dishes,” I told her after a quiet dinner where we didn’t talk much.
From the kitchen, I heard Kat pad her way into the room where she’d set up her gaming and streaming equipment. As I cleaned up, my mind tried to go over the things I needed to work on that evening for the proposal and game design document.
Once back at my desk in the den, I sifted through the pile of mail I hadn’t looked at since Friday. In it, I found yet another legal letter addressed to Kat, marked urgent in big red letters on the front of the envelope.
Hmm. She’d mentioned having shredded the others unread, willfully keeping herself in ignorance. Was she truly in trouble somehow? It definitely involved her brother but why were they after her? And did this have anything to do with Derek’s motivation to get Kat back to Canada? My fingers hesitated on the seam of the letter, tempted to open it myself and have a look.
My conscience got the better of me, though. Even if we were truly married in every sense, I had no right to confiscate her mail and read it if my name wasn’t also on the envelope. And it wasn’t.
The best I could do was to hand it to her in person and ask her directly about it. She owed me an honest answer, after all, since she’d blabbed my not-so-secret to her circle of friends. I wasn’t as upset now that a few hours had passed but at least I could use it as leverage to get some answers out of her about this.
I knocked on the door and she called for me to come in immediately. She turned from her computer monitor and smiled. “Hey.”
She was in full gamer girl mode, despite the fact that she wasn’t streaming on her channel. Her brand new and very impressive Sennheiser headset was perched on her head, mouthpiece poised just over her plump lips. Her gleaming hair was pulled back into a serviceable braid. And she had on a pair of tiny Daisy Dukes that exposed miles of pale, curvy leg for my eyes to feast on.
She was not making this sexual frustration situation any easier, god damn it. And now I suddenly regretted coming in here.
“Are you in the middle of something?” I glanced at the screen, eyebrows shooting up. She was logged into Dragon Epoch. From the background, I could tell that she was using the live version and not the unpublished test material for the expansion. Besides using the testing server from home was difficult and required permission—because of possible security leaks. She actually played this game for fun?
“What’s up?” she said, nudging back one of her earphones from her delicate ear. “No, no I’m asking the hubby what’s up, not you, dork,” she spoke again into the mouthpiece. “Hold on a sec. I’m afk. Besides, the other two aren’t even logged in yet so hold your horses.” She turned back to her PC and clicked the mute button.
I shook my head, eyes glued to the monitor. “How are you not sick as shit of this game since you work on it all day?”
She shrugged, her smile widening. “My regular group—the one I started playing with ages ago back during the open beta—is logging on tonight for a rare game night. I wouldn’t miss it. You wanna join us? Do you have a character on the Omni server in the upper level range?”
“I have no idea. I, uh, need to talk to you about your mail, if you have a minute.”
She gave me a questioning glance, then pulled off her headset and swiveled on her chair to face me. I grabbed a nearby stool to sit at her level. “Yeah, I’ve got about ten minutes before the other two long in.”
I handed her the envelope. “You got another letter from the lawyer and I really think you should open it.”
She frowned, then darted a look up at me. The question unspoken. What business was it of mine?
“Please, if you would? Put my mind at ease. You said you had no idea if you were in trouble. I’d like to know. I’d like to help.”
Her big blue eyes fixed on me for a long moment, unreadable, before she blinked and took the letter from me with a slight shrug. Sliding a finger under the lip of the seal on the envelope, she tore it open. The thick linen paper spilled out onto her lap.