40. Galahad
Galahad
Henri had cried when Grace gave him the egg.
Not just a tear or two. The man had held it against his chest with both hands, closed his eyes, and wept.
His lawyer had looked uncomfortable, but his assistant had tissues at the ready.
Grace cried too, because of course she did, and I stood there with my arm in a sling and a lump in my throat that was clearly the fault of my pain meds.
He’d insisted she accept the reward of five million dollars, the amount the Dubois family had set aside for whoever brought the egg home.
Grace had tried to refuse. Henri hadn’t let her.
Dmitry received his portion for the years he’d spent tracking it down.
The lawyer handled the paperwork, including a condition Arthur suggested: if Henri sold the egg within the next five years, Grace would receive half of the proceeds.
That was three hours ago. Now we were on the Gulfstream, climbing over Eastern Europe. I was in the aft cabin with Arthur and Merlin, the three of us around the worktable, reviewing footage Merlin had taken of our evening at Werner Kessler’s estate.
“Without drone coverage or helmet cams,” said Merlin, “we can’t do a proper After-Action Review.”
I rolled my left shoulder, but the seats at the worktable were smaller than the others in the jet, and there wasn’t enough room. The doctors had instructed me to keep the arm immobilized for a month or two, but honestly, the sling was already driving me nuts.
“AAR procedures,” Arthur said as he jotted notes onto his tablet. “Drones and helmet cams. I should call Tristan about the office renovations. We may need larger storage.”
Grace scrolled through the jet’s entertainment system from the couch in the mid-cabin. The lack of turbulence and avoiding the windows apparently made her a calmer passenger. “Anyone mind if I put on a movie?”
“Go for it,” I said.
“Are you okay with a romcom? It’s got a ninety-two percent on Rotten Tomatoes.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“It means people liked it, Garrett.” She flashed me a huge smile, then hit play. “I’m putting it on.”
Arthur grinned at his tablet, while Merlin pointed out an interesting tactic the Pendragon team had used at the front door after the flashbang went off.
It felt like any normal debrief. Except this wasn’t a normal debrief.
This was me talking with my old teammates, while my girlfriend picked a movie on Arthur’s father’s jet.
Girlfriend. When had that happened?
Somewhere between Michigan and a hospital in Prague, apparently.
“I digitally signed the final paperwork for the contract in Monaco this morning.” Merlin shut off the AAR video. “Your help with the handoff saved me a week, Arthur, so I’m available now.”
“Excellent.” Arthur settled back in his chair.
“Morganna sent me a list of employment expectations, including a salary about fifty percent higher than I’d budgeted and a tech stack that’ll require us to modify the server room config.
Tristan’s going to shoot me if I keep making changes to the office floor plan. ”
Merlin chuckled. “If you can handle the tech side, she’ll negotiate her salary. You know she’s worth whatever you can pay, right?”
“Oh, I know. But her White Spring contract doesn’t end for another four months, and I expect she’ll spend the entire time wearing me down.” Arthur raised an eyebrow at me. “Speaking of staffing, what are you thinking, Galahad? Has a week with us changed your mind?”
Grace glanced over from the couch. She might have had the movie playing, but she was still listening to us.
She knew what I was going to say. We’d talked about it several times during visiting hours, in my brief waking moments.
She’d asked an exhaustive list of questions.
I’d given her what answers I could, and somewhere in those conversations, I’d gone from thinking about staying to deciding.
“I’m in,” I said. “I called White Spring to let them know I was off the market.”
The corner of his mouth turned up, and he gave me one nod. “Good. We’ve got work to do when we get back.”
Grace laughed from the mid-cabin. She’d probably seen the movie a dozen times, but it didn’t spoil her enjoyment.
I touched my left shoulder, as though that might alleviate the discomfort.
“Worse than the last time?” asked Arthur.
Green eyes floated in my memory. The last time I’d been shot, Carissa had been with someone else. But those weren’t the green eyes I was seeing. They were Grace’s. The woman who’d been by my side through the whole thing. “I’m just older. Not healing as fast.”
“Go.” He gestured to the couch with his tablet pencil. “I need to contact my accountant about our sudden influx of personnel.”
I eased out of the seat, and Grace shifted to make room before I’d taken two steps. I lowered myself carefully, and she tucked herself against my right side, pulling my good arm around her shoulders like she was arranging furniture.
“Comfy?” she asked.
“Getting there.”
