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Lily
Holy crap, a lot had changed in a year.
For one, I was no longer in LA. I had moved into Connor’s apartment in Manhattan.
When I say ‘apartment,’ that’s… um… a little bit of an understatement.
He owned the top three floors of a skyscraper overlooking Central Park. We lived in the penthouse, which is also where I ran Ross and Associates Consulting.
Which, by the way, had quadrupled in size. Or quintupled. Or octupled. Whatever. It was huge, and growing bigger by the day.
Anh handled West Coast operations, and I’d sent Keisha (the woman I’d met during my very first consulting gig, then lured away – with Scott Shaw’s blessing) to Chicago. I had a managing consultant in all the top 10 major US cities, usually with ten consultants or more underneath them.
Things had gotten crazy. But I was loving it – running my own little empire. We were even thinking of expanding to London and Hong Kong.
At the moment, Anh was with me in New York because I had more pressing concerns than some CEO’s morale problem:
I was getting married in less than a month.
Anh had flown in Monday afternoon. First we’d handled company business until the wee hours. Now, after a working brunch with waaaay too many mimosas, we were going over the wedding plans.
Anh was my Maid of Honor, in case you hadn’t guessed.
I had almost given that distinction to Sebastian, but that seemed a little too cheeky. Besides, he was going to officiate.
I’m not kidding. He got his certificate on the internet and everything. For the next 30 days, he was legally able to marry anybody.
I told him not to go marrying random gay men in clubs. I told him with great power comes great responsibility.
Peter Parker. Spider-man. Words of wisdom.
He’d just groaned and told me the flower arrangements I’d picked out were atrocious.
He would have given me his opinion no matter what, but he was also my wedding planner. And let me assure you of this: no woman on the face of the planet has ever had as dedicated, fervent, insufferable, or opinionated a wedding planner as I did.
I would have fired him months ago, but I was kind of stuck with him. Sebastian still worked for Connor.
Not everybody still did, though. Now my fiancé (I love saying that… fiancé… sigh…) had a full team of bodyguards – because Johnny watched over me.
After the whole shooting incident (which still freezes the blood in my veins when I think about it), and after Miranda made her veiled threats to me outside the hospital, Connor wanted Johnny to be my bodyguard.
“You’re the best I have, and she’s the most precious thing in my life,” Connor had said to him. “You’re looking out for Lily from now on.”
“I didn’t keep you from getting shot,” Johnny had said dourly. He still tortured himself over that, months afterward.
“Yeah, well, make sure it doesn’t happen again, because if anything happens to her, I’m shooting you,” Connor had joked.
Although, to be honest, I’m not sure how much of it was a joke.
So far, I’d remained completely safe.
Johnny was great – I loved having him around. Although since he was with me almost 24/7, I teased him about not having a girlfriend.
“When do you get some ooh la la time?” I asked.
“Never you mind,” he said.
Months after Anh and Johnny originally met – the day Connor proposed to me in my Santa Monica offices – I suggested they should go out for dinner sometime.
