on the couch last night.
Before I could consider that I’d somehow drunkenly stumbled upstairs, the door opened, and Wren stood there looking very much alive if not all that well. He sported bruises that looked a few days old, and when he stepped inside, it wasn’t with his usual swagger. He limped across the room, and I forgot all about my hangover as I rushed to meet him.
“Wren!” I threw my arms around his neck, and he grunted. I quickly stepped back and looked him over, wondering where he was hurt.
“I’m okay,” he said through clenched teeth.
“You don’t look okay to me! What did he do to you?”
“He taught me a lesson about loyalty.”
“Why?” Wren was the most loyal person I knew. Incidentally, it’s why I wanted to hate him. He was loyal to a man who didn’t deserve it.
“Because he ordered me to bring you to him, and I told him he might as well kill me.”
“And he just let you go?”
He laughed then, but there was no humor in it. “Fuck no. His son helped me escape.” Wren’s expression quickly turned troubled. “And Fox will make him pay for it.”
“Fox has a son?”
He nodded. “And a daughter. You’d like them. They’re little shits like you.”
His eyes twinkled when I glowered at him. “Maybe he should have done us both a favor and left you to die.”
Wren’s eyebrows nearly kissed his hairline. “What the fuck is your problem?”
For a moment, I considered lying and walking away, but I knew he would never allow me to do either. “You left me.”
“To save you,” he countered.
“And if Fox had sent someone after me?” I shot back. I remembered how easily he found me and getting cornered in that alley. If it hadn’t been for Miles and Leo…
“He doesn’t know where you are, Lou.”
“And how do you know you didn’t lead him here?”
“I was gone long before Fox got wind I was, but I still waited a couple of days before coming back to make sure I wasn’t followed.”
“But if you hadn’t left in the first place—”
“What did you expect me to do? Hide here with you forever?”
Yes. “We could go to the police.”
His hand shot out, and he yanked me into him. “We won’t be talking to the cops because I don’t trust them,” he dictated bitingly. “Any of them would sell you out.” His forehead came to rest on mine, and I could feel him soften as his hand found my hip. “I won’t take chances with you. That detective you saw killed was the only one who would have helped us.”
“So what do we do?”
Gripping my nape with his other hand, he kissed me softly. “We run.”
“Okay,” I agreed all too easily. I should have been more hesitant about giving up the life I had in exchange for another, but it was as Wren said—I’d yet to find a life that I hadn’t wanted to run away from. “But before we go, can we do one thing first?”
“This is stupid,” Wren grumbled for the third time. We’d just found a park after searching for ten minutes and were making our way down the crowded sidewalk. In the distance, I could hear what sounded like drums followed by trumpets and other various instruments and figured the local school band had come to play.
“Will you stop worrying?” I said with a grin. “You look dashing and handsome, husband.”
Wren wore a black suit and a tie that he was able to rent at the last minute, but he refused to wear dress shoes, so he paired the suit with high-top sneakers. He did let me style his hair although he bitched the entire time. And neither of us had called attention to the fact that he’d gotten hard while I ran my fingers through his hair. I’d taken my time making sure every single strand was perfectly coiffed.
I chose to wear my hair down with loose curls at the end, courtesy of Granny Harlan’s curling iron. The long, fitted black dress I wore had spaghetti straps and a slit on the right side that reached my hip and showed off my garter and killer black pumps. Thanks to my bargain shopping skills, the entire ensemble had cost Wren less than fifty bucks, and when I came downstairs where he had been impatiently pacing, I could tell by his passionate reaction that he would have paid fifty thousand. It was a good thing I hadn’t chosen to wear panties.
“Who the hell are we