Page 169 of Sins of Arrogance

“Aye.”

My brain stut­ters. “With me?”

His jaw flexes. “Who else would I be tak­ing out, Kara?”

I give him a sour look he has no trou­ble in­ter­pret­ing.

“That was not a date. It was busi­ness and I’ll tell you all about it at din­ner.”

“You’ll tell me about busi­ness? At din­ner? At a restau­rant?” I ask, just to be sure.

“Aye.”

He wants to take me on a date af­ter kid­nap­ping me and bring­ing me to the va­ca­tion house in Martha’s Vine­yard?

We ar­rived near dawn this morn­ing and I didn’t even ar­gue about go­ing to sleep in the bed we shared on our wed­ding night. Mick joined me, but he didn’t try for sex, so I didn’t knee him in the balls.

Af­ter all the rev­e­la­tions of the early hours of the morn­ing, I needed to be held and he was the only one around to do it.

At least that’s the story I’m telling my­self.

We woke around eleven and spent the day with Fitz. Both of us.

Ap­par­ently, my hus­band ex­plained to our son that we are on a fam­ily va­ca­tion. And Fitz is so ex­cited about spend­ing a week to­gether, there’s no way I was go­ing to burst his bub­ble.

Hence the un­pack­ing.

Try­ing to ig­nore the fris­son of ex­cite­ment the thought of a date with Mick – not on our an­niver­sary – causes, I ask, “What about Fitz?”

“He’s hav­ing a slum­ber party with Conor and Rory.”

That stops me.

“With your two top lieu­tenants?”

Mick nods. “They’re brib­ing him with pop­corn and a late bed­time. Gobby is in­vited.”

“Your top men are babysit­ting our son and his cat?” It’s not such an out­landish idea.

Fitz adores all three of Mick’s lieu­tenants and calls them un­cle. I’m not sure how Mick didn’t re­al­ize those men are his friends when they’re as close as broth­ers, but they’ve never watched my son overnight.

Ap­par­ently, there are a dozen more men stay­ing on the grounds to watch over us too, as Mick makes his ob­sessed so­ciopath bid to save our mar­riage.

“Ac­cord­ing to Fitz, Gobby is the best movie buddy. Don’t ask me what show they picked.” He says it so se­ri­ously, like I might ac­tu­ally quiz him on what an­i­mated fea­ture our son talked his hon­orary un­cles into watch­ing.

A laugh slips out be­fore I can stop it. “You’re se­ri­ous.”

“I am.”

“You planned a date night?” My voice comes out way softer than I mean it to.

He frowns. “Is it that hard to be­lieve?”

“Mick, we don’t date. I can count the num­ber of times we’ve gone out to­gether on one hand.” This past an­niver­sary was the sec­ond one he missed.

The other one was the year af­ter Fitz was born. With ev­ery­thing hap­pen­ing then, I barely no­tice that one.

“You’re ex­ag­ger­at­ing.”