“Who’d you have to bribe to sneak it in?” Lucy asked.
“No bribes, just some well-placed phone calls.” He gestured to her parents and Katie. “Princess, who are all these people?”
“My family.”
“Hello, Lucy’s family.” He shrugged off his jacket.
Apparently, he planned to stick around awhile. She shouldn’t have been relieved, but even with everything else, she felt better when he walked through the door.
She rummaged through the napkins and sauce packets. “Do you have any vodka?”
He chuckled. “No. They frown on mixing alcohol with your pain meds.”
“Lucy?” her father asked. “Lulu, who calls you Lucy?”
“Everyone,” she said, her focus attuned to the emotional eating binge in front of her.
“How’d you get out?” Katie asked Will.
“My x-rays and oxygen levels are fine, but I’ll sound like I inhaled a bonfire for a while.” He propped a hip to sit on the edge of her bed. “Hoped you’d be resting, so I stepped out to get you non-hospital-grade food. Looks like I missed the party.”
He was acting like everything was fine between them, but everything was not fine.
“Where’d you get clothes? I thought your clothes all burned at Camelot?”
He stared at her a beat too long. “I have my ways.”
“Lulu, why were his clothes at your house?” her father asked.
“You two arelivingtogether?” Her mother stared at Lucy as though she had suddenly sprouted a parasitic twin out of her neck.
“William Covington.” Will cleared his throat and offered her mother his hand. She shook it and gave Lucy an accusing look.
“You’re dating our girl?” her father asked.
Not anymore… Lucy opened her mouth to correct her father. “N—”
“What do you do, William?” Her father shot his patented witness-on-the-stand, take-em-down-death-ray stare at him.
This wasn’t happening. Lucy shoved more tortilla in her mouth with a newfound understanding as to why she had been chubby for all those years.
Will glanced to her and stopped abruptly, raising an eyebrow. “I…uh…own several television stations across the region.”
Lucy snorted. “He owns dozens of them.”
“Oh my.” Her mother’s nasally words pitched higher. “Why’s he with you, dear?”
Katie gaped at her.
Will tensed.
Lucy squeezed the burrito, and a chunk of chorizo plopped out.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Will had clicked into his get-it-done CEO tone.
Had he forgotten they broke up? They were over?
Her mother paled. “She’s…well…Lulu.”
