Page 52 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

If we didn’t wrap up the mystery before Cole hopped on a plane, I wouldn’t be able to extricate myself cleanly from the mess.

And there were only seventy-two hours left.

“I wish I’d never gone to Brax’s wedding.”

Dice rolled her eyes. “Because you hate hot men and obviously great sex?”

“Because I hate complications.” I leaned on the counter and cradled my head in my folded arms. “When I joined this team, it was meant to make that part of my life easier, not harder.”

“Sometimes a little hardness can be a good thing,” Tulsa said, meandering in and helping herself to an apple from the fruit bowl. “Why do you look as if your favourite rifle fell into a crusher?”

“Cole,” Dusk supplied.

Tulsa took a seat next to me. “C’mon, tell Auntie Alys all about it.”

“Do I have to?”

“Spill.”

A groan escaped my lips. “He’s ruined me for all other one-night stands.”

“One night? It’s been ten nights and counting,” Dice put in, and I glared at her.

“He’s great in bed and easy to be around the rest of the time. I mean, he pushes my boundaries, but never too far, and when I’m overly bitchy, he lets that roll off him and steers me back to being tolerable again. And now I’m supposed to go back to fucking men who think doggy style involves a literal dog and call another woman’s name when they come?”

All three of my friends winced.

“No way,” Dusk said, eyes wide.

“He was dumb as a congressman and it was probably his momma’s name, but he was pretty to look at.”

Plus I’d forgotten to recharge my vibrator, and I wasn’t ready to go to sleep that night. Insomnia was a regular companion of mine. Mentally, I might have had the shields in place to do the job I did, but that didn’t mean I could avoid the nightmares that came afterward. Whenever I got back from a particularly hellish operation, I struggled for a week or two until the bad memories took a back seat to new ones.

Tulsa put an arm around my shoulders. “The way I see it, you have two choices. Either you can make a clean break the way Dusk did with Marc and spend the remaining years of your life celibate and miserable, or you can find a way to keep seeing Cole.”

“I amnotcelibate,” Dusk snapped.

“Battery-operated boyfriends don’t count.”

Dusk threw an apple at Tulsa, then another, but Tulsa caught them and began juggling. At least it wasn’t knives.

“Easy,” Dice warned Tulsa. “We’re talking about Jez’s disastrous love life today, not Dusk’s.”

“Sexlife,” I reminded her. “Not love life. Love doesn’t come into this.”

Tulsa shrugged. “So, either you stick to your guns and break up with the guy, or you admit you like him and make it work.”

“It can’t work. I kill people. Cole won’t even kill a spider.”

Last night, a critter had crawled out of a bottle rack in that nasty little wine cellar of his, and instead of squashing it, he’d found a glass and a piece of cardboard and carefully put the eight-legged freak outside. Then he’d opened a bottle of wine that was probably worth a thousand bucks, totally oblivious to the value, and I couldn’t inform him of the error of his ways because I wasn’t supposed to know.

“I won’t kill a spider, but I have no problem putting a bullet through a man’s head at five hundred yards,” Dice said, and that was true. She actually had a pet tarantula. “And you only kill bad people.”

“Oh, so I just wait until we’re eating breakfast and then say, ‘By the way, honey, I don’t really write obituaries for a living. I’m an assassin.’ He’d choke to death on his croissant.”

The three of them were staring at me.

“Wait.” Tulsa held up a hand. “Wait a second. You told him what? That you writeobituaries?”

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