Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,52

can tell him you did your best.”

“Leenie—”

“Shhh.” She reached out and brushed his hair back from his face, her fingers cool against his skin. “Let it go, Jack. That night? The sex was great, but …” She shook her head. “We’d drive each other nuts.”

It was then that the phone rang—Maggie, right on schedule.

Arlene let go of Jack’s hands, and pushed herself out of the chair, stepping over him to go into the kitchen. She picked up the phone and didn’t even bother to say hello. “You get your butt home, young lady. Right now.”

She didn’t wait to hear any excuses or counterarguments. She just hung up the phone with some force.

“You should definitely not be here when she gets back,” she called to Jack.

CHAPTER THREE

“Huh,” Robin said. “That was weird.”

As Jules Cassidy inched his way out of the busy airport parking lot, he glanced at his husband of less than a year, who was staring at his cell phone, his movie-star-perfect brow furrowed in puzzlement.

Robin’s hair was jarhead short. Apparently Joe Laughlin, the character—a closeted gay A-list actor—he played on his hit cable-TV series, Shadowland, was “starring” in a war movie as an enlisted Marine.

As usual, Robin had been nervous about Jules’s reaction to the crew cut, since he’d had it buzzed while Jules was away. But, also as usual, Jules loved it, just as he’d loved every haircut and style—long, short, in-between and a multitude of colors—that Robin had ever had.

His spouse was freakin’ gorgeous—and a full triple screaming-bejeezus hot. And it had been eons since Jules had kissed the man, let alone …

The car in front of him was stopped by the car in front of them, and on and on it went, out of Jules’s line of sight, and probably all of the way out of Logan and right to the front steps of their South End of Boston home. Still he tried to mind-control the car at the front of this mess, no matter that it was miles away, willing whoever-it-was to put the pedal to the metal.

“I just called Will’s, to see if Dolphina was there,” Robin was explaining, “and I’m pretty sure Maggie’s mother answered.”

“Arlene, right?” Jules said, as the solid, endless minute they’d been sitting in this exact spot turned to two and began working its way to three. “Does she go by Bristol, or—”

“She’s Schroeder, like Will,” Robin reported.

Jules nodded. That was what he’d thought. Ted Bristol, Maggie’s dad, not only lived across the country in Seattle, but, according to Will, was a textbook functioning alcoholic. Despite being capable of holding a job and paying his rent, his was not the household that Arlene had wanted Maggie to live in for a week, let alone a year.

Years plural, now—because Arlene was being sent back to Iraq for her third tour. Which made Jules’s impatience about the traffic seem petty and selfish, but for the love of God, was he the only one here who was in a hurry to get home?

“She didn’t sound happy,” Robin was telling Jules now—she being Arlene, whom he’d just spoken to on the phone. “And she didn’t wait to find out that I wasn’t Maggie before she young-ladied me and ordered my butt home.”

“You better call back.” Jules was in four-weeks-and-three-days of a hurry to get home, to be accurate. Which was four weeks longer than he’d expected to be gone when he’d packed his carry-on bag last month.

Yeah, kids. Last month.

His meeting in Washington had turned into a meeting in London, which had morphed into an FBI assignment in Afghanistan. Which was not the kind of place where Robin could join him for a long weekend.

Jules had more than half expected Robin to meet him here at the airport with a limousine and driver. If he had, this traffic wouldn’t matter. They’d be in the back, with music playing and the privacy shield up.

“I’m getting one of those circuit’s-busy signals,” Robin reported, and then smiled ruefully as he met Jules’s gaze, as he accurately read Jules’s mind. “Sorry about—”

“It’s all right.” Jules took his life partner’s hand, intertwined their fingers. Robin had broken the no-limo news to him mere seconds after they’d first embraced.

I couldn’t get a limo at such short notice, but Jesus, I’m glad you’re home.

Jules had laughed at the time, thinking that Robin was just being Robin—the king of immediate gratification. When it came to expressing the physical side of their love, here and now was Robin’s mission statement, and Jules often