My knee bounced under the table, and I forced it still. “I’d like to get rid of her security detail. I can handle protecting her.”
He arched a brow. “Oh, you can, huh? I thought you weren’t capable of that anymore. PTSD and shit. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“It is. But I’m a hundred percent now, and I won’t let anything happen to her.” I met his eyes. “I would lay down my life for her.”
Vince held my gaze for a long, silent moment. Then he nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I’ll make a call.”
Relief washed over me. “Thank you.”
“That it?”
That wasn’t it—not even close. Asking for a security change was only the tip of the iceberg. But things had gone better than I’d expected…so far. I swallowed again. “Someday, I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he looked up at the clock on the wall. “Looks like your time’s almost up.”
I glanced at my watch. “There’s still twenty—”
“It is for this conversation.” He pulled the phone from his ear, stood, and lifted his wrists for the guard—never breaking eye contact with me as the cuffs clicked closed.
I still had the receiver pressed to my ear as he took a step, then paused. He gestured to the guard for a second, lifted both bound hands to the phone and brought it back to his ear. “Next time, bring the Joey Bishop hero. The Nicky Special gives me heartburn.”
And just like that, he was gone.
I sat there a moment longer, his words rattling around in my head. After replaying our conversation a few times, a slow smile crept over my face.
At least there would be a next time.Baby steps.
EPILOGUE
Juliette
Two years later
I opened the door to find our new neighbor, Patrice, standing there with a scowl on her face.
“What the hell is burning?” she asked. “I almost called the fire department until I saw your husband out back, apparently up to no good.”
“It’s not a fire. Myboyfriendis smoking sausage in the backyard.”
“Well, tell him he needs to do that somewhere else. I can’t stand the smell of smoke.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll let him know you stopped by.” I closed the door.
I walked out back to meet Wes by the smoker he’d set up. “The neighbor came by to complain about the smoke.”
“I’ll drop some off for her when I’m done. Once she tastes it, she’ll never bitch about it again.”
“We should’ve moved to the middle of nowhere like I wanted,” I said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about anyone complaining.”
Wes and I had just bought a house in Irvine, about an hour away from LA. I’d wanted no neighbors at all. But we didn’t have the luxury of moving too far from Los Angeles. We needed to be close enough that Wes could still commute to his movie-consulting gigs. This was at least away from the hustle and bustle. I also needed to be relatively close to the city for the occasional meeting; although, I pretty much wrote from home full time now.
We’d had two requirements for a house: more than one bedroom and space for a basketball court. We’d managed to get both.
Today would be the first time we’d had guests since moving to the new place. I was hosting book club for my old LA crew. We normally got together in the evenings, but we’d planned a Saturday noontime gathering today since traffic during the week to get to where we lived was a bitch.
And as we were no longer close to Wes’s infamous sausage guy in West Hollywood, he’d recently learned how to smoke his own and was smoking some today for the ladies. Up until now, though, the only sausage they’d ever really been interested in wasthe one in his pants. Pam did know that Wes was my boyfriend now, so at least we didn’t have to pretend he was just a friend anymore.
When the four ladies arrived, both Wes and I went to the door to greet them.
