Page 63 of No Longer Safe

She shook her head. “Remember the wedding dress stuff?”

I nodded as I walked to the kitchen to get a bottle of water. There was no way I was going to buy one from the hot dog cart, they were five dollars, and I was dying of thirst by the time I made it to this block. I gulped down the water like I was a dying woman. Carina watched me with big eyes.

“Well, it’s only getting worse. Maybe we should push back the wedding some.”

“I don’t know why you both wanted to move so quickly with it.”

She slumped her shoulders and folded herself over the counter. “Ace assured me money would buy everything.”

I tilted my water bottle toward her. “Money can’t buy time.”

“Apparently not. So it’s either letting Emeline have the pick of my wedding dress or I go back to that boutique and tell her to go ahead, it’ll just take a few months.”

“What was rushing you both to begin with?” I leaned on the island opposite of her. The smell of baking bread wrapped around us and I knew immediately that Georgie was hard at work in the butler’s kitchen making dinner. If I wasn’t in a predicament with Carina, I would have danced down the short hall to Georgie to sing her praises. But we were inserious modehere.

She threw her hands up. “I don’t know, something about being heir and his father pushing for him to get married and have kids.”

My brows pulled together. “What? I didn’t think you would be having kids so soon.” And there was absolutely nothing wrong with that, if that was what she wanted to do but I’d known Carina my entire life, this didn’t seem like her.

“No,” She shook her head. “We aren’t going to start having kids right away. He’s just appeasing his father on the timeline of marriage so we can have a little less pressure on us from him.”

“Okayyyy,” I dragged out. “So get your dream dress, push the wedding back, and do it the way the both of you want to.”

Even though I wouldn’t say it out loud, I had a feeling Ace’s parents were controlling more than Carina let on. I hadn’t forgotten the reasoning for the quick wedding from when she announced her engagement,Ace is just sooo in love.Now it washim being heir. I tried to keep my thoughts and face neutral, but I didn’t like it. I hoped he was marrying her for all of the right reasons. I hoped he was truly in love with her like I thought he was.

She pinched her lips together and nodded. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Oh no, here we go.I was going to be kicked out, or told I couldn’t stay here very long or something equally awful.

“Grandmother and Nana wanted to take us to dinner.”

I blew out the breath I’d been holding. “That’s it?”

Her eyebrows almost hit her hairline. “I mean, I think that’s pretty rough.”

I flicked my wrist. “The grannies are harmless.”

Even I knew my words were definitely far from the truth. But how bad could it be?

Three dayslater and we found out just how bad it could be. Neither of us knew what we could possibly expect so we both wore conservative dresses with high necklines and sensible shoes. The sensible shoes part was spot on. For two grannies, they sure loved to walk everywhere and experience the night air as Nana said. I was also beginning to think the cane Grandmother hauled around with her was either for show or for a weapon.

The restaurant they chose was nothing I could have ever expected and based on Carina’s eyes and how wide they were… it wasn’t something she would have expected either. We thought they would have chosen a nice, quiet place with an expensive wine selection.

Nope.

They chose a restaurant withbanana hammocks.

Damn banana hammocks.

I’d never come so close to men in thongs before in my entire life. Our waiter had abananahammock. I couldn’t look at anything else. I couldn’t tell you what his hair color was or if he was even attractive because the moment he came to our table with thatmassivething, I couldn’t see anything else. I was a horrible person, obviously.

The grannies grinned as they ordered cocktail after cocktail. All Carina and I could do was sit straight-backed in our chairs and hope we didn’t come face-to-face with one of them. Touching was heavily encouraged because the moment Nana smacked a bare ass, I about ran out of the place.

Grandmother hiccuped. “Ace wouldn’t have ever approved of this so we had to be careful.”

You could only get into this restaurant/club if you were invited. The grannies had multiple grand invitations by what they were saying. The door to get in was extremely discrete and the bouncer waiting outside of it… terrifying. I would have never come here on my own but there were many others seated around us that felt the complete opposite.

Nana nodded and smacked another man as he went by. He yelped and jumped a little, but seemed to be enjoying it. What kind of alternate reality had we found ourselves in? “We lost our tail a long time ago.”

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