“Hey Robin, how are you feeling?”
“I’m good. I was going to ask you the same thing.”
He stands up and puts his phone into his back pocket. “I woke up starving, I can’t lie, but I feel better than I have in a long time. If you don’t count the bruises from working on that fence, I mean.”
My eyes widen as I get closer to him, noticing the big purple mark on his right forearm.
“Oh my God, did you have that last night?”
He nods. “It looks worse than it did last night. It also looks a lot worse than it feels.”
“Shayne bruises like a peach,” Harper says. “It usually looks that bad, and it’s usually because he bumped into something.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s not painful.”
“I assume no one’s told you when the detective’s going to be here?” Harper asks.
Shayne shakes his head. “Falcon and Jay are keeping Owen and Lana busy, so I don’t know if we’ll get any notice on that.”
“What about lunch?”
“What about it?” Shayne asks.
“Do we have an ETA?”
I laugh, but Harper’s being deadly serious, I think.
If there’s one thing he takes seriously, it’s food.
“It’ll come when it’s ready, which should be sometime soon,” Shayne assures him.
I move away to look at the lounge area. It’s clean and tidy and there’s no trace of Harper’s perfume around the couch. Someone definitely cleaned up this morning.
I find the two and a half bars of chocolate on the coffee table, and I smile.
“If you really can’t wait, there’s chocolate over here,” I tell Harper.
“Ooh!” he murmurs. “I forgot about that.”
Darting over, he picks up what’s left of the milk chocolate bar.
He passes me the salted caramel. “You should try it.”
“Thanks. I will.”
Chapter One Hundred-Twenty-Five
Falcon
Taking a coffee break was not on my plans for the morning, but the moment the negotiation process passed the hour mark, I knew it wasn’t going to be a quick day.
I spend a few minutes too long looking back over the last page of our new employment contract, and I’ve got a lukewarm drink in my other hand.
I down it as if it’s water and then I set the paper cup down on Lana’s office coffee table.
“So, we have a three-month non-negotiable work period, during which you and your guys will take two weeks off as a trial run for our guys being in charge, and after that we can start taking turns with time off and on?”
Lana nods. “I think three months is reasonable. If you don’t have it down by then, you’re not going to have it down.”
