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It was just coming up on three in the afternoon, mere hours after seeing her parents off.
Jenny shook her head. “What the hell just happened here?”
Parker met her gaze. “I know exactly how you feel. We’ve been trying to find the answer to that very question ourselves. I was good through the meeting this morning, and I got that the big worry was that someone was looking for you, and for some reason, that had Jake, Adam, and Grandma Kate, especially, really worried.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Jenny said.
“Then they suggested you consider leaving your apartment, so you could move into a house because it was a…more defensible position?” Dale seemed to be running those words through his mind again. “Is that how they put it?”
“That part at least I understand,” Jenny said. “Ari explained it to me when we went to my apartment to gather my stuff.” She nodded to let them know she’d thought that part odd, too, at first. “Apparently, not long after moving to Lusty, Chloe Jessop—well, Chloe Rhodes at the time—was taken hostage by the man who had abused her sister, Carrie, when she’d been a child in foster care. He’d intended to kidnap Carrie but got Chloe instead. The rescue didn’t quite go as planned, and Chloe ended up killing her kidnapper and saving Adam Kendall’s life. That happened just a couple of units down from the apartment I was in.” Ari’s narrative had convinced Jenny that a house was a better option for safety’s sake.
“Okay, that makes sense, then. And thinking about it, I’d have to agree. It would be easier to defend a house, or effect a rescue of someone held in one, than a single apartment inside a larger building.” Parker nodded.
“I get that, too,” Dale said. “Moving forward, we looked at this house, liked it, you went to get your things, Ari brought you back…and then all hell broke loose.”
Jenny, Parker, and Dale had more or less been standing agog on the sidewalk as a steady stream of trucks and cars arrived. All those vehicles disgorged an equally steady stream of people carrying stuff into the house.
At some point they’d entered the house, too, and discovered they were completely superfluous to what was happening all around them.
This house was a damn good size, but it had actually felt crowded with all those people bringing in all that stuff. And when they’d left—fled—just moments ago, everything was put away, arranged, perfectly neat and tidy! There wasn’t so much as a discarded tissue to be picked up and disposed of.
Parker held up a set of keys. “These are for here, by the way, three sets of keys, front and back doors.”
“Okay.” Jenny met Parker’s gaze and then Dale’s. She had to fight against the grin that tugged at her lips. “So, um…when I kissed both of you goodnight last night, we all three agreed on parting that we should try and find a place where we could comfortably get together and…um…”
“Make love,” Parker said.
“Yes, make love. Because we didn’t want to go into either of your guest bedrooms at Ari’s and close the door,” Jenny said. “And the bed at my apartment wasn’t very big.” It had been a double bed, and they probably could have managed, but Dale had worried about one of them falling out and hitting the floor. Jenny tilted her head. “So, I guess my most burning question right this moment is, has anyone checked out the bedrooms upstairs?”
Parker and Dale met each other’s gazes, looked at her, and shook their heads.
Jenny couldn’t keep her smile back. She turned and ran for the stairs, racing the two Benedicts who were running behind her. Upstairs, a hallway stretched out before her, back toward the front door, the entire length of the house. On her left, three doors stood open, and on her right, there was only one set of doors near the end of the hallway—and those were double doors. She walked toward that lone room, noting as she passed the others there were two bedrooms and a bathroom and that the bedrooms appeared to be fully furnished, beds made, ready to use.
Jenny thrust open the doors and took two steps inside. This room appeared ready to use, all right. The humungous bed reminded her very much of Ari’s. And it was completely made up with linens and a nice comforter and had even been turned down. What, no mints on the pillows?
