“Yeah.Wow.That’s exactly how I feel.I’m sorry I’ve been keeping stuff from you, Persia.But I just… I wanted to keep things on the downlow.Everything’s changed since the kidnapping though.It’s like Ryan realizes how much he feels for me.”
“That’s so sweet,” Persia murmured.“I can’t believe he saved you… I mean, I thought they’d stopped making gentlemen now.”
“Yeah.Me too,” she confessed.
“How did he save you?”
“He knocked Jaime’s gun out of his hands,” she told her, half-lying.Ryan had mauled Jaime, killing him in the passenger seat of her SUV.
Yeah, that was a helluva memory to have of a first date.
She closed her eyes and wished like hell she could tell Persia everything.
Gulping, and feeling very overwhelmed all of a sudden, she whispered, “I miss you, Persia.”
“Of course you do.You haven’t seen me in close to five weeks!”came Persia’s matter of fact tone.“I miss you too, bitch.When are you coming to the bakery?”
She gnawed at her lip.“I don’t know.My security protocol has changed.”
“Of course.That makes sense.”Persia hissed.“They were with you years, too.Shit, Shawn must feel like crap.”
“Understatement,” she admitted.“He’s beating himself up about it.”
That was no lie.She knew Shawn was, but so much had happened since that El highly doubted Shawn was giving that much thought.
The current concern was figuring out where the latest threat came from.
Was it the Pantera?Had the Pantera come for them and set the explosion on their car?Or was it one of their own?
Her life had never been easy.Sure, she’d had money, and that paved the way a lot of the time, but it also caused more trouble than it was worth.
Of course, telling that to a struggling single mom of four who was finding it hard to pay the mortgage as well as feed her kids… yeah, it never went down easily.
But, the truth was, being rich, as rich and as ‘monied’ as El, was a job in itself.
That single mom didn’t have to worry about her kids being abducted and held for ransom.
Neither was better or worse, just different.Comparing the two never worked, but El usually did because she always felt like a poor little rich girl, when really she wasn’t.
Of all her family she was the most grounded, and that was the truth of it.
Her brothers were politicians, and they tried to sell the whole spiel that they were America’s family men, that whole bull crap, trying to make the everyday voter empathize with them… yeah, it was all BS.
Her brothers imported their shoes, for Christ’s sake.They’d only started driving American-brand vehicles when they’d done as their father wanted and gone into politics.
Before then, getting them into anything not German was impossible.
Same went with their mistresses.
For some reason, they had a thing about chicks called Heidi and freaking Elsa.
Her lips curved at the thought.That was a slight exaggeration, but her brothers just seemed to prefer the exotic… until they’d moved into a different sphere, of course.
“El?You still there?”
She blinked.“Yeah.Sorry.My mind wandered off.It’s been doing that of late.”
“I can’t blame you, babe.I’m sorry, I didn’t realize so much shit was going down.”
