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Chapter 21

Harlan

“Your friends were welcome to stay for dinner,” I tell Quinn as we sit down to eat the tagliatelle Bolognese that my staff has served for us in the dining room, with a Caprese salad and wine.

The two of us are alone, and she seems tense.

“I know,” she says. “Thank you. Carlisle told me so. But I thought we could eat alone.”

When I came downstairs after my shower, she’d insisted that she had work to finish before dinner. She was adamant about it, barely looking me in the eye as she rushed around the kitchen. Minutes later, her girlfriend Dani arrived, and they disappeared into the house somewhere. So I went to do some work in my office.

Soon after that, Carlisle informed me that Quinn’s girlfriend Nicole had also arrived, and that the girls were out by the pool.

I went to the family room and saw them through the windows, sitting on lounge chairs on the far side of the pool. I could see the furry little black body stretched out beneathQuinn’s lounge chair; taking a cat nap while the girls huddled together above, talking.

Their closeness made me uneasy. Because I was excluded from it.

Now, I watch Quinn picking at her food. I’m not sure what happened to the woman I came home to after work. She had such a sparkle in her eyes.

Now she just seems anxious.

I wonder if she and her friends were talking about me again.

And why.

“Don’t they ever work?” I ask her lightly.

“Sometimes.” She smiles a little, but it’s forced. “Dani is a fashion stylist. But she works mostly on social media these days, so her hours are generally flexible. Unless she’s working with some rich, demanding client.” She glances at me, like maybe that was rude. But I’m not offended. “Nicole works at night. Waitressing.”

Of course, I already know what her friends do for a living, and a whole lot else about them. I had my team run a security check on each of them after the first time I found them in my house.

Quinn doesn’t know that, though.

“And when they’re not working, they just hang around?”

She meets my eyes. “I told you before, they look out for me.”

“Do they have some reason to be worried about you?”

“What makes you think they’re worried?”

“I saw you talking, out by the pool.”

She’s silent for a moment, still picking at her food. Maybe considering what it means that I was watching them. “Does it bother you that they came over? I don’t have to have them over here.”

“It’s fine. If you wanted to see them. I’m just not accustomed to reporting to a team about my personal life. I don’t see a reason for it.”

“We’re girlfriends,” she says, as if that explains it. “We share. They care about me.”

“Then maybe they should respect your privacy.”

“Uh…” She looks uncertain. “That’s not really a thing for us.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“I think you and I have very different ideas of what ‘friend’ means.” She sips her water, then frowns. “Come to think of it, do you have anyone you talk to about personal things?”

“No.”