Page 72 of Happily Never After

“Love you, Coli,” Claire and Mindy said together. They blew her a kiss, and the video cut out.

“So much for our lunch hour stakeout,” Claire said. She balled up their food wrappers and tossed them into the car trash can she had insisted Luke install.

Her phone rang, and she jumped. It was Luke.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m with Mindy and you’re on speaker. What’s up?”

“Just leaving the farmers’ market. They had baby carrots for Winston.”

God, even the words “baby carrots” were sexy when they were said in that gravelly voice.

“Awesome. Thank you for doing that. How did the lunch go?”

“It was good. They wanted to talk about securing some of my future projects.”

“Luke, that’s huge!”

“I know. I wish you had been there for it.”

Shit. She cringed. Luke had asked her to come to lunch with him, but she had been so consumed with proposal drama and the need to seek out information on ESA that she had turned him down.

“I’m really sorry. I promise I’ll be at the next one. I’m glad they could see past that grumbly exterior to the soft, squishy genius inside you.”

Luke grunted. “So you had a good lunch then?”

“Mmhmm. We just finished up and are about to leave for the ranch.”

“I didn’t know CVS served lunch.”

“What?”

Something banged on her window. Claire screamed and dropped her phone. The Taser was halfway out of her purse before she registered the fact that the person outside her window was a rather pissed-off Luke.

She sheepishly rolled the window down. “What are you doing here?” Did he have access to her phone’s GPS too?

“The farmers’ market is literally across the street.” He pointed at a large, glowing sign that read “The Original Farmers’ Market.”

“Oh.”

His brows were drawn together. “So, just to be clear, you can make time to do lunch with your sisters, but when I ask you to go to lunch, you’d rather sit in the parking lot of a CVS and eat gas station wraps.”

Oof.

“I’m so sorry. We were?—”

“I know what you were doing.” He pointed at the Whole Foods. “We talked about this. In fact, I remember expressly forbidding you to do this.”

“I’m not alone. Mindy’s here. And Nicole was on FaceTime.”

“You could be with an entire team of Navy SEALs and I still wouldn’t want you dangling yourself in front of them like a piece of meat. We’re not done talking about this.” He shook a finger at the car, then turned and strode off down the street.

“Love you,” Claire called out the window. She rolled it back up. “Oh boy. He’s mad.”

“I think we’ve eclipsed mad and gone straight to fuming. You should have gone to lunch. This was a total bust.”

“I know. But now that I know he’s here somewhere, I just need to find him.” Claire typed the address for the ranch into her phone. She would make it up to Luke later. Skipping lunch had been shitty. She needed to do better. “Think we can stop for ingredients for apology pie on the way back?”

“I think you better,” Mindy said.

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