Page 142 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

“What?” Cole asked, coming to slide an arm around my waist. “Who’s a pervert?”

If we were going to do this relationship thing, it wasn’t just me he’d have to put up with.

“While we were fishing for sea cucumbers, these reprobates were counting the veins on your cock.”

Tulsa snorted. “Fishing for sea cucumbers? Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Shut up.”

Cole’s brow creased. “Counting veins? Is that some kind of girl metaphor?”

“No, it means they’re a bunch of nosy sluts, and they got out their magnifying glasses.”

“Magnifying glasses?” Tulsa had been taking eye-rolling lessons from Demelza. “What is this, the eighteenth century? We were zooming in on the satellite photos.”

“Please, you’re going to scare him off.”

“Sweetie, if he’s still here after you yeeted six men into the afterlife, he’s not going anywhere.”

Cole glanced at his crotch. “Are satellites really that good?”

Tulsa went for melodramatic. “I could tell you that, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“Some of them might be,” I said, “but we don’t like to talk about it.”

Tulsa stopped ribbing Cole long enough to cook dinner—by virtue of being a latchkey kid since the age of ten, she was the best cook out of all of us, Marcel excepted. Tomorrow, we’d have to deal with more questions about everything we’d been through over the past few days, but tomorrow was another day.

After a dinner of grilled fish, accompanied by severalembarrassing stories and way too much liquor, the girls finally went to bed, leaving me on the terrace with just Cole and the stars for company.

“They can be a lot,” I said apologetically.

“I’m glad you have friends like them. People who have your back.”

“I always felt a bit lost until our paths crossed. Even when our team was new, we slotted into each other’s lives like pieces in a jigsaw.”

“Was the jigsaw a picture of an AK-47?” Cole joked.

“No, a Sig P226. A handgun,” I clarified. “We prefer those.”

Cole leaned in and brushed his lips across mine. “Tulsa said you’d found the holy grail, but she got that wrong. I found the holy grail, the treasure at the end of the rainbow, and the pirates’ gold, all in one month.”

“You’re so sweet you make my teeth hurt.” But I returned the kiss. “And now they haveyourback too. We all do.”

“It’s like finding a family,” he said. “A woman to love and a whole bunch of sisters.”

Yes, it was. And in the morning, I’d squeeze the details of the Galaxy investigation out of them. We still had that loose end to tie up, and I wanted to get it done ASAP.

“How do you feel about going back to Vegas?” I asked.

“Happier than I did before. I just need to tidy up my house so I can rent it out for a while, and then I’ll book a flight.”

“Are you renting it out for the money? Or because you don’t want it to sit empty?”

“For the money. I actually hate the thought of strangers living in it, but the Galaxy can’t afford to pay me a salary.”

“I have money, and I also like the idea of taking a vacation here every now and again. An actual vacation, no firearms involved.”

“I don’t want to use you as a cash machine. I know how that feels.”

---