Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 141165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 706(@200wpm)___ 565(@250wpm)___ 471(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 706(@200wpm)___ 565(@250wpm)___ 471(@300wpm)
“A few inches.” He extends an arm over my seat and assesses our surroundings. “You’re still good, honey.”
My eyes bug and lips part—he called me honey . So innately and instinctively and with such tenderness. I inhale without exhaling, and I can’t help but turn my head to Thatcher.
His attention is plastered to the street. “Jane, brake. ”
“Merde.” I slam on my brake.
Thatcher plants a firm hand on the dashboard. I brake too late, and I crunch into Maximoff’s bumper. Both of our cars jerk forward from the light impact.
My pulse has shot out of my butt, and I am a frozen chunk of ice. “Oh my God.”
“It wasn’t bad. It’s alright, Jane,” Thatcher says, very huskily and seriously and not at all alarmed. I have a soldier in my car. He speaks lowly into comms, then checks back on me.
“Oh my God,” I keep unhelpfully repeating, and I try to peer at the damage of Maximoff’s Audi. I use a phone voice-command. “Call Moffy . I can’t believe I rear-ended my best friend—”
“It was my fault,” Thatcher cuts me off, looking down at me, then eyeing the road.
“No, I should’ve been watching the street.” I do now. My eyeballs are attached to the concrete and the Audi and my mistake.
Thatcher adds, “I distracted you.”
I hear his voice in my head, You’re still good, honey.
My heart skips. “Not on purpo—”
“Janie?” Maximoff’s voice sounds through my car speakers. “Are you two okay?”
“We’re fine,” I say, sitting straighter. Face on fire. “How are you and Farrow? How’s your collarbone?” Back in May, he broke the bone from the force of the seatbelt, and I feel sick at the thought of causing him any pain.
“Totally shattered like a regular Humpty Dumpty,” Maximoff says with complete sarcasm. “I think I died back there.”
I try not to smile. I need him to be serious about his injury. At least in this moment. Before I respond, I hear his fiancé.
“You’re not dead; you’re breathing right next to me, wolf scout.”
“Or maybe we all just died, and we’re in purgatory.”
Farrow lets out a short laugh. “Or maybe you’re just a dork who wants to spend purgatory with me.”
“Or maybe—”
“Farrow,” I interject and instantly feel badly about cutting off my best friend, but I must. “How is he?”
“He’s not hurt,” Farrow says very casually, as though we’re leisurely having a four-course meal in the middle of nightmarish traffic. “You still want to do a hand-off?”
I glance at Thatcher since he’s been watching the surrounding vehicles.
He nods to me like it’s still possible.
“Yes,” I answer.
“I’m going twenty,” Maximoff tells me, his voice firm and more serious. “I can go slower if you need me to.”
“This is perfect.”
Thatcher takes out a few hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. “Three, Farrow.”
“Eh, let’s do four. I don’t want to barter with these fuckers.”
It sounds like code, but they’ve been doing this for years. Neither one needs to say three hundred dollars to understand they’re referring to cash.
Thatcher instructs me to drift closer to the silver SUV, and the four of us work in unison, despite being in different cars.
Our bodyguards roll down their windows, and paparazzi begin to roll down theirs. Camera lenses directed at our cars. Arms reaching out of the windows on either side, a few loud words exchanged, along with nods.
The hand-off works, and the SUVs slow to clear a passage as we come upon our exit.
* * *
We have the costume shop to ourselves for a few hours. Darkly lit with black-painted walls and stocked to the brim with Halloween decorations, fog machines smoke the concrete floor and spooky laughter echoes from speakers.
Maximoff and I rarely used to close down places, but lately, it’s been more necessary. Right now, over a hundred excitable teenagers are outside the glassed entrance, screaming our names and banging on the windows.
If I do say so, I prefer this crowd to what the Cinderella ad initially roused.
Maximoff and I browse a rack of steampunk costumes, and our bodyguards are in sight but out of earshot, standing at the locked glassed entrance and ensuring no one breaches.
Just until the temp bodyguards, the ones trailing us in the Range Rovers, arrive here. When the temps take over door-duty, Thatcher and Farrow will flank our sides once again.
It’s very systematic.
Which provides a great deal of calmness to my life.
I can’t bite my tongue. “Thatcher called me honey ,” I confess in a whisper to Maximoff. It is a small, innocent confession, seeing as how the much greater one is under lock and key.
That Thatcher spends the night fucking me.
Maximoff’s brows furrow. “In what way did he say it?”
I push aside a few leather corsets. “Caringly, and like it was the most natural thing in the world.” I feel oddly giddy; my lungs might as well be inflated with helium, levitating inside my chest.