Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

The trouble was, she didn’t know what she wanted anymore. Not from Sean or her job or life generally. It had seemed so simple before she went to Louisville. The whole best-self thing. The whole idea of seizing the reins of her life and steering it where she wanted it to go.

But if her life was a horse, it was a balky, opinionated one, and she needed a lot more riding lessons before she’d be able to make the stubborn fucker canter in the right direction.

She wished she had Ellen and Caleb’s certainty. Carly and Jamie’s. She wished that when she looked at herself in this dress in the mirror of this fancy shop, she didn’t want Sean to see her in it. That she didn’t want him to come to Caleb’s house for the Wednesday-night family dinner and meet the whole clan.

She wished he didn’t make her want so many things that she didn’t want to want, or dream about a life she didn’t even recognize.

“I don’t love him,” she said.

Everyone stopped talking and stared at her.

“Uh-oh,” Ellen said.

Carly grinned. “Booyah!”

“I have the perfect dress,” the shop owner said.

“I think you misheard me,” Katie protested. “I said I don’t love him.”

“Oh, we heard you,” Carly said. “We get it. You don’t love him. You don’t want to marry him and buy a house with him and have his babies and wake up with him every morning for the rest of your life.”

Ellen shook her head. “Nope. You don’t think his opinion’s more important than everybody else’s, and you don’t think he’s fabulously sexy and clever and wonderful. We get it. It’s just an oil change. A super-hot, meaningless oil change.”

Then she and Carly got on a roll, laughing and teasing her, and Katie had to stand there and take it, because she didn’t have the slightest idea how to get out of her dress.

Her phone rang, rescuing her from their cheerful mockery. It was Sean.

“What’s up?” she asked, stepping carefully to the other side of the store and ignoring Carly and Ellen’s departing jibes.

“I got our guy.”

“Seriously? How? Who is it? Why are you calling me? Call the police!”

Sean chuckled. “Slow down, ssweetheart. I used the p-profile you gave me last night to narrow the search results one more time, and when I put them together with what I dug up on the threats, I was able to figure out where they’ve been c-coming from.”

“Where?”

“It’s a public library c-computer in Pella.”

“Ben?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll have to find out if the library has logs we c-can look at, but it seems p-pretty likely, yeah. And it gets worse.”

“What?”

“I found Judah. Those texts he just sent you? The c-closest ssatellite link puts him in central Iowa.”

“He could still be in Iowa City.”

“Not according to the GPS on his phone.”

“Pella?”

“Pella.”

For a moment, she couldn’t speak. Judah was in Iowa, unprotected, and most likely so was whoever had been threatening him.

“C-clark?”