Page 112 of Back in the Saddle

Though it was interesting to know their resources extended to being able to check if someone was on a flight.

I filed that in myTo Discuss with Turner Laterfolder, and was mentally photocopying it to add to myAsk Arthur if He Can Do This Toofile, when he kept speaking.

“I understand what happened, Jess,” he stated.

“Sorry?”

“The intensity of how we got together. The way she seemed totally into me. It’s taken me a while to figure out I fell for it, and process how I felt because I did. And I still believe there are a lot of good things about Savannah, particularly her talent and ambition. It isn’t easy to make a go of it in her business. And she didn’t just make a go of it. She’s a star on the LA scene, she’s won awards and has been written up in magazines. And even if her behavior had an ulterior motive, we had good times. But she did everything just right in the beginning. She made me think I was the most important thing in her life. So when I wasn’t, it was a blow. And I didn’t realize until much later that all her behavior in the beginning was to set me up so I’d be hobbled by my feelings for her, which would allow her to get away with however she wanted to behave. Her shock that I wasn’t sticking to the program was another signal to what was going on.”

“Love bombing,” I said.

“Yes, that,” he agreed. “Then gaslighting, manipulative language and denial.”

“I obviously don’t know her, but she kinda seems like she thinks the world revolves around her.”

“That’s what narcissists do.”

So, he knew she was a narcissist too.

I said nothing.

“Jessie,” he said softly. “I don’t want every conversation we have to include her, but I do want you to know I understand how she’s operating. It isn’t lost on me. So I also want you to know I’m gonna handle it.”

“I didn’t think you wouldn’t.”

“If you were me, wouldn’t you want to assure me?”

I totally would.

I slid closer to him and put my hand on his chest. “I get it, Turner. I’m not worried about her.”

“Good.”

“And I also know you’ve got to process the shit happening with her.”

“It doesn’t have to be with you.”

“I’m not in this just for your mushroom sage stuffing, baby,” I said quietly.

His eyes warmed, and he came in for a brush of his lips.

I really loved it when he did that.

When he lifted away, I asked, “So what’s the thing I need to know?”

He took in a breath.

I braced.

He let it out and said, “Shit gets around. Your crew and my crew are interlocking. So I want you to hear it from me before someone else tells you.”

“Tells me what?”

“That my introduction to this crew was when I was undercover for the FBI. I was assigned to Stella. She wasn’t doing anything illegal, but a really bad guy had targeted someone in her circle. I decided dating her was the way to get close to her. I did this. It was unexpected, but not inexplicable, I developed feelings for her while I did. But we were never intimate. She and Mace had been together before I met her, and they’d broken up. She was hung up on him, and shortly into that op, they got back together. It was a little dicey between Mace and me for a while. But years have passed. Weddings. Kids. It’s not an issue now. However, I didn’t want you to hear about it and think it was.”

Stella, by the by, was not only Mace’s wife, and the mother of his two children, she was also the award-winning, multi-platinum lead guitar and front woman for the kickass rock band, the Blue Moon Gypsies.

Oh yeah.

---