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He kissed her as his thank-you. But when he pulled away, he said, “Then for now, I will go home and let you get a good night’s sleep.”
“For real?” Her heart dropped into her slippered feet.
“At night, they will get less of a photograph of me, especially if I use the parking lot trick again. Will you go to work tomorrow?”
“Of course! Why shouldn’t—”
She stopped. There was no “of course” about it now that she was all over the gossip pages. “Well, yes. I do still have a job, I hope. Unless Cat’s persuaded Kane to fire me,” she added dryly. “And I like my job. I only have a couple more weeks to do it before I move departments. So yes. I’m going to work.”
“It will be different now,” he said. “The car will not want to stop for coffee.”
Megan twitched her shoulders. “That stinks.”
He stretched his arms up, revealing a sliver of lean belly and a hint of hip. “Yasmin has suggested you have a bodyguard,” he said. “He will follow you into the coffee shop.”
Ah, the stretch was to relieve his tension at mentioning the idea. “We’re at that point?”
“I always have fans who are… enthusiastic,” he said. “None have risen to the level of stalker. But it is something we have always had to be ready for. And Nikki’s fans… might not have believed the press release.”
Megan shook her head this time. “Okay, fine. A bodyguard so I can get my coffee in the morning. Right?”
“She would rather—” But Megan glared at him. “Okay, okay.” He laughed. “You are frightening when you are determined.”
“Well, I’m determined to get some of Roman’s coffee in me before I face the music at work.”
“Face the music.” He frowned.
“Deal with whatever happens there,” she clarified.
“Ah.” He reached for a bag he’d left by her front door. “I will call you tomorrow.”
Megan put one arm around him, as one side of him was taken up by his gym bag. “Okay.” She lifted her face and he kissed her, slow and sweet, until it was on the tip of her tongue to ask him to stay.
But he said, “Until tomorrow, then,” opened her door, and in another second, he was gone and she was alone with the life she had now chosen.
♦
She might as well have had The Greatest Showman standing by her bed with a top hat and a bullwhip to wake her up the next morning. The circus was in town, and she was the main attraction. She’d turned her phone back on, and after listening to an eye-watering number of voicemails—including some from Kane and Thea, though none from Cat—she called Yasmin. Her new manager had some choice words about her detour from the plan over the weekend and specific instructions on her movements for the trip between her apartment and her office.
“Remember what they did to Kate,” Yasmin said in a doleful tone, and Megan thought she meant Kate Hudson until she remembered the Kate who’d married a prince.
After sleeping so much, she couldn’t get more than a couple of hours rest that night. At three a.m., she turned off every light in the apartment and raised the blinds, because the lack of view was beginning to choke her. Within five minutes, a shadow buzzed across the window, a tiny red light flashing in its depths. Megan, who’d been contemplating the buildings across from her and the lives of those in them, ran and hid behind a pillar. Then she lowered the blinds again.
So at Yasmin’s designated time, Megan emerged from her building and walked with purpose—“But don’t run!” Yasmin had said—into the fresh air. The black car waited at the curb.
Her passage was marked by maybe two handfuls of photographers, clicking away and asking her to look at them. She didn’t, but she was confident that her rust-colored, high-waisted, narrow wool pants would be shown off to their best advantage in the photos. Above them, she wore a swing coat in a beautiful cream, with matching gloves. Her hair was down today, with only a small clip holding it off her face. If the wind blew it in front of her and spoiled their shots, welp. Sucked to be them.
The driver held her door, and she slid into the seat, letting her patent brown boots be the last things the media saw. Next, she noticed the bodyguard who had disentangled himself from the front of the crowd and got into the front passenger seat. He was built like the driver: thick and solid and unsmiling. As the driver got in, the bodyguard gave her a quick look to make sure she was all there, and they began to drive.
This was ridiculous. The coffee shop was a five-minute walk from her building. And she’d spent a week in the car with this driver, thinking she’d never see him again, and she didn’t even know his name. Now there were two of them.
“Hi,” she said to them through the open partition. “We should introduce ourselves, don’t you think? I’m Megan.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the bodyguard said.
“No problem, ma’am,” the driver said.
“Right.” Old Megan might have stopped there. Maybe they couldn’t share their names. But New Megan wasn’t going to sit behind two men the size of a couch and not find out what they were called. “I’m not going to call you ‘yes’ and ‘no problem,’ guys. Come on.”
