixed the two because the caffeine wasn’t hitting the spot this morning.
Or maybe I was still doped up with sex hormones?
I checked my watch and saw it was nine a.m., late enough to call André, who didn’t get out of bed before eight thirty on a Monday, not even if there was a Lululemon half-price sale.
“Nolan finally fired his interior designer,” I said as an opener after he croaked out a groggy, “Bonjour.”
“Hallelujah, darling. Should I send champagne?”
“It’s a vineyard, André. There’s wine everywhere. But you can send a couple of designers to finish off what the bitch started.”
“Is there much left?”
“I don’t think so, but you’ll undoubtedly want to redo most of it.”
“Give me two days to finish my current project, and I’ll hop on a plane myself.”
“Perfect. And did your New York friends ever find any dirt on Marielle?”
The question was more or less redundant now, but I still wanted to know for my own curiosity. Plus if I’d be sticking around in Mason’s Hill for a while, I wasn’t averse to stoking the local rumour mill.
“There might be something. I spoke with Hayden—you remember Hayden?—and he spoke with his friend Stefan, but Stefan wasn’t sure you sent the right photo. He’s going to check with Latoya, because Latoya works at Ivory and Ink, but she’s on vacay until next Monday. The Seychelles, lucky duck.”
“What do you mean, the wrong photo?”
“Stefan met Marielle and her friend—Rina? Rita?—at a party once, the opening of some wine bar or another. He thought the photo was Rina-Rita and not Marielle, but the two women worked together, so he probably got confused. Anyhow, he thought he’d ask Latoya because she’ll know for sure.”
“Can you confirm the other name?”
And why did it sound vaguely familiar?
