Page 59 of The Bodyguard's Fall

“Huh?” There was a look of mischief on his face.

“I’ve heard of hell. But not heck. Where is that? Is that the stop right before?”

“What?”

He laughed. “And why was there so much crap in this movie? Are there a lot of horses or cows? In Vermont, we call it something else.”

I threw the pillow back at him.

“We can’t say that kind of stuff here. It’s family friendly.”

It was like I hadn’t said anything. He slid down farther onto the couch, his arms folded casually behind his head, on a roll now.

“And there was a part in the movie where the girl teased him about something, and he patted her head and called her a smart aleck.”

I remembered. “The head pat was unfortunate.”

“All of it was unfortunate.”

“Well, it’s the best we can do. There is no good replacement for that word.”

He eyed me, amusement flickering across his face. “You can’t think of one three-letter word that would have been better?”

I bit back a smile. “It doesn’t matter because we can’t say it.”

“People don’t talk like that.”

“Plenty of people talk like that. Maybe we should get you a swear jar.”

He grinned, leaning back against the couch. “Look, all the other replacements...fine. I get it. I don’t like watching shows with a ton of that stuff. But smart aleck? To the girl he likes? The tone is wrong. It completely ruined the joke.”

“Well, we can’t say that stuff on this network. Kids are watching.”

“Adults are watching!”

He looked so adorably disturbed that I had to bite back a laugh. The language in the screenplay had been an adjustment for me as well, but not as much as I thought. There was something so precious about writing a script that transcended all ages. Writing something decent and good that a mom could watch and bond over with a teenage daughter spoke to me. Back before my dad yanked our happily ever after out from under us, I remember watching these shows with my mom. If we had a night to ourselves, we’d pop up a bowl of popcorn, snuggle into our softest blankets, and turn on a romance. Having something to laugh about and sigh over together had brought us closer. And I’d never really appreciated that until this moment.

“This isn’t Hollywood,” I said, curling back against the pillows. “It’s a romance that you can safely watch with anyone in the room. There’s a very necessary market for this type of entertainment. And under those circumstances, smart aleck is the best we can do. And it works just fine.”

He was smiling now, the kind of smile that had an impish edge to it. The kind of smile that kept me up at night.

“What?” I demanded.

“Alright, I’ll give you all that. But if the day ever comes that you get one up on me, Rawlins, brace yourself because smart aleck won’t be what's coming your way.”

It was the way he was looking at me, now combined with his words, that caused a flurry of heat to race down my spine.

Standing, he reached down and offered me a hand.

“I can’t believe I just wasted ninety minutes of my life on that.”

I pretended to be shocked as we turned out the lights and headed toward the stairs. “How dare you. Little girls everywhere dream of saving cat bakeries.”

He opened my door and strode inside while I waited by the threshold. When I first arrived, his routine of checking my room each night had seemed over the top. Almost childish. Now, I’d grown to like ending my night like this. With him.

Bonus points: I kept my room much tidier when I knew he would be in here every night.

He paused in front of me at the door, looming over me in a way I found most pleasant. “Next time, I want to see a real movie from you.”