Page 134 of The Mercenary's Guide to Mishaps and Romance

Henry: You are never allowed to message Tracy again, you hear me?

Leland: You’re so spicy today, Daddy. It’s not my fault your wife called your ass “tragically flat.”

Jackson: Why?

Leland: Why’s his ass so flat? I don’t know.

Me: Why am I so fixated on his ass in the photo?

Jeremy: Cassel… why?

Cassel: It was this or death! DEATH!

Tavish: This is Danielle. May I inquire your present location? My ride is much more boring. The Scottish one won’t stop talking about some donuts he had like three weeks ago. I’m confused and hungry. And very curious about this ass.

“Huh,” Leland says.

“Did you literally text the bad guys?” Cassel asks in disbelief.

“I was so excited to show off my favorite new photo that I just threw it in a group chat! I didn’t think to make sure Tavish wasn’t in it. You know I love terrorizing him. It’s one of my favorite things to do.”

This is clearly not going to go well.

“If we’d pushed him off the boat, none of this would have happened,” Everly says as he finds his way to a seat where he tries to pretend that he hadn’t also gone flying across the boat.

Once we’re all seated and wearing life jackets while clinging on in terror, I find my mind wandering.

I hope it doesn’t take too long to reach the island. Fear over what might be happening to Tavish is eating through me. I need to reach him, and I will do absolutely anything it takes to get him home safely. I just want to take him home… I want to prove to him that I’m worth sticking around for.

But first, I must live through this boat ride.

THIRTY-ONE

TAVISH

“Your hospitality is significantly nicer than the last time I was here,” I say as I look around. “Weirdly, last time I was stabbed, threatened, and sure as fuck never paid.”

Arthur sits across from me on the couch. “I’m sorry that my hospitality was… less than appealing.”

“Sure as fuck was.”

“So your little friends are all heading here, it seems?” he asks.

“Nahhh, I doubt that,” I reply, but he flashes me a picture of all of them on a boat with Jackson’s pants down around his ankles. I’m… honestly rather confused by it. Were they having so much fun they thought a striptease was in order? And why the hell does Ellis seem so transfixed by his ass? And… why does Arthur have it? I guess they did take my phone from me. “Oh, that’s an old photo.”

“Sure, sure,” he says. “And… please don’t tell me that these are the ‘people who know my secret so if you kill me, they’ll expose it to the world’?”

“I mean… some of them know, but they’re not the only ones who do.”

“Just Jeremy Walker and Henry Johnson, then?”

“You’re going to kill the chief of police to keep him quiet?” I ask.

“I mean… killing isn’t the only way to keep someone quiet,” he says. “But yes, that does seem the most… permanent.”

“I just… I didn’t know you were such a bad guy, Arthur. I thought you ran a legitimate business. It really did seem like the one caught up in everything was your daughter. So why are you doing this?”

“Sometimes parents are pushed to do things they’d never fathom doing to protect the ones they love most.”

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