The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

Jace was already slowly moving up to the log cabin.

Jess was giving me time to finish my book, on which I’d informed my publisher I was definitely going to miss my deadline (and again, considering the cause, my publisher was okay with that for me), while Bohannan renovated the upstairs guest room that had a view to the lake into an office for me.

I could make do with my laptop in a pinch, say, when someone was running around murdering people.

But I preferred to write in quiet solitude at my PC.

Bohannan had broken that solitude with his visit.

He was carrying a manila envelope.

He dropped it on my desk.

He launched in with minimal preamble.

“After that shit hit, I called my attorney. I also called Grace. She hadn’t missed what was going down in Misted Pines and the news you and me were a thing. We had a couple of seriously fucking annoying conversations. Then she told me to tell my attorney to send her new papers. There was some back and forth as she tried to get me to intervene for her with the boys, since she’s tried to be in contact with them, but they’ve blocked her. I told her you and me were shacked up, I didn’t give a fuck if her and me were legally divorced or not, and you didn’t either. Don’t know if that’s true, didn’t matter, she didn’t know it. I just wasn’t gonna let her use my love for you to get her what she wants from my boys, and not only because she didn’t ask to talk to Celeste. She realized she wasn’t going to get what she wanted, she signed the papers.”

He tapped the envelope.

And that was it.

“All that went down, and you didn’t tell me?” I queried.

“It isn’t all that,” he refuted. “She doesn’t matter. It was just a thing I wanted to do so if some reporter got interested in you again, they couldn’t talk trash about it.”

I said nothing, even though I felt a lot.

He did say something.

“You should know, I don’t wanna get married. Not that the last one wasn’t easy to get out of so I want it easy for me to get free if this doesn’t work. This works. It’s always gonna work. I just love who we are and how we are and how huge it is and how we don’t need that. It’s huge just us. And I’m seriously fuckin’ down with that.”

“I am too,” I whispered.

“And I can keep calling you Larue. It’d get confusing if we both called each other Bohannan.”

He was so my B.

I grinned up at him. “Yeah.”

He bent to touch his mouth to mine.

And that was just who we were and how we were and how huge it was.

Because once he did that, with no further ado, he grabbed the envelope and walked out.

But there was further ado.

Because I knew, it was just me for him and him for me.

Always.

So I was thinking about that, and it was part of the “a lot.”

But another part was Bohannan mentioning reporters, so I harked back to the fallout of Tony Romano and Betty Keller.

Swarthy, handsome, ex-army sniper run amuck and his sexual manipulation of a wronged housewife on the heels of a massive small-town sex scandal that involved more vengeful housewives, cheating husbands, murdered girls, a devoted father-to-be clinging to his life, a famous profiler and his more famous girlfriend, the town had been overrun with media.

And it didn’t die down in a week.

I mean, the guy burned himself alive after a shootout and standoff in the woods with the FBI and local law enforcement.

It had all the hallmarks for enduring public fascination.

And all the consequences.

Kimmy was beside herself. The media and all their crew, not to mention the murder and scandal enthusiasts hitting town meant more foot traffic in her shop.

It also meant some of them were conspiracy theorists, so she had plenty of people to talk to about her thoughts on Castro.

Megan was incensed. “Misted Pines is so much more than Tony Romano and Betty Keller. He isn’t even from here! He’s from Maryland!”

(Megan, by the way, was the front runner to win against Kenneth Warner. She was so far ahead in the polls, rumor had it, Kenneth was going to save face by retiring. I hoped he did. She had a lot of ideas that were really good, and it’d be nice for her to hit the ground running).

It was refreshing not to be the focus of the story.

But Bohannan had had seven approaches from writers who wanted to write books about the story where he was the focus.

Unsurprisingly, he’d declined.

Things had just begun to settle down.

Audrey now lived in Spokane.

Since Will and Celeste were still together, and Dale continued to reach out to (unsuccessfully) make amends to his son, I knew Dale was down in Bend, Oregon.