Page 104 of Rune
And I was going to do everything within my power to protect it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Carmen
The next few days were pure bliss.
With the mystery at least solved, even if the ordeal wasn’t over with, we just… enjoyed ourselves and each other.
From bed, with a naked Rune beside me, I hired one of the new girls I’d been dragging my feet on, instructed my oldest employee to show her the ropes, then set her up in the schedule. Did I do this so I didn’t have to go back to my neck of the woods (and leave Rune) anytime in the near future? You bet your ass I did.
I was having way too good a time to give it up so soon.
I did get in touch with Chip.
The stubborn ass had already returned to the house because he was worried about the lawn and garden. Though he’d taken to sleeping in the basement with all his weapons.
He said there was no new activity around the house. I assume that was because Jack/Jon knew I wasn’t there anymore, and neither was my sister. He had no leverage there anymore.
I was thinking a lot about if I never really went back there, never slept in my old bed and made coffee in my old kitchen. If my life was in Navesink Bank, was there some way that I couldconvince Chip to move, so I could still keep an eye on him? I worried about him all alone with no one to look after him.
Was I getting a little ahead of myself?
Sure.
But I couldn’t help it.
I never felt anything like it before. The bone-deep certainty. The feeling of home I found inside another person.
And it wasn’t just all the feel-good sex hormones. Because I’d tried to convince myself of that for days, conveniently forgetting that the sensation had been growing since well before we finally did the deed.
It was just… right.
We were right.
So of course I was thinking of a time in the future where we were moving beyond the bedroom at the clubhouse. Suddenly, I was imagining a four-bedroom house—one for us, two for kids, and a guest for when my sister came back to visit—a yard, a season pass to the beach, an expanded business that brought home more than enough money that I could simply run it from home instead of busting my ass doing the work.
There would be trips to the playgrounds, dinners at Rune’s parents’ house, big, crazy, loud club barbecues, hectic Christmases—the kind of large, close, supportive family I would have loved and would adore giving to my own kids. Ones I hoped would come out with dimples like their father and grandfather.
“What are you smiling about?” Rune asked, turning on his pillow to look at me.
I couldn’t exactly tell him the details, but I agreed to always give him the truth.
“Just thinking about the future.”
“Am I in it?” he asked, that dancing look in his eyes.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“How do you feel about a buttery yellow ‘90s kitchen?”
“Sounds homey.”
“I guess you can live there too then.”
“And do the baseboard cleanings?”
