Chicago, Illinois

Astoria Hotel

Ryder pushed Kelly behind the couch as he got up and disappeared from her sight. She was shaking, her fingers refusing to close around the gun. She tried to peek around the corner, but she couldn’t see anything. Her heart was pounding painfully in her chest, and she was suddenly overcome with the certainty that she was about to lose her husband after finally getting him back.

“Stop, Dane!”

She stood up and held her hands up where he could see them. Dane Hood was standing just inside the room among the debris of the door, a shot gun the size of one of those mythical elephant guns her father once told her about in his hands. Ryder was crouched against the wall just out of sight of the entryway, waiting to ambush Dane. He waved at her to get back down, but she ignored him, focusing on the crazy man with the big gun.

“I’ll go with you if that’s what you want.”

Ryder shook his head so vigorously that his hair nearly stood up on end. Again, she ignored him.

“You’ll go with me willingly?” Dane asked.

“Yes. Just, let’s go now. Before Ryder comes back.”

Dane tilted his head. “Where is he? I’ve been watching the door for twenty minutes, and he hasn’t left.”

“He’s in the bathroom. He’s not feeling well. He probably didn’t hear anything.”

Dane’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t believe you.”

“Then we can wait here for him to come back out.”

There was a long moment when she thought he was going to take her up on that suggestion. Instead, he backed away and gestured for her to lead the way out of the room. Kelly gestured to Ryder to stay put, her heart pounding so hard that she couldn’t hear anything but the roar of blood in her ears. She stepped over the debris and waited in the corridor as Dane came toward her.

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded.

“I told you. I want to be with you.” He touched her face, and it took everything inside of her to keep from flinching. “I love you.”

“How could you love me? You barely know me.”

“I know everything about you. I investigated you after I read your books. I know you were born in Atlanta, that your father’s a cop and your mother’s a teacher. You were a teacher, just like your mother, until your cop of a husband screwed up and ruined your reputation. I bet that school regrets firing you now!”

“Those are just facts. You don’t know the real me.”

“Don’t I?” He moved closer to her, causing her to back up a few steps until she hit her back on the wall. He didn’t touch her, but he stood close enough that she could smell his sour breath. “I know everything I ever wanted to know.”

“Like what?”

“That you’re fucking beautiful.” His eyes moved slowly down the length of her body. “You have eyes that haunt me. And that perfect, perky nose? It draws the eyes, and I can’t look away.”

“Looks have very little to do with personality.”

“Yeah?” He frowned, clearly growing frustrated. “You’re funny. And intelligent. Your books might seem like fluff, but they’re deeply thought out. You are an amazing writer, especially when it comes to developing your characters. And the sex scenes . . . Awesome!”

Kelly shook her head, gesturing more to Ryder as he tried to make his way across the debris where the door once was than to Dane. But he took it as a criticism of his words.

“Why do you have to be such a bitch?” he asked, moving even closer to her. He set the butt of the gun on the floor, using it as a sort of crutch as he leaned into her. “I’m trying to compliment you here!”

“You know nothing about me! You know my characters, what I’ve put out in the world, and you know about my past. But you don’t know me! Why are you doing this?”

He smacked her across the face with his open palm, anger flashing in his eyes. “I’m a good man!” he insisted. “I’ll make you happy!”

“A man who hits women isn’t a good man,” she said, touching a line of blood that dribbled from her injured lip.

“If you wouldn’t piss me the hell off!”

“I don’t want you!”

She pushed his chest with both hands, forcing him to stumble backward. Ryder was on his hands and knees behind him. Dane stumbled over Ryder and fell on to his ass, the shotgun flying free. Kelly snatched it up and aimed it at his chest.

“Did your investigation inform you that my Daddy’s favorite pastime was to take me and my sister to the firing range on Saturdays to teach us how to shoot? Did it tell you that I’m a crack shot, especially with a gun this simple to fire?”

Dane held up his hands. “I’m sorry.”

Kelly was so damn tired of people apologizing to her. She raised the barrel of the gun, sighting him right in the center of his forehead. She might have fired, too, if Ryder hadn’t put his hand on the barrel and pushed it down to aim it at the floor.

“It’s over, babe,” he said in that soothing voice of his. He touched her lip, his thumb coming away with a smear of blood. Just the same, he leaned in to kiss her. That’s when Dane thought it was a good idea to get up and rush at them.

But it wasn’t a good idea.

