Chapter 16 Giovanni
GIOVANNI
I watch Meggie on the cabin’s CCTV camera, heading back inside with Amber. She’s smiling to hide what’s going on behind her eyes, but I sense the fear in the tightness around her mouth, the angle of her neck as she ushers Amber through to the kitchen, while her eyes are darting around the cabin.
My instinct is to reach out and touch her lips, to smooth her hair away from her face, and pull her against my chest. But if I touch the monitor, it will be cold and solid. Not warm and soft like Meggie.
I sit back in my seat in my office and down my shot of brandy. It doesn’t touch the sides.
I was so close. So close to ending this, to giving them their lives back. My girls.
Meggie and Amber.
It doesn’t sit right with me. The plan was watertight.
He was caught on CCTV entering the airport terminal.
He approached the check-in desks, mingled with a crowd of passengers, three generations of the same family with mountains of luggage and odd-shaped parcels wrapped in brown paper, and then disappeared.
We proceeded with the plan—I hadn’t listened to Meggie’s panicked sobs over the radio to then abandon it at the first hurdle.
The airport-wide announcement was made: Will Megan Walsh please proceed to security on the lower level of the main terminal.
Demi had already boarded the private jet.
I had eyes everywhere. But he was a no-show.
He knew.
I turn back to the video footage from the cabin in Stowe and smile.
Amber is helping Meggie make cakes. She’s standing on a low plastic booster-step, stirring a bowl filled with melted chocolate, and I can smell the sweetness from here.
Meggie lines a tray with greaseproof paper, then she dips a finger into the bowl to test it and licks chocolate from her finger.
As she does so, she glances up at the camera and freezes with her finger between her lips suggestively.
My cock instinctively swells inside my pants, and I rub it to ease the ache that I know isn’t going away any time soon.
As if she knows that I’m watching, Meggie aims a quick glance at the top of Amber’s head, slides her finger out of her mouth, and licks her lips, staring directly at the camera the entire time.
I groan out loud. She has no idea what she does to me.
Meggie raises her finger in front of her face and licks it slowly, dragging her tongue up to her fingertip, then curling it around the side, until she has licked it clean.
I’m drooling. Pre-cum oozes from my cock. How, in the history of time, has melting chocolate ever been this fucking sexy?
Then Amber says something to her sister, and Meggie helps her tip the chocolate out of the bowl, smoothing it across the tray with a spatula.
I can imagine the heat in Meggie’s cheeks at almost getting caught out by her kid sister, and I’m overwhelmed by the bone-shaking desire I feel for this woman.
I watch as they mix up more frosting and add food coloring, which makes it look a slightly darker shade of grey on my screen. Meggie gives her sister a wooden spoon, and Amber adds random dollops of the frosting to the tray, licking the spoon when she isn’t being watched.
Then, tongue poking out of the side of her mouth in concentration, Meggie draws a metal skewer through the lighter frosting, creating heart shapes as if by magic. She says something to Amber as she opens a small tub and hands it over.
“This is the fun part,” I imagine her saying, as Amber scatters tiny sprinkles over the tray.
Meggie stands back and examines their creation. Then, she peers up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling and smiles.
My heart fills with love for them. She made this for me. She knew all along that I was watching her, and she wanted to give me a sign that she’s thinking of me too.
Can she forgive me for not telling her about Lucia?
I have to hope that she can.
Don Calderone asked me if I could imagine life without her, and the answer will always be no.
I feel her absence in New York as if the ground has opened up and swallowed her whole.
I want her back. I want her beside me, and I’ll go anywhere in the world to make that happen, because wherever Meggie is, that’s where I belong.
With one last glance at the screen, I slide my chair away from my desk and stand up.
I have a favor to call in, and a fish to hook.
Nikki blinks and peers behind me when she opens the door of her tiny, rented apartment in LA. She looks different without the makeup and the waitress outfit. Fresh. Natural. The kind of woman Meggie would choose as a best friend.
“Can I come in?”
She blinks hard several times, open-mouthed. “You want to come in?” She tries to look around me again as if Meggie might suddenly jump out and surprise her. “Where’s Meg?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
She stands aside, still clinging to the edge of the door as if it’s the only thing keeping her upright.
