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“I didn’t think there was going to be a kidnapping though,” Caroline said. “You were already in such a morose state when I came to see you, I assumed that they would be waiting for you at the meeting place and you would be pretty easily convinced to go with them. I mean, who really has their own daughter snatched by thugs?”
“Caroline, meet the Mahoneys. I hear your family isn’t so fond of them already.” I pushed a coffee in front of her and sat down with my own, and for a few minutes we just studied our own cups and sipped.
“It’s not impossible for us to be friends still, you know,” Caroline spoke up finally. “Like I said before, friendships in our world get complicated quickly. At least with me… you already know what you’re getting, I guess.”
“That could be the worst offer of friendship I’ve ever had,” I told her.
She cocked her head at me like a meerkat who had spotted this assault on the burrow a long way off. “Have you had many offers of friendship?”
“This might be the only really serious one,” I admitted.
“I was going to say. I’ve had a few in my time, and this sort of scene is by no means the worst it’s gotten.”
“What would you have done if I did end up staying with my parents?” I had a feeling the answer was just going to twist my head up in even more knots, and yet I had to know. “Or was trying to be my friend then less serious than it is now?”
“Well if they hadn’t gone the kidnapping route there would have been no problem, right?” said Caroline.
As expected it hurt my head, and yet she had a point.
I snatched the biscuit tray from her before she could steal her fourth. “I am going to need a friend if I’m ever going to survive until the wedding, never mind any further than that. But next time, you have to make sure you talk to me if you want me to butt out of something. Don’t just dump me in the middle of a drama we didn’t need to have, my life is too complicated for that already.”
“Agreed,” said Caroline. I had a feeling she really meant it… but I also had a feeling she was willing to drop the whole project if it suited her.
I was sitting down with a good coffee, and I was exhausted.
“I’m still sort of wondering whether I can do this,” I admitted, even though Caroline seemed like the worst person to take advice from at the moment. Second only to my parents and that guy with Devin’s logo carved into his dick, maybe.
“I think I can trust you with a little secret,” said Caroline. “We’re all of us, in this world, getting up in the morning and wondering what the hell we’re even doing, I think. Trying to figure out if we can stay in the game.”
I thought about that for a few seconds. “You know what? Doesn’t make me feel one bit better.”
“I doubted it would,” Caroline admitted.
Chapter Twenty
I slid around in Devin’s oversized bed, missing most of my clothes, while he sat on the edge in an immaculate suit and watched me. I had no idea how he’d gotten from what we were doing before that to that point. It just showed some things about this partnership—this relationship—were going to take a while to change.
Him trusting me with the details of his life when he wasn’t with me was one of them, unfortunately. He still hadn’t explained what was so important that he couldn’t take a moment to enjoy an interlude with his (possible) future wife with his clothes off.
“You know,” I spoke up once I’d gotten sick of admiring his admittedly fabulous side profile. His head turned. “There have been so many guys who would have killed to get a piece of what you just walk away from on a regular basis.”
“And there are times I don’t walk away from it either,” Devin returned, “such as when I don’t have to work. I was never one of those ‘so many guys’, anyway: you never bothered to so much as check if I’d actually killed anyone before you were throwing yourself at me.”
Devin had a way of sucking the humour out of certain otherwise perfectly normal witty remarks. “Are you saying I was too easy to value?”
“Easy to value? Absolutely, my dear. Too easy… not at all, I think you provided an excellent ratio of challenge to reward.”
“I hate when you wordplay my brain into submission like that,” I told Devin.
“I know,” he said.
We fell into a silence that seemed to welcome me asking about the less contentious thing that was on my mind. “So… I’m your dear, then?”
“Absolutely.” I hardly ever seemed to surprise him when I called him out on his own statements. It made me realise just how controlled his brain really was under the surface: he never spoke a word he wasn’t prepared to account for that very moment. I had a feeling it was some sort of response to the way he’d grown up, not least the detail of what my parents had done to him, but it was an admirable quality as far as I could see. I’d done a lot worse with far more minor trauma.
“Yes,” Devin continued. “A deer in the headlights…”
“Devin.”
