“Matthew,” Nina whispered as blood stained her mouth. She coughed, and more came out.
“Oh, fuck,” I cried. “Oh, fuck, no, no, no, baby, no…”
Nina lunged forward, her body sinking into the too-large uniform of the Marine I’d somehow lost to the fire.
“Matthew,” she said as she wasted away. “I’m so sorry.”
And then her eyes sank back as her body dropped limp in my arms. I shook her, trying to revive her there in the hall as another round of bombs sounded in the square outside.
“Nina!” I shouted. “No, no, no, we’ve got to get you out of here! Nina, goddammit, stay with me! NINA!”
“Mattie! Mattie!”
“Huh? What?”
I shook awake with the rush of a dog shaking water off his coat and almost twice as wet, given the sheen of sweat that covered my body.
Frankie stood next to the bed clutching the edges of her bathrobe, tired eyes wide with concern.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is everything all right? Where’s Sofia?”
“Mattie, everything’s fine. Sofia’s sleeping. You were shouting in your sleep,” she said. “I didn’t know you were having nightmares again.”
I didn’t respond. The fact that I was having nightmares again was news to me too, but it wasn’t something I was ever going to complain about. Most of the guys I knew who came back from Iraq suffered a lot worse than a bad dream every now and then.
I blinked, trying to get the image of Nina, bruised and battered, out of my head.
Put it away. You’re done with her now.
Maybe if I said it to myself enough times, I’d actually start to believe it.
“Anyway,” Frankie said. “I actually woke up because your phone was ringing.”
“Oh,” I said, still bleary from sleep. “Okay, um, sorry. I’ll silence the ringer.”
When she didn’t leave right away, I frowned. “Something else, Frankie?”
She just watched me for a moment. “Must have been quite a dream for you to sleep right through your ringer.”
Again, I took a deep breath. “I’m fine, Frankie. Go back to sleep.”
She gave me another long look, then trudged out of the room to her own across the hall.
I flopped back onto the bed. Five missed calls. Jesus, no wonder it woke her up. Five missed calls. All of them from Derek.
When I called him back, he picked up immediately. “Jesus, where have you been?”
I frowned. “Do you have a death wish? Can you ever call me at a normal fuckin’ time, man?”
There was a long sigh. “You’re going to want to come down here.”
I rubbed a heavy palm over my face, ignoring the scratch of three days’ worth of stubble there. “Derek, come on. Whoever you got, it can wait until—”
“Zola,” he interrupted curtly. “It’s Nina Gardner.”
At the sound of the name, I sat straight up in bed. It echoed around my head—no, my soul—like a church bell, heavy and resonant.
“What?” I said, convinced I’d misheard him. “Did you just say you have Nina…”
“Gardner, yeah. She’s turned herself in.”
Holy shit.
I could imagine her clearly in the middle of the local precinct, sitting primly in the mint-colored interrogation room, hands folded on her lap over her designer dress. Wedding ring gleaming, hair glossy. Acting like the queen of her new, gritty domain.
“And, Zola, there’s more,” Derek said. “She asked to look at the videos you showed her. The ones of her running the properties with Vamos. I let her. I wanted to see what she’d do. She says she’s not actually in them.”
“I’m sure she did,” I said crabbily.
“But she says it’s someone she knows,” he continued. “Someone named Caitlyn Calvert.”
To be continued…in The Honest Affair
Coming Fall 2020
Thank you so much for reading The Perfect Woman. Nina and Matthew’s story concludes in the upcoming novel, The Honest Affair. You can preorder here: www.nicolefrenchromance.com/thehonestaffair
Acknowledgments
Ho-ly crap. This book is done. I don’t think I’m alone in saying this year has presented some of the most massive challenges to writing I have ever faced, so many of which have to do with the extraordinary times we are living in. As a result, I was forced to delay the book’s publication not once, but twice in order to offer my readers the best I possibly could. So, first and foremost, my thanks must go to them. Thank you for your patience and for sticking by this story while it came to be. You are beloved and cherished.
I also must thank a few other critical people without whose help this book would not exist:
My alpha readers, Danielle and Patricia, who were appropriately demanding, yet