The apartment is tiny, the entire floor space barely larger than the kennel in which we found Bella at the rescue center. It looks as if a tornado just tore straight through the middle, spewing clothes, takeout cartons, used coffee cups, and scripts in its wake.
“Yeah, sorry about the mess,” she says, the familiar British accent driving home my longing for Meggie. “I’ve not had a chance to tidy up.”
She picks up a T-shirt and hairclip from the floor, realizes that it’s not going to make a dent in the mess, and puts them back down again on the arm of the grubby gray sofa, the only seating in the place.
“So…” She smiles and shrugs and rubs her arms like this is the most awkward situation she has ever found herself in, when she literally pretends to be other people for a living. “What have you done with my best friend?”
“She’s … safe.” When she furrows her brow, I quickly add, “Don’t worry, she isn’t alone. She and Amber have a team of bodyguards with them.”
She scrunches up her nose and perches on the sofa arm. “Does this have anything to do with the fucking asshole who killed their mom?”
I smile. ‘Fucking asshole’ is a politer term than the guy deserves.
“He followed them to New York. They were not safe there, so they’ve relocated to my mountain cabin.”
Her eyes meet mine. “Why didn’t you just get your security team to shoot the bastard? Or have him arrested? I don’t understand how he keeps getting away with actual murder.”
If only it were that simple.
“I tried. But we have to catch him first.”
She stands back up. “Look, it’s great that she’s in a log cabin in Vermont, but what happens if he follows her there too? Couldn’t you … I don’t know … pull some strings and get her a new identity? You can pull strings, right?”
I can tell by the way she narrows her eyes at me like she’s trying to hear the parts of the story I deliberately omitted, that she understands more about me in five minutes than Meggie has figured out in the time we’ve spent together.
“A new identity won’t make him go away.”
“No, but it will make it harder for him to find them.”
“I’m making it harder for him to find them.”
She sucks in a deep breath, expanding her diaphragm and releasing it slowly. “They’ve been through a lot already. I don’t know how much Meggie has told you, but no seventeen-year-old should have to plan for the event of their mom’s murder.”
My jaw clenches the way it always does whenever I picture young Meggie gathering a bunch of baby stuff, settling her baby sister into her stroller, and walking away from the only life they knew.
I think I’ve learned enough about Meggie to know that she would’ve kept right on smiling and singing lullabies so that Amber didn’t get scared.
“I promised to keep them safe, and I’m a man of my word.”
She slants her eyes slyly. “Keep them safe? Is that it?”
I smile. “I asked Meggie to marry me.”
Her eyes grow huge, and she lets out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a giggle. “You fucking what! She never told me this. Wait till I speak to her, boy is she going to get it. I’m her bestie. She’s supposed to tell me everything.”
Just like Meggie, she rambles when caught off-guard.
“Hang on.” She purses her lips, pensive. “She accepted, right?”
“Long story. She hasn’t said yes … yet.”
“Okay, so what are you doing here in LA?” She faces me squarely, hands on hips. “Why aren’t you in Vermont with them?”
“There’s something I need to do first.”
“Something that’s more important than marrying my best friend?”
Meggie needs people like Nikki in her life, people to look out for her, and I know that I made the right decision by coming to LA.
“Believe me, nothing is more important to me than marrying your best friend. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. But I also want to make sure that when I catch up with the man who murdered her mom, he will not live to tell the tale.”
Her expression is unfathomable, wistful almost. She nods. “That’s what I like to hear. I hope you both remember who convinced her to go on that breakfast date. I want to be maid of honor at the wedding, and godmother to your first child. Godmother to all your children.”
“I will bear that in mind. I have a proposition for you.”
“Wait.” She blinks three times, slowly. “You can’t propose to two women at the same time you know.”
Ouch. That hurts.
But I remind myself that it’s a chance remark.
A joke. If Meggie had told her about Lucia, she’d have slammed the door in my face when I arrived and then opened it again to yell at me.
Loudly. Using every swear word she knows.
She’d have probably thrown something very hard and very heavy at my head too.
“I’m not proposing marriage. How would you feel about an impromptu vacation in Vermont?”
Pause. “Me?” She even peers behind her as if I might be speaking to someone else, someone she didn’t know was in the room. “When? I mean, you want me to travel to Vermont now?”
“Yes. As soon as you can get away. Today preferably.”