Jaimie: Fire and Ice (The Wilde Sisters 2)
Page 103
The only good thing about him was this woman. She had come into his life by accident and she wouldn’t be in it for long, but while she was, he would protect her. Take care of her…
“There’s that look again.”
“What look?”
“The one that says you’re a thousand miles away.”
Zach smiled, cupped his hand around the back of her neck, drew her to him and kissed her.
“I’m going to make those calls. Then we’ll do something really exciting with the rest of the evening.”
“For instance?”
“We’ll go out. Dancing. Clubbing. Your pick it.”
“How about digging up an old movie on TV and ordering up popcorn?”
“What a woman! Clint Eastwood? Robert de Niro?”
“Reese Witherspoon. Meg Ryan. “
Zach sighed. “Nobody’s perfect.”
Jaimie made a fist, punched him in the arm. He laughed, they kissed…and then Zach took his phone from his pocket, went into the bedroom, shut the door partway, and got to work.
* * * *
It was Saturday night and it was late. Talk about double whammies.
Yes, but Zach had what people called connections, and it was time to use them.
He made half a dozen calls; those calls led to half a dozen more. In between placing the calls and having them returned, he watched a movie that turned out to be newer than old, without Meg Ryan or Reese Witherspoon and with, instead, a bunch of actresses whose names he’d never heard before. They were, Jaimie said, from TV.
He rarely watched TV, which explained it.
A chick flick, after all. But to his surprise, it wasn’t.
It was funny and clever, and if his head hadn’t been in two places at once, he might actually have enjoyed it, but his head was in two places at once, and that meant that he was, too.
By the time the movie ended, he’d damn near worn a path in the Oriental carpet that led from the sitting room to the bedroom.
The good news was that he had a plan in place.
The bad was that he didn’t know where Young was, and what that really meant was that he didn’t know what Young was up to.
The only certainty about the man was that at this point, he was legally untouchable.
He’d moved from befriending Jaimie to dating her. When that had gone south, he’d turned into her unwanted suitor, sending gifts and, turning up everywhere she went. Approaching her, saying ugly things to her…none of it was really sufficient for harassment charges or a restraining order.
One lawyer pal pointed out an awful truth that Zach already knew. Even if she got a restraining order, it was always possible that the harassment could lead to worse things.
“Plain English,” his friend said, “women have been killed for trying to keep the creeps away. I’m sure you know that.”
Zach did.
Plus, the man had a clean history. No prior charges of anything, not even a traffic ticket.
A hundred times that night Zach silently cursed himself for having inadvertently destroyed the proof of Young’s trespass, though, after a while, he wondered if even that would have sealed the man’s fate.