Chasing Serenity (River Rain 1)

He didn’t argue further. It was cute, her staking her claim. And she took Thursday duty with watering and deadheading the flowers.

And then there was the time she floated the idea of, “What do you think about me contacting Rhys and asking him to look into a few lovely ladies the mom of a friend of mine in New York says are attractive, nice and unattached.”

To that he’d said a firm, “No.”

And to his surprise, even if she gave him a squinty look, she hadn’t pushed it.

Though he had no doubt she was biding her time.

As far as he knew, she had yet to unleash “Rhys.”

But that was only as far as he knew.

And he was afraid to ask.

So with Chloe being Chloe, and this mysterious Rhys guy in the mix, “doing something” could mean just about anything.

“I don’t need another suit,” he told her. “Seeing as I haven’t worn any of the ones you’ve already given me.”

“I got a dog,” she blurted.

He was silent.

“Okay, listen, I know this is probably something we should discuss,” she said quickly.

She was right, they should.

But—

“And I want you to know, I get that. But Montana is, well, Judge, honey, she has a mohawk.”

“What?”

“She’s part pittie and part Rhodesian ridgeback and she is so sweet. There’s a terrible situation with her current family where they’ve learned the baby they’re about to have is going to be significantly special needs. They’re understandably freaked out about that, they need to focus on it and how that will change their lives, and sadly, they’re worried Montana will suffer along the way. Now, they’re being picky because they want to be certain their girl has a good home. Mi told them about me, and I went to go see her today and they liked me, and I left with her and, Judge…you’re just going to fall in love with her. I promise. I swear.”

“Chlo—”

“And it was awful, everyone was crying, even me.”

She insisted she wasn’t a crier, but it was his experience his woman cried all the time.

“Hon—”

“And she misses her mommy and daddy already, I can tell. We had the difficult discussion, but we think it needs to be a surgical cut. As awful as it is, and as much as they want to visit her, we all agreed that it would be confusing for her. So we’re going to have to be extra sweet to her for a while.”

He had visions of her talking on the phone while cooking a skillet of bacon at the same time.

And maybe frying up a filet mignon.

“So she’ll know who her new mummy and daddy are and that we’re going to take the best of care of her,” she continued. “Do you think Zeke will be okay with her?”

“Zeke loves everything.”

“Well then! See!” she cried.

God, she sounded like a little girl, all scared and excited.

It was fucking adorable.

“Chlo—”

“I promise to do research about introducing new dogs to a family and—”

“Coco, baby, shut up so I can talk.”

Silence.

“I don’t care,” he said.

And he stopped talking.

“That’s it, you don’t care?”

“That’s it. You want her, we’ll figure it out. We’ll give her love. It’s all good.” It was then her story about adopting a dog and three cats hit him, and he added, “Just, now, promise me, no more unless we discuss it. Two is one thing, if Montana will be good with Zeke, Zeke’ll be good with her. We got enough love to go around. But we both do a lot of traveling back and forth and we need to consider who’s staying with who, if they eventually should be separated at all, and what it’s doing to them, all the moving around.”

“In other words, don’t get a cat…yet.”

He grinned at the “yet.”

“Babe,” was all he said.

“We need to talk about moving in together.”

Judge went still.

“Zeke loves the car. Dogs love cars. But humans, all this moving around, it’s not fun,” she declared.

Leave it to Chloe to throw it right out there.

He was outrageously thrilled.

Even so.

“Let’s talk about that when you come up tomorrow.”

“I’m moving up there.”

Judge went rock solid.

“I can come down for the day once or twice a week, but Mi doesn’t need me. And with recent events, we’ve needed to hire another full-timer anyway.”

She had.

The double whammy of Elsa Cohen, with her seventeen million followers (not to mention the public’s sudden highly increased fascination with all things Pierce-Swan-Holloway-Oakley) sent people in droves to Velvet and Fabulous Foot Forward’s donations to stratospheric levels. And unbeknownst to Chloe, she’d impressed a patron who had significant social standing and a shit ton of friends, all of whom, after Chloe plied them with champagne and helped style them, were now regulars.

This meant, in the last two months, Velvet moved from solid, sustained, but moderate growth to being the It Store in Phoenix, quadrupling her gross, and doing triple that in online sales.