Page 36 of Tactically Acquired

“Did you hear what she said about kidnapping? Do you really think she would survive out there?”

“No, but isn’t that the point of us doing this?”

He might have a point, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. When another round of machine gun snoring started up, I pushed the woman off my shoulder, trying to get her to sit upright. Her head tilted back at what looked like an uncomfortable angle, but if anything, it made the snoring worse.Now she was doing the machine gun thing with a long, drawn-out snore at the end.

“Fuck, just shoot me now,” I sighed.

“We need gas. I’m gonna pull over up ahead,” Thumper chuckled. “You can take her to the bathroom and?—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I chuckled. “Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“Uh…because I don’t want to.”

Thumper quirked his eyebrow, then glanced over at IRIS.

“Look,” IRIS said, twisting in his seat to face me. “Here’s the thing. Thumper and I can’t look after her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s a celebrity.”

“And?”

“And she’s a woman.”

“No shit. This is what we do. I thought you knew that.”

“Yeah, but if I go home and tell Jane that I guarded Audrey Leigh, there are gonna be all these follow-up questions.”

“Like, was she really that pretty?” Thumper jumped in.

“Was she nice?”

“Is her ass really that curvy?”

“Do you think her breasts are real?” IRIS asked.

“Is she funny?”

They kept trading these questions back and forth, but I still didn’t get it.

“And here’s the big one,” IRIS said. “What’s she really like?”

“What’s your point of all this?”

“The point is there’s no good answer to any of those questions. They’re all trick questions, and anything we say will land us in the dog house.”

I couldn’t believe these guys thought so little of their wives. “Jane and Bree would never do that to you. They know you love them and would never cheat on them.”

“Do you remember when Miranda first came to stay with us?”

I frowned, trying to remember who Miranda was. “That chick that lived with Sarah? The one who Brock was always trying to fuck?”

Thumper nodded. “The same one. We were doing one of Zoe’s movies and Bree thought Miranda was hitting on me. Bree went crazy and beat the shit out of her.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

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