Page 88

Kai

* * *

I vaguely remembered telling him to get his shit and move in already. Thank God I did; saved me from having to work up the courage to tell him to do it today.

I rolled over to my side to get out of bed and found that Kai had even put my phone in my charger.

Now I had to keep him.

I looked at my phone and saw that Sue had already texted me twice this morning. Time to put my best friend out of her misery.

I pushed in her number.

“It’s about damned time you answered your phone! I was about to get on a plane.”

“As if, Little Pixie, like your husband would allow you to come out for a visit without him.”

“You’re right, he wouldn’t. Therefore, I would have back-up when I held you down on the floor and beat the information from you.”

I shuddered. Not the best image at the moment.

“How about we stop with that line of teasing for the moment, until we’re caught up?”

“Marlowe?” Sue’s voice was quiet. “Has something happened since yesterday morning’s text?”

God, she knew me well. She could pick up on just my tone that fast that something wasn’t right. I loved this woman.

“A ton of good stuff. Some scary stuff. But mostly good,” I rushed to assure her.

“Okay.” She drew the word out so it was five syllables. “Tell me the ‘not good’ and scary stuff first.”

“What makes you think there is ‘not good’ stuff, too?”

“Not good goes hand-in-hand with scary, so fess up.”

“We made love!”

“You and Kai, not me and you, right? Just for clarification. I teach English, so it’s important that we get this conversation started off correctly.”

I laughed. “Yes, me and Kai. Or is it Kai and I? Whatever, we made love. I said we had sex, but he said we made love!”

I heard her gasp.

“He said that? The muscularly, soldierly, kind of grim guy?”

“The grim part was early on. I’ve seen him grin and smile and even chuckle now. And Sue, you should hear him laugh. He has the best laugh.”

“Did he laugh when you made love?”

I paused.

“He did.” I thought some more. “Was that bad? I didn’t think it was bad at the time. We were both laughing. So I thought⁠—”

“Stop already, I was teasing. Yes, laughter is good, and I’m going to hunt down Denny Rasmussen and kick his ass…again.”

That made me laugh, too. “Okay, let me tell you more. The scary stuff is I was almost kidnapped, but that wasn’t as scary as almost being driven off the road over a cliff. That had been much scarier, but apparently chloroform is really bad for you. I’m still preferring the botched kidnapping, plus that way Chaos didn’t get hurt and⁠—”

“STOP!”