Page 67 of The Grump I Got Stuck With

“What is that?” Madison groaned.

“Sorry,” I whispered, locking my hand around my phone. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Just a phone call. Go back to sleep.”

She mumbled unintelligibly, throwing the sheet over her head. I took a beat to admire how bloody adorable she was, not to mention sexy, as I crawled out of bed, naked, darting into the hall to press the phone to my ear. “Hello,” I whispered, voice a little rough.

But instead of Weston, a different voice responded. One I hadn’t heard for months. One I didn’t want to hear.

“Alistair?”

Leo fucking Cartwright. What the hell did my solicitor want at—I pulled the phone away from my ear—two thirty in the bloody morning?

“I know it’s late,” he said.

“You didn’t even bother me in the middle of the night during the trial.”

“Because I needed you to look like a human being on the stand, not a zombie.”

“What do you want?” I groaned. I wanted to be back in bed, wrapped around Madison, drifting off to the sound of her breathing.

“I just got a call from a friend at the police department.”

“What kind of friend?”

“The kind that does me favors from time to time.”

I hummed. “What did they say?”

“Jessica has just been arrested.”

I almost dropped my phone, Leo’s voice fading to static as my pulse rushed in my ears like a torrent of water. “They found her?”

“They found her.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, massaging my eyes, trying to gather my senses enough to process what the man was saying. I was standing naked in the hallway, and my embezzling ex had just been arrested. I needed some goddamn trousers and then maybe a stiff drink. “Where was she?”

“Apparently, she never left the country.”

She’d been here this whole time? I clenched my hand around the phone so hard it ached.

“She’s on her way to the Charing Cross police station to be processed.”

For a beat, I struggled to catch my breath. “And then what?”

“She’ll be brought against the Westminster Magistrate’s Court for her initial hearing.”

“Okay.”

“Look, Alistair, the reason I wanted to call right away instead of leaving this for the morning is so you’d be prepared. The news hasn’t gotten a hold of this yet, but they will soon. They’re going to have questions for you, and you’ll need to have answers prepared. Not to mention, you’ll likely be asked by the courts to testify when this goes to trial, so you need to be ready for that call.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. It was happening all over again. The media storm. The frenzy. It was about to crash down on my head twice as hard as last time because this time Jessica would be here to kick off the criminal trial the world had been waiting for all along.

Camera flashes exploded in my mind. All I could see when I closed my eyes was Kenna’s little face surrounded by journalists, drowning under the weight of other people’s questions and comments and assumptions. I couldn’t drag her into this mess again.

“We’ll prepare you like we did before,” Leo was saying. “Run through your story. Make sure you’re prepared for their questions.”

My story, I thought. Jessica was the biggest regret of my fucking life. Except she’d given me Kenna. And I could never regret that.

“Do you remember what we rehearsed?”