Betrayal of the Dove - By Capri Montgomery Page 0,63

you know I wouldn’t be in purgatory…or hell? You wouldn’t land there; trust me, baby.”

“Oh,” she nodded. “I will find you.” And she meant every word of that. “You keep your head up and don’t get distracted. Whoever this guy is, I don’t want you to be the third person on his kill belt. Please be safe?”

“I will,” he promised her. “I’ll come back to you—alive.”

“You better. I’m not sure my heart can take it if you don’t.”

“You love me; huh?” He grinned like the Cheshire cat.

“I do,” she admitted softly as she gazed into his eyes. “I don’t know how it happened; I don’t know when exactly, but somewhere between you walking into my store and right now, I fell harder than I’ve ever fallen in my life. I’m afraid to share my world with you; but I’m afraid not to share my world with you too.”

“I won’t hurt you,” he promised her. “Because somewhere between reading everything I could find out about you, and now, I’ve fallen in love with you too.”

She laughed. “Just how much information about me is floating around out there?”

“To be fair, I looked you up on-line after I met you. You were under the radar until you opened the store. Your opening was in the on-line newspapers and print. Your picture on-line sparked a few discussions.”

“Oh no,” she covered her eyes. “People on-line can be mean. I don’t think I want to know.”

“Trust me, there was nothing mean about the comments…scary maybe, but not mean.”

“Scary?”

“There are always a few yahoos who don’t know how to treat a woman and somehow think lewd remarks will land them in bed with said woman.”

“Oh,” she nodded. “So my store opening propelled me into the spotlight…” she started laughing hard. It wasn’t as if she could call the limited publicity her store received for opening on the Row instant fame. Every new shop that came to the elite, and oh so expensive, area managed to get free press because it was treated as big news for the area. She considered it free advertisement that let people know she was open for business. They had strict rules about signage for the shops. They couldn’t have banners that let people know it was a grand opening. There were no electronically lit signs allowed; since she lived above her store she was actually thankful for that. They also couldn’t have balloons to advertise sales, and the signs that were allowed in the windows had to be, “fitting to the Row, and pleasing to the eyes.” Loosely translated, the signs had to be about the size of a five by seven postcard with one color for the background and one color for the written text. Oh, and the font had to be either elegant like an Edwardian Script or simply basic like a Garamond Italic. She found that out the hard way when she put her first sign in the window that had a picture of one of her pieces. The city official stopped in and reminded her of the rules. She hadn’t known about that one, which he was sure she hadn’t because it had recently been adapted into the bylaws and they hadn’t gotten around to adding it into the buying contract yet—recently added was code for added three years ago and they were too lazy or too cheap to update their forms. He had been nice about informing her, so she couldn’t hate him for it, but had she known it was going to be that crazy she might have considered opening slightly off the Row. On the other end of things, she wasn’t sure if her store’s success would have been any greater just because she had personalized signs whenever there was a sale. There really wasn’t any real way of gauging the difference thanks to the stringent rules.

“Be careful while I’m gone, Alyssa. Leo’s great, just please let him keep you safe.”

“Shane, your friend deserves the vacation he came here for. Let him go and enjoy what Arizona has to offer. I’ll be fine.”

“He and I both agreed it would be best if you had protection.”

“Oh you did; did you? Do I have a say in this?”

“No.”

His one word reply made it clear he believed the conversation was over. He obviously thought she would accept his friend’s protection while he was away and there was no arguing about it. She shook her head at him. “You are worse than my brothers.” She didn’t think it would