Epilogue #2
The part of me that had spent a lot of fucking time working on my own mental health was a bit concerned that he was masking his grief and anger in work.
The other part of me, though, knew that Cam was seeing a therapist. And if she was okay with how he was coping, then that was really all that mattered.
As for Miranda, well, it happened a lot like I suggested to her it might.
She spent the first week or so mostly okay.
More worried about Cam than what had happened to her.
But as the second week rolled in, there started to be nightmares.
And I would catch her staring out the window, lost in her own thoughts, a freaked out look in her eyes.
But I got her talking about it. And she’d agreed that she would go see a professional if she felt like she was struggling.
Until then, we were just trying to enjoy life and each other.
“Hey, I might as well get something accomplished while we wait,” she insisted, but didn’t try to take her phone back.
In her defense, we’d been waiting at the independent airport for what felt like ages.
“Remind me again why we agreed to take Bellamy’s plane instead of just… going commercial?” she asked. “Or chartering my own private plane?” she said, sighing.
“You were there on the call,” I reminded her. “The man talks you in circles until you’re too dizzy to think straight.”
“I know,” she said, shaking her head. “I felt drunk after that call.”
When she finally decided she was comfortable enough to leave the country for a while, she’d really had her heart set on Bellamy’s villa.
I don’t know if it was because of the strange night of tension associated with the invitation, or because she’d been in the early stages of the relationship, envisioning us in that villa, or what, but no other one would do.
So when we’d called to ask him to use it, we somehow got roped into using his jet. And then his yacht when we wanted to go to Greece.
It was a whole thing.
One we were instantly regretting.
Since we were on hour four of waiting for the damn jet.
Which would put us in Italy, at earliest, at nine or ten at night. Hardly what we wanted. But we were stuck with this arrangement now.
“Oh, finally,” Miranda said as we heard a plane in the distance.
Not too much later, the jet had landed, and we were moving out on the tarmac toward it as the stairs lowered.
Then there was Bellamy.
And… Fenway?
“Sorry, my friends,” Bellamy said, whacking Fenway hard on the back of his shoulder. “I had to pick up Fenway here from the middle of another international incident,” he said, smirking. “He needs to head to Navesink Bank to see some other friends of ours.”
We all knew which friend that would be.
Quinton Baird.
And his poor team who must have been getting sick of cleaning up his messes.
“Is it my fault that wives of powerful men want to bed me?” Fenway asked, not looking the least bit contrite.
“Perhaps making sure the wives in question aren’t married to crime lords might be a wise choice moving forward,” Bellamy suggested.
“Or, you know, bedding unmarried women,” Miranda said, rolling her eyes.
“Miranda!” Fenway said, immediately brightening.
“I thought it was you. You exquisite creature,” he said, rushing forward like they were the oldest of friends.
“Look at you. Positively glowing. Even after your own incident. It’s so nice to see you outside of a work or benefit setting.
What are you doing with this schmuck?” he asked, throwing a smirk in my direction.
“You know what, never mind. He is the perfect catch. And I’m not just saying that because he has been competition for all the beautiful women for years now. We should do lunch.”
“No,” Bellamy said, rolling his eyes. Bellamy was, in his own way, pretty carefree and frivolous.
You know, save for the dark shit he did that no one knew about.
But when he was put next to Fenway Arlington, he was the serious one.
“We need to get you to Quin before someone puts a bullet in your skull.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Fenway said, but his tone had gone a shade darker.
“No one would want to mess up this perfect face. Alas, he’s right,” he said, giving Miranda a kiss on the cheek.
“I hear you two are taking a tour of Italy and Greece. If you happen to want to use any of my homes in Europe, I am just a call away.”
With that, he was walking toward the car that had pulled up for them, right on time.
“Sorry about the delay. It really was life or death,” Bellamy said, exhaling hard.
It wouldn’t have been clear to Miranda, but since I knew Bellamy from our black ops days, I got the look in his eye then.
The one that said he hadn’t just grabbed Fenway off of a tarmac in some foreign country, that he’d needed to do some extraction work to get him out.
“Unfortunately, the pilot is going to need to fuel up and change out at the next airport, but it should only tack on another hour or so to your flight. I put you up at a hotel in Italy for tonight. That way you can see the villa in the morning.”
