Page 49 of Protecting What's Mine

“Another girls’ night?” Ellen was so excited that Mack felt an odd mixture of flattered, happy, and inexplicably sad for them both.

Mack shrugged. “Yeah. Sure.”

Ellen bit her lip. “Do you really think I can do this?”

“Of course you can. Look at everything else you already do. You’re raising kids, running a family, working, dealing with a husband and a father-in-law. You’re already doing the hard stuff. This is easier.”

Ellen was nodding. “I never really thought about it like that.”

“You’re just replacing bad coping habits with good ones.”

“Ooh! We can be accountability partners,” Ellen squealed, clapping her hands. “What do you want to work on?”

“Oh. Uh. Meditation? I guess.” Mack congratulated herself on not saying, “Talking myself out of sleeping with Linc.”

“That sounds amazing. Meditation is so, like, enlightened,” Ellen said to the interior of her purse. Her hands and face disappeared.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Aha!” She triumphantly produced a notebook and a pencil decorated with teeth marks. “Okay. We’re writing these down. Oprah says if you’re going to set goals, they have to be measurable and specific.”

Well, if Oprah said so…

Ellen neatly scratched out her goals on the pad and pushed it across the table to Mack.

1. Swim or walk five days a week.

2. Have a salad for lunch every day.

3. Quit pork rinds.

“This doesn’t say anything about smoking,” Mack pointed out.

“That’s the pork rinds. In case Barry or the kids find the list. I fib to them too.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now add yours,” Ellen ordered. “We’ll make it official. Can I have one last cigar—”

“No,” Mack said firmly as she wrote:Meditate 10 minutes a day.

“Party pooper.”

Mack snickered and picked up a buffalo wing. “To accountability,” she said.

Ellen helped herself to another wing and tapped it to Mack’s. “To the sexy firefighter who’s headed this way.”

17

Linc had stopped in for a beer and some wings and instead found his sexy, reticent neighbor enjoying dinner with one of his old girlfriends.

“Ladies,” he said, strolling across the patio. “A little birdie bartender told me you were out here.”

It was getting closer to dusk. A server bustled out behind him to turn on the patio heaters and plug in the overhead string lights.

“We were just talking about you.” Ellen beamed up at him. “Pull up a chair, chief.”

He bent and gave her a peck on the cheek, then did as he was told. “All good, I hope. How are Barry and the kids?”