Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 109608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 548(@200wpm)___ 438(@250wpm)___ 365(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 548(@200wpm)___ 438(@250wpm)___ 365(@300wpm)
Nora tipped her head to the side. “Nothing I’ve not said before.”
“Could it have gotten through?”
At that question, she lifted a shoulder. “No idea. Possibly. But if I had to guess, how honest his son was with him was probably what started to make him think.”
Jamie could see that.
“Now, dearest, hit me with it. What’s the bad news?” she asked.
Reluctantly, he told her why Chet was in town, and that Dru had seen him outside the brownstone.
“I worked with Elsa to kill the story,” he finished. “But that doesn’t mean he won’t shop it around.”
“So that was who Dru was looking at,” she said.
“You saw him too?”
“No. But she mentioned someone watching us, and she seemed…not quite right about it. I put it down to the media attention our group gets. She never seems comfortable with that.”
“Well, she recognized him.”
He hated to see it, but there was no beam from her eyes now.
“This is unsettling, Jamie.”
She was very right.
“She has a man on her at all times, as do you,” Jamie reminded her. “They’ve been informed of this latest. Elsa is going to keep her ear to the ground in case Chet, Pop or Paloma looks for some other place who will air his lies. I can’t imagine she’d be able to catch the story anywhere he shopped it so we could kill it. But Kateri also knows this is a possibility, she has even more connections, so maybe, between the two of them, we can cut him off at the knees.”
“So, hopefully, we’ve sorted the two major issues. Charles and his cronies can have some fun with AJ. And in a few months, this will all be over.”
“Hopefully.”
“And then, Jamie,”—she pressed deeper into him, her gaze serious—“it’ll be time to deal with your real father.”
Yes.
It would.
As she always did when this came up, she made her point, then sensed his emotion around it, so she changed the subject immediately.
“In the meantime, Nico is spending the weekend with us, I have a fabulous adoption party to plan, and Allegra tells me my blood pressure is perfect.”
“Excellent news, baby,” he murmured.
“Oh, and I’ll need a new dress for the party, so will Dru, and this means shopping.”
She was beaming again, and he knew she loved shopping, but she’d also told him about her conversation with his daughter about designers and style, so he knew that beam was about a lot more than just shopping. Thus, Jamie decided talking was done, making out was in order, so with her between his legs, his ass on her desk, that was what they did.
He let her go to change out of his suit so they could relax and have dinner. Then read for a while, make love and go to sleep.
It wouldn’t be until the next afternoon, when Charles called him, that Jamie would learn that Roland had completely stepped away from the Oakbilly Gulch deal.
So either Nora or Nico got to him.
That was good to know.
One down.
Two to go.
CHAPTER 18
TOM FORD
Jamie
Saturday afternoon, Jamie was in the hearth room, while Mika, Cadence, Tom, Dru, Allegra, Valentina and Nico (Archie was shooting a game, Darryn was on call) were sitting around the dining table, still chatting, and giving it time before they had dessert after consuming Alyona’s gut-busting lunch.
He left them after he got a call from Judge, everyone yelled out hello (and demanded more baby pictures), and he moved to the hearth room for more privacy.
Nora had exquisite taste, every inch of her apartment was stunning, which made him look forward to what she and his daughter were going to do to the brownstone, but this was his favorite room in the house. It was the only one that had any masculinity to it, if you counted black velvet couches with crystal and gold lighting features as masculine.
But he liked the one dark feature wall, and the couches in there were insanely comfortable.
He settled in one and asked his son, “Everything going well?”
“JT is growing like a weed, mostly out,” Judge told him. “He’s getting a buddha belly. It’s cute as fuck.”
Jamie chuckled even as he reminded himself to look for real estate in Prescott. The lives they lived and where they lived them, at that juncture, it was out of his control how much he’d miss of his grandson in this time.
But Jamie was determined not to let that go on too long.
“Chloe’s good,” Judge continued. “She’s getting her energy back, even though we’ve found that good-night’s-sleep-is-a-memory thing for parents is very real, and it’s tougher for her because she’s breastfeeding.”
“You’re with her on that, though. Right?” Jamie prompted.
He heard the smile in his son’s voice, a reaction to Jamie’s quiet order, when Judge replied, “Yeah, Dad. She tells me I don’t have to get up and hang with them. I tell her, if she’d just pump so I could feed him and she could sleep, she wouldn’t have to get up. But she feels like hogging all that action, and when Chloe is really into something, I’ve learned the best thing to do is just let her do it.”