Kelly raised the gun and pulled the trigger; her shoulders pushed so far back that she was convinced she might have dislocated one or both. The wall above Dane’s head released a huge shower of drywall debris and powder, coating Dane from the top of his head to the small of his back. He fell back again, landing squarely on his ass once more.

“Move again, and I won’t aim that high.”

He held up his hands but was smart enough not to speak.

But then Kelly decided she wanted him to speak. She moved around Ryder and shoved the barrel of the gun in the center of his chest.

“Did you kill Tracy?”

Dane’s eyes narrowed as he looked up at her. “What do you think, bitch?”

Ryder kicked him in the jaw, snapping his head back against the wall, more debris falling on him. “Don’t call my wife a bitch.”

“Did you kill her?” Kelly demanded again.

“Yeah. She fucking lied about who she was. We went on that date, and she invited me back to her place, then announced that she wasn’t the writer, but a PR bitch who makes a living manipulating the press. She manipulated me! The two of you look so much alike that I would never have guessed until she said something. But she had to tell me and I . . . I lost it.”

Tears welled in Kelly’s eyes. “She was a good person, you ass! You think you’re a good person? You’re the bastard who took a really good person out of this world. It should have been you!”

“It should have been you.”

Ryder kicked him again, not once but over and over again until the man fell back and curled up into a fetal position, trying to protect himself from the blows. Kelly watched for a moment, suddenly so exhausted, so emotionally and physically exhausted that she couldn’t even move. But then that moral compass kicked in, and she moved to Ryder’s side, snagging his arm and pulling him back.

“It’s okay. He can’t hurt us anymore.”

The elevator doors opened, and an army of cops were suddenly filing out into the corridor, most of them with their guns in their hands, aimed at Ryder and Kelly. She dropped the shotgun and held up her hands as Ryder did the same, dropping his handgun that he’d been holding the whole time. She couldn’t imagine the restraint it had taken to keep from firing his weapon at Dane’s head when he said those things, but she was grateful it had been there. She wanted to see Dane go to jail for a very long time for Tracy. Her friend deserved that much.

It took some time to sort things out, but Dane was quickly in handcuffs, and Mastiff’s operatives arrived to get them out of there. They were on a plane before midnight, both having made statements to the cops and signed all the legal documents that promised they’d return for anything else the investigators might require. She wondered about the damage to the hotel, but she figured that would be dealt with when Mastiff sent her their final bill.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Ryder said as they flew over farmland.

“Done what?”

“Given yourself up to him.”

“I protect you, you protect me, right? That’s all I was doing.”

“How did you know he wouldn’t shoot you right there and then.”

“He’d gone to a lot of trouble to get into the room. He was more likely to shoot you on contact than me.”

“At least it wouldn’t have been you.”

Kelly sat up and turned to her husband, taking his face between both her hands. “Stop it, Ryder Fairfield! You and I are a partnership. Fifty-fifty. You’re not allowed to sacrifice yourself for me, and I’m not allowed to do it for you. We do everything together!”

“But what you did—”

“I just distracted him so that you could come to the rescue. That’s fifty-fifty.”

He laughed but then nodded. “Okay. I get it.”

“I won’t lose you again. Never.”

“Never,” he agreed, leaning in to kiss her. “You’re stuck with me for the rest of our lives.”

She nodded, pulling away from him even as he tried to pull her closer. From around her neck, she pulled free a chain that she’d worn for a year and then slipped it into a jewelry box she kept on her dresser back in Springfield. She’d grabbed it on impulse as she was packing for this trip and put it on this morning in preparation for the reading, thinking it might finally be time for him to see how deep her belief that they’d find their way back to each other ran. She took it off and cradled the jewels it held in her hand for a long second before opening her hand and showing him what it contained.

His eyes widened a little, but he didn’t seem surprised.

He lifted one of the items, a set of gold rings they’d picked out together, and slid them onto her left ring finger. She took the other and slipped it onto his.

“Mrs. Fairfield,” he said softly.

“Mr. Fairfield.”

They kissed, a new passion in their touch. A new familiarity. And then she rested her head on his shoulder and sighed contentedly.

“Let’s go home.”

He squeezed her shoulder, and she smiled, glad to finally be at the end of this long road. It was time to find a new one, to adjust their journey and find their way back to the dreams they’d had since the moment they first found each other.

Bumps in the road is what her grandmother would have called this. Personally, Kelly was ready for a nice, smooth road from here on out.