On the screen, a woman in a yellow dress was arguing with a man outside a bookshop. “She’s an author, and he’s her publisher. But secretly, he’s in love with her. They’ve been working together for?—”
Grace continued summarizing what I’d missed of the movie. Most of the details flew in one ear and out the other, but I wasn’t there for the movie.
Three days ago, I’d been on a surgical table while my heart tried to quit twice.
The doctors had told me I was lucky. If my heart had stopped, they would have tossed me into ICU after the surgery, and I would have been in Prague for weeks.
As it was, the doctors had been hesitant about letting me travel so soon after surgery.
Arthur managed everything for me and found someone willing to sign off on the exceptional circumstances.
Specifically, that the police wanted us out of town and we had a private jet that could easily reroute if needed.
Grace said she would have stayed with me in Prague, as long as it took. My woman would have put her life on hold for me.
All of this was supposed to be a favor. Babysit a woman and her treasure on a quick round-trip visit to London.
Instead, I’d wound up between Grace Laurent and Brandon Caulfield’s gun the same way I’d stepped between my parents when I was sixteen. Love sometimes led to stupid decisions, and that made it a liability. At least, the old me would have said that, but the old me was wrong.
Grace’s hand rested on my thigh, her thumb tracing a slow back-and-forth pattern she probably wasn’t aware of. On the screen, the bookshop guy was making an idiot of himself. I didn’t know the movie’s name, but I already knew how it ended.
“My parents won’t take more than half a million,” Grace said out of nowhere.
“You finally talked to them?”
She rolled her eyes in my direction, then let them settle back on the movie. “I skipped a few details that I thought would be better explained in person.”
“Like the French Resistance?”
“Exactly.” She blew out a sharp breath. “Dad’s going to lose it when I tell him his mother had a whole secret past, so I thought showing him the photos would help.”
“That leaves you with four-and-a-half million.”
“Four.” She squeezed my thigh. “Ten percent for you, remember?”
That had been little more than a joke, designed to make her stop insisting she couldn’t afford the pro bono job. “I’m okay. I’ve got a job now.”
“Maybe you could invest in some real estate? I was looking at listings in Brenton this morning.”
I’d noticed. When we were in the car to the airport, her phone had been open to a property site, and she’d angled it away from me when I’d asked what she was doing. She wasn’t as sneaky as she thought she was. “Yeah?”
“There are some houses for sale near Tristan’s neighborhood.”
“Is that so?”
“I saw a nice spot with three bedrooms, a big yard, and a cute little porch.”
“You’ve been busy.”
She tilted her head up. “I’m just looking.”
“You’re house shopping.”
“I’m browsing. There’s a difference.”
“There’s no difference.”
She pressed her face into my shoulder. Was she embarrassed? “There is, because I know you’ll say it’s too early to talk about it.”
I held her tighter. “I didn’t say it’s too early.”
She looked up at me, those bright green eyes full of… hope? “Seriously?”
My mother would have adored Grace. She would have loved the way Grace made you smile with a coffee, with her laugh, with her unfiltered commentary on the wonders around her.
She would have loved the way Grace saw the best in people, even in a man who didn’t believe there was anything he had to offer her.
I remembered my mom in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, after my father was gone for good.
She was making me blueberry pancakes, humming something, with flour on her shirt.
No bruises, no cuts, no sorrow. Just her and me in the couple of years we had together.
She would have been happy for me. The memories of her normally hurt, but right now, they didn’t.
I leaned back so my woman would see the seriousness in my eyes when I said: “I’ve been living out of go-bags for three years, Grace. A porch sounds great.”
“Really?”
“Really.” I kissed her temple and encouraged her to settle into the crook of my shoulder. “Living with the woman I love sounds like?—”
She shot out of her comfortable position, eyes wide and lips forming words that didn’t come.
“Grace Laurent, speechless?” I couldn’t help my smile. Yeah, she was rubbing off on me. I pulled her in close. “We’ll figure out the details when we get home.”
She snuggled in tight and curled her legs up on the couch. “I love you, too, Mr. Grumpy Face.”
My laugh came next, every bit as insistent as the smile had been.
We continued watching the silly movie until Grace’s breathing slowed and she fell asleep.
On the screen, the bookshop man and the yellow-dress woman were walking in the rain, arguing again.
How the hell had this become my life? I was watching a romcom on a private jet with a bullet wound in my shoulder, and a future I’d never planned nestled against me.
I closed my eyes and let myself drift off with her.
Because it was a damn good life.