Chapter 41
It was the ladybug bracelet that did me in.
For the next month, I moped around while doing the usual jobs for Attorney Lawless. I had enrolled in a new set of paralegal classes. Still went with Havisham and Salcedo to the Waffle House, but not as often as we used to because Salcedo was back in class and Havisham was serious about her cowboy.
Even better, he’d worked through college as a bartender, so a little refresher and a pouring license and he was ready and able to help Havisham around the bar, a place where I felt increasingly like a third wheel.
Then one day I checked the mail, and there was a smaller padded envelope. Inside was a bracelet with ladybugs, nothing too expensive but not too cheap, either. A note simply said,
This reminded me of you. M.
I clasped the bracelet on the same wrist that held my gift from Addie, then turned over the envelope to look for a return address. There was the address for Malone’s apartment, written in the same exacting handwriting I recognized from his walls.
San José.
He must’ve finished the Denver job, and he was back in the apartment I’d found the day I searched his name on Tracers while looking for his phone number.
Ladybugs might not have been a declaration of love, but going to an actual post office to mail something certainly was.
The next thing I knew, I was searching for plane tickets. One look at the price and I snapped the laptop shut. “I can’t swing it, BB.”
My kitten, who was looking more and more like a cat, sat beside me, tail wrapped around her front feet. She meowed.
“No. It’s too expensive.”
She blinked at me and adjusted her feet, rewound her tail, and then stared at me intently, her two eyes now even more distinctly different, one blue and the other yellow green. She said nothing.
She didn’t have to. Not when her eyes reminded me of Malone.
“You can’t use my own tricks against me.”
Still, she stared.
“I don’t like to fly.”
Too bad, her eyes seemed to say.
“What if he has another girlfriend already?”
Then he wouldn’t be sending you a bracelet, now would he?
“Unless he’s like all the other guys I’ve met.”
She tilted her head to one side as if to say, You know better than that.
“Fine. You’re right. That’s what credit cards are for, but I can’t resurrect my pettiness career to pay them off, so you need to think of a new side hustle. Think you could get internet famous?”
She yawned.
I started the process of picking out a flight but grimaced at the last-minute price. “How do I know if he’s even there, BB?”
She lightly bit me, her not-so-subtle request for pets. Absently, I petted her while trying to navigate my laptop with one hand. When I paused in my petting, she meowed.
“I am absolutely not texting him. I need to see his expression when I tell him. I need to see if he’s happy to see me or not.”
She looked over her shoulder, which I decided was her version of a shrug.
“Fine. You’re right. If he’s not home for some reason, then I’ll wait. Or maybe say screw it and go to wine country. I’ve always wanted to visit, and I’m sure as heck not getting to the South of France anytime soon.”
I booked the flight and a rental car for the next day and considered googling “Am I mentally unstable if I’m having entire conversations with my cat?” but decided I didn’t want to know the answer to that particular question.
Almost twenty-four hours later, I wearily sat in my rental car, secure in the knowledge that I still didn’t like flying.
Even worse, I did not feel sexy at all. I felt gross in the late-August heat.
I was tired from my early wakeup call and from spending so much time in either an airport or a plane.
I still had almost forty-five minutes to go.
You should’ve texted him.
Maybe. It was ridiculous. Who shows up on someone’s doorstep? Uninvited, at that?
In the outskirts of San José—yes, I did know the way, courtesy of GPS and the return address label—I had an idea. It was either a wonderful idea or a terrible one. Honestly, “wonderful or terrible” could’ve described the entire trip.
All I knew was that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t at least ask him the question, and that’s how I ended up at his front door on a Wednesday evening holding a pizza box.
You’re gonna feel like a prize idiot if he has someone over. Or if he isn’t there at all. Or—
“Stark!”
His precious, handsome face said it all: eyes twinkling, grin broadening. God, how I’d missed that face.
“Malone.”
“I see you have a pizza box.”
“I do. Inside there is, believe it or not, a pizza.”
“Interesting. Would you like to come in?”
“That I would.”
His apartment was stunning, mid-century modern, tidy but not fussily so. The Dodgers game was on the television in the living room, but he turned that off before joining me at his dining room table.
“What brings you all the way to California?” he asked carefully.
“I’ve given the past few weeks a great deal of thought,” I said, “and I was wondering if you would be interested in renegotiating our benefits package.”
He frowned. “Just benefits?”
“Well, I would like to add an exclusivity clause to it, which is sorta backward, and this analogy is going sideways. Dammit, Malone, I miss you.”
He crossed the distance between us in seconds, his arms around me and his lips on mine.
We kissed as if we hadn’t seen each other in a lifetime, and truly, that’s the way it felt.
He shoved the pizza box to the side and sat me on the table.
My whole body shuddered in pleasure at the memory of tables past.
Ken’s memory tried to intrude, but I shoved him away.
Malone had his hands on the hem of my shirt.
“Anchovies.”
“Stark,” he said in a warning voice.
“No, there’s something I need to say to you first.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously.
“Something I’ve never said first to anyone ever.”
His eyes widened ever so slightly, and while looking down to gather my courage, I caught a glimpse of his friendship bracelet. He still wore it, just as the ladybug bracelet had joined mine.
I looked up into his beautifully arresting eyes and said, “I have fallen in love with you.”
His whole body relaxed. It was as though I could see all his anxieties and apprehensions melt away. “Stella Stark, I fell in love with you the minute we bumped into each other in the breezeway.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say so!”
He shrugged. “You were looking for a man in finance.”
“No, I was looking for a forensic accountant who has a Star Trek tattoo. I just didn’t know that yet.”
“Hold on, let me see if I can find one.” He turned to go, and I grabbed his arm.
“Malone?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know how any of this will work, but I want to try. I want more than ‘pizza with benefits.’”
“And I want to give it to you,” he said. “Literally and figuratively.”
“I might be wearing a purple bra.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and gave me his sternest look, the eyebrow above his blue eye arched. “I must see it. Those are the rules.”
“That you made up!” I said even as I took off my shirt.
“Stark, I will build you an entire pizzeria if you come to bed with me now and don’t leave that bed until next week.”
“You drive a hard bargain, but sold.”
The next thing I knew, Malone had thrown me over his shoulder. Through the curtain of my hair and out the window of his kitchen, I saw . . . a big, beautiful blue moon.
Later, I lay in his arms, thoroughly kissed, and grinned at the wonder of the moon shining down on us while the King of My Heart took a well-deserved snooze.