“Okay…so let’s pack up and catch a flight out of here tonight. We can go wherever you want. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague.”

“Are you serious?” she asks with her eyebrows practically touching the ceiling.

“Dead fucking serious. We can go for a few weeks, just bum around Europe if you want. Get away from all this craziness and regroup. Or we can go tropical if you want to, because if you only want to wear nothing but a little bikini, I’m down with that too.”

“I can’t just take off and leave like that.”

“You sure as hell can.”

“I have school, Beck. Classes I have to attend, work I have to do,” she says with an eye roll.

“Drop the classes. Take a semester off,” I tell her simply. I mean…why the fuck not?

“Just drop my classes? Take a semester off?” Her tone is one of astonishment and exasperation with me.

“Okay, two weeks. I’ll pay for it,” I say smoothly. “You won’t be out any money.”

I expect that to piss her off—the not-so-subtle reminder that I paid for her education in return for her giving herself to me—but I’ll make her see that I’d buy the world for her right now if I could and wouldn’t expect a damn thing in return.

Instead, she narrows her eyes at me. “You are the least impulsive person I know. Beck North doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to jet off to Europe. What’s really going on here?”

Taking a deep breath, I push off from the counter and walk around the island until I come up to her stool. She swivels it toward me, her eyes filled with concern.

Blowing out the breath, I take her hands and pull them onto my chest, where I hold them tight. “I need to get away, Sela. I can’t go into the office because I can’t risk a run-in with JT. I just won’t be able to hold it together because all of this is so fresh and raw. I’m afraid of what I might do to him, to our business…all of it…if I lose control around him. So I want to just leave for a bit, collect ourselves. Take the pack off. Relax and get to know each other better. I don’t know what the future has in store, but if JT is going to pay for this, we need to have our ducks in a row. Things are going to get stressful, and I’d like some time with you and away from all of this shit.”

Her eyes soften and her head tilts in understanding. “I can’t do two weeks. I can only miss three classes in each course.”

“A week then,” I counteroffer.

“Where would we go?” she asks.

“Wherever you want. I don’t care.”

“So we’d leave tonight?”

“I’d leave right now if we could, but unfortunately, two things prevent that. First, I have that investigator coming just after lunch. I’m going to hire him to start digging into JT. And second, and probably most important, I need to do laundry, as I’m out of clean underwear.”

Sela laughs, and it fills me with hope that we’re going to get through this. She leans forward on the stool, presses her bare feet down into the bottom rung, and pushes up to bring her mouth to mine. Just the softest of kisses and an even bigger smile on her face when she pulls back. “Okay. I’m going to go start laundry, then I’m going to message my professors and let them know the classes I’ll be missing. You do whatever work you need to get things cleared away.”

“So we’re going?”

“I’d like to see Vienna,” she says as she pushes up from the stool. I step back to give her room and she slides past me, heading over to the kettle, which is now boiling. “Or Prague. That would be nice.”

“I’ll get Linda to book us flights and make hotel reservations,” I say, admiring her ass in some tiny white panties that look virginally sweet.

Then I walk back around the counter to my laptop, and start putting things in order.

—

Dennis Flaherty sits across from my desk in my home office, looking nothing like what I thought a sleazy investigator would look like. I was expecting short and portly with perhaps a bad Hawaiian print shirt with mustard stains. He’s tall and built solidly, wearing a tailored navy blue suit with a sedate yellow tie. His hair is fiery red but cropped close to his head in a military-style cut. The only other thing I notice is a wedding ring on his left fourth finger.

“You’re sizing me up,” Dennis says with a smirk.

“That obvious?” I ask him with a laugh.

“I get paid to observe,” he says dryly.

“Well, what I’m getting ready to ask you to do might cross some ethical lines. I need some dirty stuff. You look like a financial advisor or banker or something.”

Dennis nods in understanding. “Don’t let my love of fine Italian silk suits throw you off. I’ve had plenty of dirt under my nails before.”

I glance past Dennis to my open office door. Sela’s in our room packing. I asked her if she wanted to sit in on this meeting, but she just shook her head and said, “I’d rather not. I know in painstaking detail what you’re going to be talking to him about. I’ll let you take this one for the team.”

Team.

I liked the sound of that.

“I want you to investigate my partner, Jonathon Townsend. I assume you’ve done some background research on me?”

“I have. Your partner too. Quite an interesting business you have.”

“Well, I want the business for myself and I can’t seem to dislodge him. I need something that will convince him to leave.”

“How far do you want to go with this?”

“All the way isn’t far enough,” I tell him smoothly. “I don’t care what the cost or what it takes to get me what I need.”

“It’s personal to you,” Dennis observes as he pulls his phone out of the inside breast pocket. I watch as he taps a few times, presumably pulling up an app or something, then his thumbs race across the screen as he types.

“Just making some notes,” he says without looking up at me. “I need to know why it’s personal so I know which direction you want me looking.”

His face tips back up and he pins me with a direct stare. I know he needs to know this, because I want him also looking into fraternity brothers as possible suspects, but it still burns to have someone know what Sela went through. But I have her permission to disclose this sordidness to him, and he came highly recommended, so I press forward.