“…and then I was like oh man, it’s so big, is it going to fit?”
“Tell me everything.” Tiffany sits down. “Spare no detail.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be on patrol?”
Tiffany holds out her hand then slams it down on the table causing the silverware to fall off the table. “Some things are more important than life or death!”
“Yeah,” Del agrees with a grin. “Like teeny,” another slice through the sausage “pieces of dick,” one more cut down the middle, ouch, “that get cut off,” two more slices, “because they’re being,” cut, cut, cut, “a giant,” cut, “dick!”
I wince when the last piece falls to the ground, only to nearly laugh when Tiffany leans over and whispers, “You gonna eat that?”
“I would never eat that.” Del glares.
I lean over the table. “Pretty sure your tongue is still sore from all the sucking it did last night, princess.”
Tiffany leans in. “You sucked but didn’t lick?”
“Can we not?” Del interrupts and starts drinking her orange juice. “I’m tired, and this is… stressful.”
“I’m not stressed at all.” Tiffany grins, leaning back in her chair, arms going behind her head like she’s at a spa and the most relaxed she’s ever been. “I’m quite entertained. You guys should write a book one day and definitely put a sausage on the front of it.”
“Done.” Del takes another bite, and I can’t get the image of us from last night rubbed—hah—rubbed from my brain. It’s like she’s all I can see and feel, and now we have a stupid audience of one annoying person and another that I want to push off a cliff but can’t because he’s only doing the stupid job I gave him.
“Tiffany…” I grunt out her name. “I’m going to sit next to my wife, so if you don’t mind, could you please check the permitter again?”
She scoots her chair back and tosses down her napkin. “More hostile in here than out there, but sure thing, boss.”
I wince. “I really wish people would stop calling me that.”
“What?” Tiffany actually grabs a piece of sausage from Del’s plate and pops it in her mouth. “It’s true; we’re just your minions, though I really appreciate the healthcare and 401K.”
“Go.” I point toward the door.
She just winks and waltzes off.
I’m suddenly exhausted as I stare after her and then see Roman again. How did my life get this complicated? “You’re not really going to chop my dick into tiny pieces, are you?”
Del’s quiet, and then, “Don’t knock it until you try it.”
“I can’t decide if that’s funny or just really alarming on an extreme level of Dateline mixed with a really bad crime show.”
“Meh.” She shrugs.
We both go quiet.
It’s not a bad quiet, though.
She finally speaks. “It’s going to be hard.”
“Are we still talking about dicks?” I joke.
She elbows me. “You know what I mean.” Her eyes lift, and I know she’s looking at him. “I know what we have to do, what we agreed to. I’m just saying it’s going to be hard.”
My heart twinges in my chest as I whisper back, watching her as she watches him. “You have no idea.”
We eat the rest of our breakfast in nice silence before Tiffany returns and announces that we should go back up to the room and go over my father’s plans—aka his directions for them for the next six days of torture. And I’m suddenly in a better mood because I know what he’ll see when he walks through that door. Roman’s going to see what we did last night, have actual confirmation in the room, and he’ll suffer just as much as I am.
For some reason, though, it doesn’t make the pain any less. If anything, it’s worse as I take Del’s hand in mine and squeeze it. Walking toward the elevator like I’m heading for a pirate’s plank I wonder if it would be better for everyone if I just jumped off into the tumultuous waves of my own doom and sank to the bottom of the ocean.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“One day a king will come and the sword will rise again.” —King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
Roman
“So, I don’t get it,” Tiffany said on the way here. “You love her, he loves her—apparently—and yet he assigned you to her?”
I sighed. “What better person to protect the one you love than the one who loves her more?”
She snickered. “As romantic as that sounds, how do you know it’s true?”
I whipped my head to the right and nearly pulled the SUV over into oncoming traffic. “What the hell are you asking?”
She frowned. “I’m just saying he could love her just as much or possibly more than you.” She sighed. “Men, always thinking with their tiny dicks. She’s a woman with one of the most powerful men on the planet, and you think he’d just pick her out of a lineup because she’s pretty?”
“Yes.” I scowled. “He doesn’t know her like I do.”
“Okay.” She patted my arm like someone would a child. “And the virgin sitting next to me knows that how?”
Ready to roll my own vehicle, I looked away. “I’m not a virgin.”
“Oh, right,” She stretches her arms overhead and laughs. “It was one time, but can you really count something that took four point eight seconds before it was over.”
“Fuck you.” I gritted my teeth.
“Oh, you did,” she said sweetly. “But only once, and like I said, can you count it?”
I said nothing.
“Does she know?”
I pulled to the side of the road instantly, causing dirt and rocks to erupt around the SUV in a cloud of what looked like smoke. I grabbed my Glock, pressing it against Tiffany’s temple on the side of the highway. “No, and the only way she will is if you tell her, right?”
Tiffany held up her hands. “Fine, fine, it never happened.” She laughed again. “And it really didn’t, you know what I mean?”
“I wish I could kill you without getting in trouble,” I muttered, putting my gun away and pulling back into traffic.
“You’re not the first to say that, probably not the last. Now let’s go ride in on our white horse and guard the princess you’re so obsessed with keeping.”
“She’s mine to keep,” I said.
“If you say so.”
“And yours to protect,” I added. “Now, let’s go.”
“I’d die for her too.” Tiffany looked away. “Just for other reasons like sisterhood and the meaning of life, protection, pride in your work, self-sacrifice—”
“Can you be done talking now?”
“Never,” she vowed. “Now, let’s turn on some Disco!”
It would forever be in the top five worst drives of my entire life, and it was only a few hours of her singing next to me and continuing to make fun of the fact that I’d only slept with one girl in my entire life and it was the person making me want to kill myself.