Page 78 of Perfect Order

“A single word?” I question. Damn, now I wish I’d listened to Leanne instead of losing it last night.

“Yes.”

“Leanne,” I throw out.

Carys’s expression doesn’t change when she says, “No.”

I give it a moment’s thought before, “Crash.”

There’s a tiny flicker in her eyes, but again she says, “No. We could do this all day. If you don’t mind…”

But there’s something important in that information. Something she’s not telling me. Leaning forward, I breathe, “Q?za,”and wait for Carys’s reaction.

She inhales sharply. Without a word, she moves over to a cabinet that conceals a safe. After spinning a dial back and forth, she reaches inside for an envelope. Removing it, she closes and locks the safe before standing. Holding it out, she murmurs, “Please be careful on your flight. Tell Beckett to break a leg. We’ll be watching on TV, of course.”

I nod, slipping the contents inside my jacket. “It’s going to be perfect.”

She follows me to her door. “I certainly hope so.”

After I depart the law office of LLF LLC with a quick wave to their administrative assistant, Angie, I slip the envelope from my pocket. After I open it, I read a quick note scrawled in feminine handwriting. The words send a chill down my spine.

Kane,

If I don’t find out what is going on, no one I care for will ever be safe. That includes you.

If I’ve left, it’s because it’s no longer safe. You’re going to have to trust me. No, I take that back. This goes beyond trust. No matter what may happen, I’m trusting you beyond trust with everything: my heart, my mind, my very soul.

Never doubt my feelings for you. They’re real.

Love,

Crash

It’s the last two words that galvanize me into action. Pulling my phone from my pocket, I tell Caleb, “I’m coming in.”

“After I’m done pulling her fat out of the fryer, I’m going to enjoy slaughtering the both of you. Then I’m roasting you both on the grill I got last Father’s Day. I’ll enjoy every morsel of you I consume—you realize that, don’t you, McCullough?” Keene roars.

Caleb, much calmer, is working on his tablet to get Sam Akin an update about a potential threat to Erzulie. “Really, Kane, you should have simply come to us.”

“I was ordered—” I begin.

“Not to be dumb. I believe that’s part of our contract, since I wrote it,” Keene thunders.

My own temper begins to fire. “She wasn’t mine to protect, Keene.”

Shrewdly, Caleb notes, “Until she was. That’s when you should have come to us.”

I open my mouth to refute his observation, but I can’t. Leanne Miles is mine in every way, and I’m not stupid enough to refute it. “Do I remove myself from Beckett’s detail?” I offer as a solution.

Both of them eye me like I’ve just grown two heads. “Are you insane?” Caleb asks mildly before returning to his tablet.

“Well, there might be a conflict of interest,” I retort.

“For one night.” Keene yanks at his hair. “Okay, a few nights. See, this is why Carys should have convinced her to get her own detail when she was on tour last summer. But then…” He abruptly stops talking.

I know where his mind was going.But then she died.And who would have thought the death of her twin would have stirred up this hornets’ nest. “Then things quieted down. Likely because she wasn’t in the spotlight as much after her sister’s death.”

Keene jumps on the bone I throw him. “That. Exactly that. But if she suspects someone’s targeting her again, why not come to us?”