Page 116 of Runaway Bride's Guide to Love

“Do you know what she’s about to say?” I ask Simon.

“Nope. But if I know my sister, who to this day still lives in Rolling Hills High School history for a prank involving a foreign exchange student that never went to the school, it’s about to be good.”

All eyes are on Quinn as we wait anxiously to hear her thoughts.

“We need Duncan to confess.”

“That’s what Dad said,” Stella says as we all nod in agreement. “The problem is, he’ll never just come out and say it. If I confront him, it will be another one of his lies. I don’t know how to get him to talk.”

“What if we had some outside help?”

We look at each other, not knowing what, or whom, she’s talking about.

“Just say the rest, Quinn,” Maeve says. “Clearly we’re not following.”

“And the evil smile on your face is giving villain vibes,” Ainsley says.

“Not villain. Let’s call me a vigilante,” Quinn says. “Because, somewhere over Oklahoma, it came to me. Men say stupid shit. Present company excluded.”

“Nope, I do,” Simon says. “But carry on because you’re not wrong.”

“Thank you. Men will say a lot of things during sex. Or to getlaid. Or, in the case of one Pencil Dick Duncan Hughes, when he’s getting whipped.”

I think we all stop breathing.

Quinn is a fucking genius.

“I’m just saying,” Quinn continues. “If I liked being spanked and called a good boy, there would be a lot of things I’d confess to my dominatrix.”

guide to love rule #23

Men come and go. But female friends you meet in the women’s bathroom, or when they’re spanking your fiancé, last forever.

34

stella

“Areyou sure this is going to work?”

This doesn’t feel real. It feels like we’re doing a bad reenactment ofOcean’s Eleven. But instead of robbing a casino with high-tech equipment and a crew of criminals, it’s me, Emmett, my brother and sisters, Nadia, and a guy my brother somehow knows who does surveillance that insists on being called Kaos.

And yes, he told me it was with a “K.” Which makes sense, with his blue mohawk and gauged ears that you could fit a donut hole through.

“It’s working on my end,” Kaos says as he tests the camera and audio. “As long as he doesn’t see it, we’re smooth sailing.”

Was Quinn’s plan to hire Nadia to get Duncan to spill while we secretly recorded him with cameras strategically set up in the hotel room? Yes.

Is it ridiculous? Yes.

Did Simon then come in saying he knew a guy who could make this happen? Of course he did.

Which is how we’re here, at the scene of the flogging crime—the hotel I was supposed to get married at—to catch Duncan in the act.

Hopefully notthatact. Just the one where he admits that he’s a trash human and the SEC can put him in jail instead of me.

He wouldn’t last a day, even in white-collar jail.

“This is going to be fun,” Nadia says as she comes out of the hotel bathroom, clad in her leather outfit. “I’ve never done this before.”

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