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“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” he laughed.
“What can I say?” I gave him my most innocent expression. “I love bacon.”
“I’ll be sure to double the amount on my shopping list so I don’t run out of it when you’re over, then.”
I really liked how easily he mentioned us spending time together at his place in the future. “I approve of this plan.”
“What would you like with your bacon this morning?”
I shrugged. “Whatever else you want to make. As long as you put a heaping portion of the meat of the gods on my plate, I’m not too picky.”
He chuckled as he pulled eggs, butter, milk, mushrooms, and cheese out of the fridge. “I make a mean omelet. How about I do a big one for us to split?”
“Sounds perfect to me,” I agreed.
We chatted while he fried the bacon in one pan and cooked the omelet in the other. He finally let me help when it was time to make toast, and it wasn’t long before we were sitting across from each other, eating our breakfast. I ate my half of the omelet first—saving the best for last—and leaned back in my chair as I leisurely ate the bacon. “Do you have any plans for today?”
“I need to head into the office for a few hours and make sure all the post-awards coverage is going smoothly, but other than that, my schedule is wide open.”
Deeply aware of how limited our time together was before I left for Chicago, I asked, “Maybe we could do something when you’re done?”
“There’s no maybe about it.” He reached across the table to tangle our fingers together. “If you’ve got free time when I’m done, I want it.”
“You’ve got it,” I agreed, just as my cell phone rang. “That’s weird,” I murmured as I glanced down at the screen and saw one of my neighbor’s names.
Vaughn came up behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder. “Someone you don’t want to hear from?”
“No, Cara Lee is cool. She lives down the hall from Morgan and me, but we usually just say hey if we pass each other by in the hallway.” Curious about why she was calling, I jabbed my finger against the screen to answer. “Hey, Cara Lee. What’s up?”
“Hey, Allie. Sorry to bother you, but I couldn’t get a hold of Morgan, and this is urgent.”
“Urgent?” I echoed, feeling Vaughn’s body tense up. Mine did the same when Cara Lee explained what was going on. “Shit, thanks for the heads-up. I’ll hunt Morgan down, and we’ll be home soon.”
I disconnected the call, and Vaughn’s arms tightened around me. Cara Lee’s voice had been loud enough to hear everything she said, so I didn’t need to repeat it all for him. “I’ll go grab us some clothes while you call Morgan. If she’s not answering, I’ll give Gage’s phone a try or we can drive over to his house. I don’t know the code to his gate, but I do know his assistant’s phone number, and he can unlock it from his phone.”
“Thanks.” I twisted my head and gave him a peck on the cheek before pulling Morgan up on my contact’s list. She didn’t pick up the first five times, but the sixth was the charm.
Morgan didn’t give me the chance to say anything before she asked, “Are you home and ready to give me all the dirty details about you and Vaughn?”
It was probably going to blow her mind when I got around to telling her there were no dirty details to share since the most Vaughn and I had done was kissing with a little light petting. But now wasn’t the time to get into how I’d spent my night. We had bigger issues to deal with at the moment. “We have a problem.”
Knowing me well after all these years, Morgan quickly caught on to how serious my tone was and shifted gears. “What’s wrong?”
I hated to be the one to burst Morgan’s bubble just when she was on the top of the world, but it had to be done. “I just got a call from Cara Lee from down the hall. When she went down to the parking garage to leave for hot yoga, she saw your car was completely trashed. She says all the windows are busted, the headlights are smashed in, the convertible top is slashed to shit, there are huge dents all over the body of the car, your tires are flat, and the words cunt, bitch, and whore are spray painted on the hood and sides of the car.”
“What the hell?” she asked.
Vaughn strode into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a polo. I took the athletic shorts and shirt he handed me before finishing my explanation for Morgan, “You need to meet me at the condo so we can call the police. Right now. Cara Lee is sitting in her car monitoring the scene so no one touches anything.”
