Page 70 of Guarding Grace
He started the pasta and set places for dinner at the bar behind the kitchen island, all the while calling out instructions to me. It struck me as thoughtful, since I couldn’t sit comfortably.
Then my phone rang. I held it up. “Serena.”
“Take the call. I’ll finish up here.” Once again, a simple statement that would have been out of character for him last week.
I walked into the next room. “Hi.”
“My God,” Serena’s voice was agitated. “Duke tells me you guys got chased and shot at.”
A shiver went through me. “The story of my life this week,” I said with as breezy a voice as I could manage. I moved farther away from the kitchen.
“How are you holding up? I can come over.”
“No. I’m fine,” I insisted, without feeling like it was a lie. “Terry and I are cooking dinner.”
Her voice took on a questioning tinge. “Together?”
I faced the window, lowering my voice. “Yes.”
“Hmm... Does that mean you’re taking my advice about making time to have a life?”
“Sort of,” I said softly. “But something’s off, and he won’t talk about it.”
“What does that mean?” she asked. Serena’s doggedness had been a strength in group therapy. She always eventually pulled out truth and laid it on the table to be dissected.
“It means I wanted to, but we fought.”
“Flirt. You know how.”
“He’s not being…” I searched for the right word. “Receptive.”
“Then use your secret weapon.”
“I don’t know. What if it backfires?” She’d once told me that if flirting didn’t work, the secret weapon was to turn jealousy to your advantage and flirt with another guy.
“Then he wasn’t into you enough in the first place.”
I pondered that for a second.
“What did you fight about?” This wasn’t going to end until she was completely satisfied.
“I leaned out of the car and shot back at the bastards against hisorders,” I added particular disdain to that last word.
“Really? That’s great.”
“There was nothing great about it,” I disagreed. “It was pretty heated.”
“Duke was like that,” she explained. “He still is. It just means Terry cares about you…a lot. It’s a guy thing about being overprotective, but turbocharged with the SEALs.”
Heat bloomed in my chest as I absorbed the words. “He was pretty angry.”
“Trust me. That’s a good thing.” Her statement made no sense at all.
“Grace? Dinner’s almost ready,” Terry called from the kitchen.
“He’s calling. I gotta go,” I told Serena.
“Yeah, I heard. Be good now. Scratch that, be as naughty as you want.”