He’d thought of everything.
And as we enjoyed his hospitality that night before heading to the villa the next morning, all the inconvenience had long since been forgiven.
“I think we need a villa,” Miranda declared on our second day there, standing on the balcony that overlooked the olive orchard behind Bellamy’s house while I was still sprawled in bed, enjoying the view of her in nothing but my shirt.
We.
She thought we needed a villa.
I liked the fact that, more and more often, she was using that word when she spoke of the future.
What countries we were going to visit.
Which benefits we were going to go to.
Sure, all of our time together implied that she was serious about us as a couple, but it was something else to hear her talk about it.
It was easy to just… be with someone.
It was harder to envision a future with them.
Or, at least, that was what I thought.
The future had always been somewhat… blurry before. I figured there would be constants. Like work, like my house, like travel, and my friends.
But I couldn’t see anything else clearly.
Until Miranda.
Now, when I looked toward the future, all I saw was her.
Standing in my kitchen making coffee, in her penthouse in her work clothes that I would strip off of her, lounging in the hammock in my backyard, in another sexy gown at a benefit.
And, more than that, I saw myself right there in every one of those situations.
Because I finally found her.
The person who looked at me like Riya and Sawyer looked at each other. And like Kenzi and Tig did. And Clarke and Barrett.
The person I looked at the same way.
With pure, undiluted love and admiration.
Because there was no way around it.
I fucking adored her.
I loved her in a way I hadn’t been sure I was capable of.
“Brock?”
“Hm?” I asked, looking up, realizing I’d been lost in my own thoughts.
“What do you think?”
“About?”
“Getting a villa.”
“We would have close proximity to a lot of Italian food,” I said, nodding.
“I mean, the restaurants probably aren’t owned by the mob or anything,” she said with a smirk as she walked back toward the bed. “But I’m sure we could find a place we like.”
“The coffee, though,” I said, shaking my head.
“I mean, obviously, we will have to import from Navesink Bank,” she said, and I had to have a laugh at that. Potentially living part-time in a country known for its coffee, and importing some in from some little town in New Jersey.
“Obviously,” I agreed. “So what happens if you love Greece and the Maldives and South America as much as you love it here?”
“Well, I guess we start collecting real estate like Bellamy and Fenway,” she said. “Maybe we can even cause an international scandal all our own someday.”
“Well, we would know who to call to fix it.”
“Cam,” she said with a big smile.
“You know what? You’re probably right,” I agreed, folding up, grabbing her, and pulling her back into the bed with me.
Miranda - 8 months
“Was that the Chine—“ I started as I walked toward the living room in the penthouse apartment we still split some of our time in, though we did tend to spend more time in Navesink Bank these days.
In Brock’s small, but perfect, house. In close proximity to amazing coffee. And his friends that had become something like an extended family to both of us.
“Actually…”
“Hey! Look who’s not crazy anymore!” a female voice said as my gaze landed on Alice standing just inside the door to the hallway. “I mean, well, for the moment,” she said, giving me a familiar self-deprecating smile.
She looked good, too.
A little less thin, so she didn’t seem so breakable.
“Alice!” I said, beaming at her.
I’d lost hope in seeing her again several months ago. I figured, if I was going to see her, it would have been relatively soon after I’d been released.
“You know, you could have told me that you weren’t, you know,” she said, miming slicing her throat. Appropriate, Alice was not. But I found I liked that she just said whatever was rolling around in her head.
“Would you have believed me?” I shot back.
“I mean, probably not. I once spent an entire evening talking to a chick who swore she was Johnny Cash. So, yeah, you know, sometimes you take what people say with a grain of salt. So… you were never crazy! Good for you.”
“Brock,” I said, gesturing toward him. “This is Alice. Alice, Brock. She made my stay at the psych ward tolerable. Alice, this is my former private investigator turned, ah, boyfriend,” I said, wincing a little at that word. It just sounded so wrong for what he meant to me.
“As a psych ward alum, I have to thank you for being that old timer who helped out the new kid. I had someone do that for me once upon a time too. It meant a lot,” Brock said.