Page 54 of Happily Never After

“Love you. See you for lunch on Wednesday?”

“Sounds good.”

Claire shut the door with a snap and fought the urge to collapse onto the grass with her arms wide open. She had never been so pleased to be out of a car. She had vastly underestimated the traffic situation in LA. Brad’s proposal timeline was definitely going to need some fine tuning.

“Okay,” Luke said as he fished his keys out of his pocket, “I ordered some groceries, they should be here by eight. I’m getting pizza for dinner.”

With any luck, it was the same place he had paid to fly a pizza boy cross-country to her as an apology. The memory of that crust lived rent-free in her head.

“Backyard is fenced in so Rosie and Winton can play without wandering into traffic,” he said as he turned the knob and thrust the door open. “And I have a call out to a security company. They’ll be here tomorrow to install an updated system.”

His worn jeans hugged his butt as he walked into the house in front of her. It was sexy when he used his bossy, take-charge attitude for good instead of evil.

While his West Haven house was huge and classic and full of hardwood floors and every kind of luxury, this house was smaller, sleek, and modern. The floor was tiled in a herringbone pattern, and all the furniture was black and expensive-looking. A small sitting room stood to the right of the front door, with a staircase disappearing upstairs on the left. A short hallway led to the—again, sleek and modern—kitchen and dining room. A deck led off the kitchen to the backyard, which was indeed fenced in. Another hallway led to a powder room and long, skinny living room.

“Where’s the basement? These binders are going to clutter up the office.” Claire opened a door in the hallway only to find a closet.

“It’s LA. We generally don’t do basements. Earthquakes,” Luke explained as he opened another door to reveal a water heater. He flipped a handle and closed the door. A rushing sound announced water flowing through the pipes. “Wasn’t that in any of your natural disaster research?”

She nudged him.

“Upstairs.” He took her suitcase and headed up. Rosie wiggled in her arms, so Claire let her down gently, and she rocketed up the steps past Luke to investigate.

“Our room.” He opened the first door on the right and flung her suitcase inside unceremoniously. Claire cringed. Good thing her laptop wasn’t in there. “Mindy’s across the hall,” he said, opening the door for her and flicking the light switch.

“And here’s the office.” He ducked, and the string that dangled from the attic access dragged through his hair. He opened a final door, revealing a moderately sized bedroom with a desk and computer monitor. It wasn’t what her bougie ass had gotten used to, but it was doable.

“You’re going to have to keep the noise down when you’re video chatting with Sawyer,” Claire teased as Mindy elbowed her way into the office. “These walls look thin.” She rapped on one.

It was going to be a tight squeeze with even two of them, but they had been through worse. Before Claire had the warehouse, her one-bedroom apartment had been their office, and they had shared it with her ex-fiancé Jason, the immobile and chronically unemployed lump.

“Oh, good,” Mindy said, approaching a bare corkboard fastened to the wall. “We can use this for the new murder board.”

“What do you mean new murder board?” Luke growled.

Claire turned to him. “Come on. You can’t be surprised. They burned my warehouse down. And they threatened my mom and sisters. That’s not going to go unpunished. I’m tired of them messing with my life and my livelihood. We’re going to figure out who the cult leader is, and then we’re going to?—”

“Murder him,” Mindy interrupted darkly.

“Right, or, as an alternate plan, we’re going to tell the FBI and let them handle it.”

Luke shook his head. “Don’t get involved. It’s not safe.”

“When has that ever stopped me before?”

“Maybe one security system isn’t going to be enough,” Luke said with a sigh.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

To Do:

- Buy blackout curtains

- Emergency preparedness meeting

“Can you get that?”Luke called with half a piece of toast hanging out of his mouth. “It’s probably the security guy.”

“Got it.” Claire loaded her plate in the dishwasher and picked her notebook off the table. She stifled a yawn and uncapped her pen. Sawyer had provided some questions for them to ask the technician. In her other hand, she clutched her cell phone, ready to call the security company to confirm the identity of whichever technician showed up. She may have temporarily moved 2,500 miles away, but if it didn’t stop ESA when she went to Paris last year, a simple cross-country trek wasn’t likely to dissuade them either.

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