Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“Yeah, he hates you,” Jing assured me when we parted at the commercial terminal. She was flying first class home to Paris, and Garland, who, it turned out, wasn’t needed on the op, was meeting her there. “I mean, really, you could try the patience of a saint.”
When I looked to Owen for help, he just squinted at me. Apparently, he agreed.
I hugged Jing really tight, and she said to please not wrinkle her.
“Rest a bit,” she told me, then hugged Arden and Owen. “Maybe stay home and watch some TV.”
She was cackling as she strutted away from us.
Once Owen and I were seated on our plane, Arden took us smoothly up into the sky.
“I can’t wait to get home.” Owen sighed, his head on my shoulder.
“I have a question,” I said, and he lifted his head and looked at me. “Nam told me that you had hundreds of pictures of me on your phone that you showed him.”
“Of course I have pictures of you. Why wouldn’t I?”
“It just never crossed my mind that you would.”
“I’m madly in love with you,” he said dismissively. “And everyone’s phone is filled with pictures of their family and of their one and only. Don’t be dumb.”
His honesty rendered me mute. He had pictures of me because I was his love, simple as that.
“Just so we’re clear, anyone who looks into you going forward will find me everywhere. They won’t be able to miss that I’m the man in your life.”
“No, Owen, that could be dangerous.”
“Not anymore. I look at Dante, I look at Darius, and they live their lives in the open. Aaron Sutter has a husband whom everyone on the planet knows. We’re going to be just like that. We’re done with all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit. Wait until we get married. It’s going to be really obnoxious.”
Married? I couldn’t stop staring at him.
“You look a bit stunned. Here, put your head down on my shoulder and rest. You’ll feel better if you get some sleep.”
Ready or not.
EIGHTEEN
I was happy, and so since I was, I kept waiting for something horrible to happen.
We went to the pound and got Ernie, a black-and-white pit bull who’d been there almost a year and who was the absolute sweetest boy. We also got Lulu, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix, because she was adorable and no one wanted her because she was eleven. Who in their right mind got rid of a dog that had been with them for so long? It was like throwing away a member of the family. Owen said that perhaps her owner had died and there had been no provisions made for the dog. When we got home, I made him check, and with a few keystrokes we found out that Lulu had been surrendered because her people got a new puppy.
“You see?” I told him. “People suck.”
He nodded and hugged me and passed me Lulu, who had liked me right off. She’d stuck her little paw through the bars to get my attention. I carried her the rest of the time we were at the shelter and almost chicken-winged a woman who reached out to pet her. She was already mine, best everyone knew.
I kept waiting for someone to make a remark about Owen and me, about our age difference, and the lady taking our information at the shelter—I just knew—was going to ask me if the dogs were for my son. Instead, she told us how happy she was that Ernie was going home with such a great couple.
Owen had waggled his eyebrows at me.
We went out to dinner, and the hostess came to tell me our table was ready, and then, making conversation on the way to the table, asked Owen how long we’d been married.
“I guess you look like you belong to me,” he teased, leaning sideways in the booth to kiss the side of my neck.
At work, walking in, holding Owen’s hand, no one paid us any attention. Not even a look. Only Benji congratulated Owen on me finally pulling my head out of my ass.
“What did he say?” I asked when we were alone in my office.
Taking my face in his hands, he eased me close so he could kiss me. “Everyone knew it would happen, Jared. It was just a question of when.”
Skyping with Croy, one of my old fixers who now worked as a private investigator in Las Vegas—a business I owned half of—when he saw Owen kiss my cheek before he left to get lunch, he grinned.
“You have something to say, Croy?”
“No, sir. That’s just nice, is all, and it’s excellent that it happened before the turn of the century.”
Everyone was a wiseass.
At home, Owen did exactly as he said he would and simply moved his bedroom. Nothing changed. It was our house, our home, but instead of going to bed alone, I had him there, reading in bed, tracking something on the Japanese black market, or watching true-crime dramas or stories about serial killers.