Page 43 of Dirty Love

“Oh, babe. No. Actually, anything is possible.” He kisses my forehead. “And we’re going to take advantage of all of it.”

My head is spinning. For the first time in a decade, I feel a weird kind of hope. It’s got a crazy number of strings attached to it, and it feels fragile as fuck, but…this might just work. I might get to have this, at least for a little while.

I lean in close and brush my lips against his skin. “For the next time we get together, you should know I can’t get pregnant.”

He swallows hard. “Good to know. I’ll make sure to get you an up-to-date health check.”

Holy shit. I grin. “I’ll do the same.”

—twenty—

Wilson

New York

August

When I get back from L.A., we’re suddenly slammed with work. Apparently the lazy heat of summer means people make bad decisions and do stupid things.

But when Tabitha schedules a twenty-four hour trip to New York, there’s no question I’m going to make time to see her.

I’m pretty mobile. I run a dark web browser on my phone that lets me connect to my private servers, and in turn, any of the monitoring I’ve got set up. Right now, that’s just Tabitha’s. Before I left, I gave her a few things. An ereader with a secret built-in browser, a GPS tracker, and a few apps on her phone that looked innocuous but allowed her to message me if she needed to.

She didn’t for three weeks.

I have the patience of a fucking saint.

But then she gave me the heads up about the trip, even before her credit card was used to book the flight.

At some point I’m going to have to stop lurking in her digital footprint like a tech-perv.

Not today, though.

Not any time soon, either, because I don’t trust Derew as far as I could throw him while he was weighted down with a lead full-body cast.

It is some fucked-up bullshit to trap a teenager in a weird psuedo-marriage in order to control her career. And there might be more to it than that—the thought makes me ball my fists in rage—but no amount of theorizing spits out an explanation that’s not disgusting.

My bots are searching for him, though. If he drifts the wrong direction on the internet, they’ll find him.

And in the meantime, I have a date with his wife.

003-3000: Where are you?

Tabitha: Lord & Taylor on Fifth Ave. But I bet you know that already.

003-3000: You always rain on my attempts to be polite.

Tabitha: Are you here already?

003-3000: Ten minutes away.

Tabitha: I’ll meet you on the main floor.

She’s on her phone when I step inside from the sweltering heat. I stop and look at her. She’s wearing a floral dress under a tiny denim vest and knee-high lace-up platform sandals. Her hair is piled on top of her head and she has an oversized bag slung over one shoulder.

She looks like a teenager, like an innocent little rebel, and a flash of anger stabs through me before I can lock it down. She never really got to be that innocent little rebel in real life.

Neither did I, though, and we both fucking survived, so the sentimentality isn’t necessary.

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