Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 122440 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 612(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 408(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122440 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 612(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 408(@300wpm)
“All of you knew?” Wilder questioned.
“We didn’t discuss it, but I would guess everyone knew,” Stella said with a little smug smirk. “Raine and Zahra for certain. And Shabina. She’s the master of observation. Vienna is wicked smart, and she knows Harlow very well. They spend a lot of time together.” She nodded decisively. “I’d say she knew.”
Harlow rubbed her tear-wet face on Wilder’s shirt. “That’s friends for you. Nothing gets past them.”
“Good thing. I’m going to leave you in good hands if you’re okay now,” Wilder said, stepping slightly away from her so he could frame her face with his hands. “Are you good, mon rêve? I can stay if you need me.”
He melted her heart every single time. “I’m good,” she reassured him. And she was. She would hate it if Guadalupe, a woman she considered a friend, despised her so much that she would conspire with someone else to leave death threats in her mailbox, but that didn’t lessen the fact that she had sisters of the heart, men who cared to protect her, and Wilder, a partner she never thought she would have. “I’m good,” she repeated. “Thank you for taking the time to come to me when I was falling apart.”
“Every time,” he assured, and bent his head to brush a kiss on her nose. “Look after my woman, Stella.”
Stella flashed a grin and waved him away. “If you don’t disappear, and we don’t get back to that room, they’ll all be heading this way. Vienna will most likely carry Raine, and Rush will lose his mind. It will be a thing.”
“We can’t have a thing,” Wilder stated, and sauntered off, using the shortcut through the wall to get to the security room.
“Shabina’s home is a maze,” Stella said. “She probably has an entire house behind the walls and underground.”
Harlow tied her hair back so she could splash cold water on her face. “Rainier’s most likely digging out a miles-long tunnel that goes from Shabina’s house straight to his compound.”
“Don’t forget the café,” Stella said. “He would want her to have an escape tunnel from there as well.”
“Someday the entire ground under Knightly will collapse.” Harlow continued her imaginative narrative, although she thought Rainier was perfectly capable of making such a fantasy come true. “Archeologists will be called in to see why there is a labyrinth of tunnels below the town.”
“They’ll find several armories stocked with every kind of weapon imaginable,” Stella added.
“And dungeons,” Harlow supplied. The nonsense was helping to rid her face of the evidence of tears.
“Harlow, Stella,” Zahra called. “You have about ten seconds to get out here, or we’re sending the dogs after you. Shabina has dessert ready. Dessert. Shabina’s dessert. I’m not missing out on that because you’re discussing how hot Sam is.”
Harlow burst out laughing. “We’d better make a run for it. She really will send all the dogs this way.”
They both started a sprint down the hall. “It was the dessert,” Stella said. “Nothing else would ever get that woman out of her favorite chair, even to threaten us.”
Harlow found herself laughing as they hurried into the great room. She was so thankful for her friends. “Good grief, Zahra, the dogs?”
Zahra raised an elegant eyebrow. “It’s Shabina’s dessert. You can hardly blame me.” She turned toward Guadalupe. “That’s all it would take for world peace. Tell all the world leaders if they settled down and stopped posturing, we’d send them Shabina’s desserts.”
“I will admit I always skip dessert,” Guadalupe said. “It isn’t easy keeping weight off when I don’t do a lot of exercise.”
“Wait,” Vienna said, turning to face the realtor. “You climb, don’t you?”
“Well…no. I don’t like heights. And I don’t run.”
“At last, a woman with sense,” Zahra stated. She waved her hand to encompass all of her friends. “Women with no sense right there. They all run, backpack, hike, boulder, trad climb, jump off cliffs in weird contraptions, bicycle—you name it, they do it. In other words, not a single one of them has a lick of sense. And they all have personal trainers who kick their butts.”
Stella cleared her throat. “Zahra, you do all of those things.”
“Under protest. It isn’t like I want to do a single one of those things. I’m forced to do them to keep all of you safe. And the personal trainer is afraid of me, so I don’t have to do a quarter of what the rest of you do.” There was immense satisfaction in her voice.
“He isn’t afraid of you,” Stella protested. “He’s fallen like every other man who has come before him. He can’t possibly make you do anything you don’t want to do, and he knows it, so he allows you to do what you want, hoping you’ll look kindly at him.”
Zahra heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Dessert sounds better to me than going on a date.”