Page 65 of The Bodyguard

Twelve

ANYHOO.

That’s how I wound up moving to Jack Stapleton’s parents’ five-hundred-acre cattle ranch—against all my better judgment.

Not that I had a choice.

But compared to living next door to Taylor, it suddenly didn’t seem so bad.

Compared to staying in our fourplex with its papier-mâché walls, eating cereal in my kitchen, and listening to Robby and The Worst Person Ever making waffles on the other side, compared to overhearing the two of them watching horror movies on her sofa, or ordering takeout, or going at it all night in her bedroom… compared to all that, moving in with The Destroyer was definitely an upgrade.

I called my landlord from the car after that fight with Taylor to cancel my lease.

I’d find a new place online and rent it sight unseen. I’d hire movers to pack up my entire apartment, dirty laundry and all, and haul it away.

I’d leave on assignment, and then I’d never set foot in that apartment again.

And I’d make sure my next rental had a working fireplace so I could unpack, find all the things Taylor had given me over the years—the Wonder Woman T-shirt, the journal with the YOU ARE MAGIC glitter cover, the picture book of the world’s cutest hedgehogs—and throw them in the fire one by one to burn them all to ashes.

A purge. A cleansing. A new frigging start.

THE MORNING JACKand I moved out to the Stapletons’ ranch, it was Jack who was in a bad mood.

Like he was the one who’d earned one.

Gone was that aggressively nonchalant vibe he wore most of the time like a cologne. His shoulders were tense as he drove, his jaw was tight, and his blood pressure—I swear, I could read it from across the car—was elevated.

He barely even spoke to me the entire drive.

It was the loudest quiet I’d ever heard.

It was only then, on the interstate, in Jack’s passenger seat, that I realized Taylor had done me a favor, in a way: She had turned going to Jack’s ranch into a kind of escape.

It wasn’t the escape I’d been wanting.

But it would do for now.

That realization brightened my mood quite a bit.

By the time we got to the Brazos bridge, and Jack got out to walk across, he looked almost nauseated. And by the time we pulled up to the house itself, the air around him was positively brittle with misery.

An escape for me. But maybe the opposite for him.

Though Kelly hadn’t been kidding about House Beautiful. It was a 1920’s Spanish-style hacienda with a red-tiled roof and pink bougainvillea blossoming everywhere. We parked on the gravel drive, and as I stepped out of the car a breeze brushed past us and fluttered the sundress around my bare knees.

It felt nice, actually.

I guess girlfriend clothes had their perks.

“It’s so idyllic,” I said, of the house.

Jack didn’t comment.

But that whole “think of it like a paid vacation” thing?

I could suddenly see it.

This wasn’t where Jack had grown up. He later told me that his grandparents lived here when he was little, but after they were gone, it became a weekend place. His parents had only moved out full time after they’d retired, and that’s when his mom started the garden, and his dad had converted half of the old barn into a woodworking shop.