On the screen, a woman in a yellow dress was arguing with a man outside a bookshop. “She’s an author, and he’s her publisher. But secretly, he’s in love with her. They’ve been working together for?—”
Grace continued summarizing what I’d missed of the movie. Most of the details flew in one ear and out the other, but I wasn’t there for the movie.
Three days ago, I’d been on a surgical table while my heart tried to quit twice. The doctors had told me I was lucky. If my hearthadstopped, they would have tossed me into ICU after the surgery, and I would have been in Prague for weeks. As it was, the doctors had been hesitant about letting me travel so soon after surgery. Arthur managed everything for me and found someone willing to sign off on the exceptional circumstances. Specifically, that the police wanted us out of town and we had a private jet that could easily reroute if needed.
Grace said she would have stayed with me in Prague, as long as it took. My woman would have put her life on hold for me.
All of this was supposed to be a favor. Babysit a woman and her treasure on a quick round-trip visit to London.
Instead, I’d wound up between Grace Laurent and Brandon Caulfield’s gun the same way I’d stepped between my parents when I was sixteen. Love sometimes led to stupid decisions, andthat made it a liability. At least, the old me would have said that, but the old me was wrong.
Grace’s hand rested on my thigh, her thumb tracing a slow back-and-forth pattern she probably wasn’t aware of. On the screen, the bookshop guy was making an idiot of himself. I didn’t know the movie’s name, but I already knew how it ended.
“My parents won’t take more than half a million,” Grace said out of nowhere.
“You finally talked to them?”
She rolled her eyes in my direction, then let them settle back on the movie. “I skipped a few details that I thought would be better explained in person.”
“Like the French Resistance?”
“Exactly.” She blew out a sharp breath. “Dad’s going to lose it when I tell him his mother had a whole secret past, so I thought showing him the photos would help.”
“That leaves you with four-and-a-half million.”
“Four.” She squeezed my thigh. “Ten percent for you, remember?”
That had been little more than a joke, designed to make her stop insisting she couldn’t afford the pro bono job. “I’m okay. I’ve got a job now.”
“Maybe you could invest in some real estate? I was looking at listings in Brenton this morning.”
I’d noticed. When we were in the car to the airport, her phone had been open to a property site, and she’d angled it away from me when I’d asked what she was doing. She wasn’t as sneaky as she thought she was. “Yeah?”
“There are some houses for sale near Tristan’s neighborhood.”
“Is that so?”
“I saw a nice spot with three bedrooms, a big yard, and a cute little porch.”
“You’ve been busy.”
She tilted her head up. “I’m justlooking.”
“You’re house shopping.”
“I’mbrowsing. There’s a difference.”
“There’s no difference.”
She pressed her face into my shoulder. Was she embarrassed? “There is, because I know you’ll say it’s too early to talk about it.”
I held her tighter. “I didn’t say it’s too early.”
She looked up at me, those bright green eyes full of… hope? “Seriously?”
My mother would have adored Grace. She would have loved the way Grace made you smile with a coffee, with her laugh, with her unfiltered commentary on the wonders around her. She would have loved the way Grace saw the best in people, even in a man who didn’t believe there was anything he had to offer her. I remembered my mom in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, after my father was gone for good. She was making me blueberry pancakes, humming something, with flour on her shirt. No bruises, no cuts, no sorrow. Just her and me in the couple of years we had together.
She would have been happy for me. The memories of her normally hurt, but right now, they didn’t.
