heard from her in weeks.
Davis was recuperating at one of his family’s properties while acting as our own personal banker. With all the eyes on Charlie’s business, it wasn’t safe to move any money we didn’t have to. He’d recovered enough to be released from the hospital and he and Ridge had spent two days together before Miranda had gotten nervous and told us we needed to hit the road immediately. Apparently, it had been quite the reunion. Ridge had a collection of love bites, fingertip bruises, and scratches that had impressed even Breck and Danny.
Both Davis and Wesley would meet us in Wisconsin.
I was on the fence about that decision. I couldn’t see that we needed him, and, as a rule, I didn’t trust billionaires. That was just good sense. Billionaires were not like normal people. They weren’t even like millionaires. With steady work and mediocre success at investing, a plumber could become a millionaire. To become a billionaire required a ruthlessness seldom found in the population as a whole and a willingness to exploit every labor and tax loophole on the books.
Their thought processes were so alien, it almost wasn’t any fun scamming them. You couldn’t hurt them financially, there was no way to take enough money from them for them to even notice. Case in point, Davis Ethan. He’d turned his back on the family and the family business, plotted against them, and gotten shot by his own mother, all without any apparent consequences. At least not any financial consequences.
The worst you could do to a billionaire was hurt their pride, but woe betide the fellow that did. They had the deepest of pockets and armies of lawyers to deploy.
Maybe Davis was different because he had worked for a living. God only knew why he’d chosen to go into law enforcement, of all things. Then again, he’d resigned his position with Diplomatic Security to throw his lot in with Ridge. I wondered how long that would last. Going by the gorgeous watch on his wrist, Ridge seemed to think it would be forever. Far be it from me to burst his bubble, but in my experience, happily ever after only happened in fairy tales.
Another thing about billionaires, they get bored more easily than normal folk. When you don’t need to work to survive, you have too much free time and no direction. Then again, the Pfeiffer boys were rather entertaining, so who knew. Who was I to scoff at true love?
“Did someone say food stop?” Breck asked from the back.
“Yes,” I said and hit the turn signal.
Leo stepped from the passenger’s side, stretched, and took a deep, appreciative breath.
The cool night air did smell lovely, especially compared to the air inside the SUV. After spending most of the last decade in large coastal cities, I’d forgotten the scent of a forest at night. Eric and I had spent a lot of time in the woods as children, and then again as teenagers looking for privacy.
I derailed that painful train of thought immediately. We were hundreds of miles away from my hometown and already this trip was killing me. Memories I’d been suppressing for years were bubbling to the forefront of my brain and I hated it.
Outside of the Denny’s and gas station, there wasn’t much around us in the way of civilization. A two-lane road peeled off east and west of the highway, disappearing around the curve of the hills. A tractor-trailer zoomed by, shaking the SUV and making our loose clothing flap in the wind. From somewhere behind me I heard Breck and Ridge’s voices raised in what sounded like a time-worn argument, the kind that became more habit than actual disagreement.
“I was not feeling up Debbie Schnetzer,” Breck was insisting. “I was getting a bug out from her shirt!”
“I know what I saw,” Ridge said. “Hand down the shirt. Groping. I was there.”
“Just because you saw something doesn’t mean it happened,” Breck retorted.
I was so tired that almost made sense.
“Carson?” Leo asked.
I pulled my attention back to the here and now. “Yeah?”
“Food?” he asked gently.
Oh yeah. Right. We were on my job this time. I was in charge. There was a buzzing in my veins as if I were still sitting in the moving car and the taste of stale coffee in my mouth. Sitting down in a stationary seat for half an hour sounded good. Anything to postpone the inevitable.
2 Carson
There was always something particularly jarring about stumbling into fluorescent lighting in the middle