A Little Something Extra

“Well, of course you did.” Samantha shifted in her seat, smiling benignly. “I opened it.”

“Did you also put the stamp on it? Because the print was halfway under the stamp.”

The agent jerked to his feet and ran for the door, holding his briefcase in front of him like a battering ram. Dimitri shot out his arm and clotheslined the guy. A second later, the man lay on the floor, holding his throat and gasping for air.

“My fiancée told you to stay,” Dimitri said as he flipped the man onto his front. “She gets upset when people don’t do as she says. And when she gets upset, it upsets me.” He secured the man’s hands behind his back with zip ties.

“Thanks, Dim Boy.” Megan blew him a kiss.

“You’re both insane.” Samantha’s eyes were wide with shock.

“And you can’t act worth a damn.” Dimitri picked up the briefcase and opened it. It was filled with threatening letters, ones they’d obviously been working on during their meeting. “Yet, it’s still better than your criminal efforts.” He held up the letters. “How could you think you’d get away with this?” He looked at Megan. “I feel like I’m in an episode of Scooby-Doo.”

“I’ll give you a Scooby snack later. Once I’ve finished talking to this idiot.” She looked back at the actress. “Lesson one—all the publicity in the world won’t improve your acting. Lesson two—if you ever put your hands on Dimitri again, I will remove them.”

“So much for waiting,” Rachel said from the doorway, her upper-class English accent sounding cold as ice. “Megan, please don’t shoot Samantha. The bill from the hotel to remove the blood stains from the carpet would cripple Benson Security.”

Rachel glided into the room on black designer pumps with bright red soles. She wore a black bespoke skirt suit and held her ever-present iPhone in her manicured hand. Red fingernails tapped at the phone as she gave the actress an icy stare.

“This isn’t how I do business, Samantha,” she said coldly.

As interrogation techniques went, Rachel’s was more about inflicting mental distress than physical pain, but it usually worked. As Samantha proved when she crumpled. “I needed the publicity, my career—”

“You don’t have a career,” Rachel said. “Not anymore.” Her thumb flicked over the screen of her phone. “The police are on their way.” With a dismissive toss of her long dark hair, she turned to Megan, who still had her gun aimed at Samantha’s head. “What did I say about guns?”

With a sigh, Megan put the gun away. “Rach, you say a lot of stuff. How am I supposed to remember it all? Plus, I didn’t shoot her. Although, I really, really wanted to.” She looked back at Samantha as though she were still considering it. “There aren’t many places I could aim for on her body where the bullet wouldn’t hit rubber and just bounce off.”

She was magnificent, in a slightly deranged, blood-thirsty kind of way.

“Man, I love you,” Dimitri said.

“For the love of all things Prada,” Rachel said. “We’re at work. Keep your relationship for your own time.”

She had a point.

As the police came through the door, Dimitri put an arm around Megan’s shoulders and guided her away from Samantha, just in case she snapped and did something they’d both regret.

“I really didn’t like her touching you,” she said as she tried to stare holes through the actress.

“I know, Buffy, I know.” He lifted her chin and kissed her hard.

“For the love of Gucci,” Rachel shouted. “Not on the job!”

Reluctantly, Dimitri broke the kiss. “Only seventeen more days until you become Megan Raast.”

“If you’re lucky,” the evil woman said.

The Wookiee Wants a Wife (or at the very least, a date!)

This story takes place after Can’t Tie Me Down.

Jonas Tremblay paced the vast interior of his penthouse apartment. This was a mistake. A humungous mistake. He couldn’t go on a blind date. He could barely leave his apartment. And if he did, he broke out in a cold sweat if he wasn’t wearing his Wookiee costume. And he couldn’t wear his Wookiee suit on a date.

Could he?

No. No, he couldn’t.

Which meant he couldn’t go. He’d just have to call Mairi, thank her for setting this up for him, and hang up on her before she could talk him into anything else. Or send her a text. Or an email. Or a coded message that would take her a couple of weeks to decode, and by then, he’d be living in a hut in the Yukon, keeping the moose company and wearing his Wookiee costume to blend with the grizzly bears. No, even that wouldn’t work. The wilderness didn’t have any internet. Which meant he was going to die alone in his big, empty, expensive apartment, looking out over Montreal and all the people living their normal lives in a normal way, without him.