“Raeann.” Her response comes just as deadpan as mine.

“Did you know they give you hot towels in first class? Hot towels. What do you even use hot towels for?”

“To clean up the downstairs from all the mile-high sex?”

I chuckle. “And here I wiped it on my face.”

She sucks in a breath. “I hope it was clean.”

“I was in first class!”

“Yeah, well, you could’ve had your own private plane, butno.” She draws the last word out.

“It seemed so unnecessary.”

“So, how’s the hotel? Fancy?”

I walk over to the huge window in my room and peer out. “This furniture is nicer than most things I’ve ever seen, and I have a view of the ocean.”

“Penthouse?”

“Penthouse,” I confirm.

“Man, you’re living the life. You, like, have your own sugar daddy.”

“Doesn’t sugar daddy imply that he’s a lot older than me and I don’t work?”

She chuckles. “Who cares what it means? Micah Freeman is whisking you off to California and who knows where else? The Raeann Gorman of a few months ago wasn’t doing any of those things.” She pauses for a second. “What’s the bathroom look like?”

I tear my stare away from the waves crashing against the shore and walk to the bathroom off this room. “Clawfoot tub.”

“You have to take a bath in it!”

Tab is content on talking about all of these amazing things, but my chest is starting to flutter. “How are things there? Athena?”

“Jace is currently feeding Athena copious amounts of treats.”

“Not too many. You know how her stomach gets.”

She raises her voice. “Jace is currently feeding the appropriate amount of treats to Athena that will not trigger her sensitive stomach.”

“Roger that,” I hear him say in the background.

“Are you sure this is okay?” I ask Tab. We’d talked about me leaving for a couple of days over and over, but guilt rears again. It doesn’t matter that she told me repeatedly to go. At one point, she even told me that if I didn’t go, she was going to come in my place, steal Micah, and leave me to become an old maid.

“I love you dearly, but stop. Everything is fine here. Business is booming. You did this, Raeann. You deserve to take a break.”

“Wedeserve to take a break.”

“I’ll take one when I find my pro football hottie who wants to shower me with gifts and whisk me away to romantic places.”

“He does have a game to play here, you know.”

“Meh.”

“I hate the idea that I keep being pulled in two different directions.”

“That’s why we have employees. That’s why I have Joey looking for a third. The point is for the money to pile up in our bank account while we become less and less involved. Right? We need to think about franchising and having a store in New York. Or we can have a store in every major pro football city. That way, when you’re being wined and dined all over the US, you can go visit each store to make sure it’s doing well.”