Everyone looked to me.
“Okay, so I have to run this by Knox because, although I’m discovering this can be inconvenient, we’ve promised complete honesty with each other,” I began.
“Whoa,” Jessie said before I could continue.
“Really?” Shanti asked.
“Well…yeah,” I replied, thinking that’s what boyfriends and girlfriends did.
Though, I’d had boyfriends, and it was safe to say complete honesty had never been on the table.
“Complete?” Joey inquired.
“I have not yet been on my period when I was with Knox, but even then I’m not going to keep it quiet.” Not that he wouldn’t notice considering the health of both of our libidos. Still. “If he’s the type of guy who gets weird about that and throws a fit that I ask him to buy tampons, we’ll have a problem that he has a problem with the natural course of a woman’s body. Outside that, I’m not sure what I’d keep from him.”
“The fact you, like the rest of us, except Shanti, just drank Jayden up like the tall, hot mug of dark chocolate cocoa he is?” Jessie suggested.
Yeah, I probably wouldn’t share with Knox the dudes I thought were hot, and I hoped he returned the favor.
“Angels business he might not need to know,” Raye stated. “And I’ll note with experience in this matter, it’s less he might not need to know and more he really doesn’t want to know.”
That was also true.
“Maybe you can just say what you have to run by him,” Willow suggested, and I knew she did it because she told everything to Gabe, and Harlow didn’t chime in on all of the things I should keep from Knox, because she told everything to Javi.
“Knox is going to talk to the guys about getting a message to his family that, as of the Thursday before last, he ceased to exist for them. But I think we should also go to Dimitri, who has a direct line to Knox’s sister, and ask him to underline that statement. I’m sure the Nightingale men will make the message clear, but I suspect an underboss in the Russian mob will make it clearer.”
“I could hang with Dimitri again,” Joey said instantly. “We didn’t get near enough time with that dude last time.”
“No matter how hot he is, he was just as scary, so after we left him, and we were all alive and breathing the last time we were there, I decided I didn’t ever want to go back,” Willow shared. “But now that I know he likes us and we’ll probably not get on his hit list, I’m changing my mind.”
I completely tracked this thought process.
“Since we have nothing better to do, it wouldn’t hurt to put some effort into firming up our relationship with an ally,” Raye remarked.
“Is it weird that really bad guys can also be kinda good guys?” Willow asked Gemma.
“Alexeyev is an animal,” Clarice said while rising from her chair (for your information, her bottom half was covered in crisp white jeans, and when she rounded the desk, I saw her fabulous mink-suede, high-heeled booties—seriously, if I wasn’t boho to the soul, I’d dress like her). “Bears look cute, but they wouldn’t blink before slicing you open with their claws.”
Scary metaphor.
But an important reminder.
“I have a trial starting tomorrow, so I’ve got prep to do. I’m gone,” Clarice declared, then sashayed to the door, but turned. “No going rogue. You don’t have me or Arthur at your back for that mess.”
“Cross our hearts,” Harlow chimed, actually crossing her heart. “We’re out.”
Clarice disappeared.
We all waited until we heard her car start up and drive away before we all turned to Shanti.
She lifted her hands in a Don’t Shoot! gesture. “Don’t ask me.”
“He shouldn’t be flirting with Clarice if he’s married,” Harlow pouted. “And that might have sounded like bickering, but every single one of us knew it was not.”
Indeed, every single one of us knew that.
“He ditched his wife.”
