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“Nope. My heart isn’t something you can just give back. It’s like a disease. You’ve caught it now and you’re stuck with it, baby.”
He’d called me “baby” almost jokingly at first, but somewhere along the way it had morphed into feeling like his own little term of endearment for me. I always thought I hated those, but I liked how it sounded coming from him.
“Alright,” I said. “Then maybe you can just give me mine back.”
“So she admits I have her heart?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t just catch mine. You stole it, asshole.”
“Guilty.” He smiled down at me and kissed me, unbothered by the people moving all around us. “As a red-blooded American man, I feel like I also need to mention that I took your virginity.”
I rolled my eyes. “Proud of ourselves, are we?”
“Highly.”
“Idiot,” I said, but my voice practically dripped with affection. Travis was an idiot, but I liked thinking of him as my idiot.
“Ice cream?” he asked cheerily.
28
TRAVIS
Eventually, real life reared its nasty ass head. Elizabeth and I had to go back to Winston-Salem. I had Mr. Meatball, Rat, and Windbag seen to and sent along ahead of us. I was excited to see the rest of my pets and find places in my house for the new items in my collection, but I was dreading the work ahead of us.
I wanted to ride off into the fucking sunset shooting guns from my hip with Elizabeth over my shoulder. Forget the fact I didn’t know how to ride a horse or shoot a gun—I wanted my damn moment.
Except I had to make sure nobody ended up in jail first. I also needed to find a way to fix all of this without risking Elizabeth’s job. That was the kicker. I knew Adrian, Noah, and Jordan wouldn’t have any reservations about bringing the whole thing down into a pile of rubble if that was what it took. I also knew I couldn’t exactly tell them I was holding my punches because I cared more about keeping Elizabeth than keeping our asses out of jail.
Did that make me a shitty friend? Of course not. Because I never failed to do something I set my mind to. So if I wanted to fix this whole thing without losing my woman, then that’s what I was damn well going to do. I was just impatient and wished I already knew how I was going to do it.
I had to be honest. I’d started to like Mrs. Glass, anyway. I didn’t really even want to see her suffer to save our asses.
“Anything I should know before I meet your friends?” Elizabeth asked.
She was done up in an emerald green dress that skirted the line between casual and professional with admirable ease. Her blonde hair was tied back in her usual I don’t fuck around style, and she had on a black choker that made me oddly attracted to her slender neck. I took a handful of her ass, pulling her in for a quick kiss in front of the restaurant.
“Just be yourself. They’ll eat you up, baby.”
She nodded. She didn’t claim I was being nice and she didn’t appear insecure. I loved that about her. She was confident as hell. She was ready to walk into a room full of strangers and start kicking ass. The only time I ever saw her seem unsure was around me. Obviously, that was only because of my disarming personality and roguish good looks.
“Oh,” I said, pausing before we went inside. “We should probably gloss over the fact that we’re trying to make sure you and Mrs. Glass keep your jobs. Okay?”
“What? Why?”
“Because my friends don’t know you. If they have to choose between prison and screwing up your career, then your career is going to get nuked. It’ll be better if they think we’re all completely on the same page. But don’t worry. All we have to do is fix this thing before they find some sloppier way to do it. No biggie.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Can we do that?”
“Definitely. Probably.”
Elizabeth didn’t look as confident as I felt, but then again, nobody ever looked quite as confident as I felt.
We headed inside the restaurant—it was fancy, but in a rustic and comfortable kind of way. The hostess led us to a private room in the back where Adrian, Noah, and Jordan were already gathered.
They all stood except Adrian, who was an ass, and came to greet us.
Noah was clean-cut and almost too perfect. Sometimes it just made you want to punch him in the face to mess up his whole untouchable vibe. But he was a good guy, even if genetics had given him such a punchable face. As usual, he had a laptop under his arm as he reached to shake Elizabeth’s hand and swap introductions. Noah had to be ready to do some nerdy computer shit at a moment’s notice, like some kind of lame superhero. He was never separated from that computer.
