“Your grandmother would carry an insect across a busy street if it meant it wouldn’t be killed trying to cross it.”
A rough laugh bursts from between my lips. “She’s a humanitarian, not a bugitarian.”
“Which means she wants to save the world, no matter whom she’s trying to save. Including the bad guys.”
I shake my head as if that will help me make more sense of what he’s saying. “Don’t you think you’re being a tad bit melodramatic? In case you’re forgetting, Liam sent us here. He wouldn’t have done that if there was anything suspicious lurking in Bernard’s background.”
Jayden answers with a gruff huff, then studies me for a long moment, his eyes narrow slits. “You’re going to do this whether I agree to it or not, aren’t you?”
I grin, straightening my shoulders. “You better believe it.”
He lets out a hard breath. “All right. But I have to fill Liam in on the situation first. If something happens to us, he’ll want to have a general idea of where to find our bodies.” He pulls his phone from his back pocket and calls our boss.
While he does that, I leave to talk to Bernard. He and I agree to meet at the private garage where he keeps his car.
“Make sure no one is following you when you come.” He shakes his head. “What am I saying? You know better than that.”
He walks away, and I return to his office. Jayden is ending his call as I enter.
“Liam’s asking Connor to track our movements while we’re with Bernard.”
“How can he do that?”
Jayden waves his phone at me. “We have tracking software built into our phones.”
“By we, do you mean you and the guys?”
“Nope, you have it, too.”
That’s news to me. “How? Unlike you guys, I don’t have a company phone. I only have a personal phone.”
Jayden wiggles his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Something tells me I probably don’t want to know.”
“You’re might be right about that.”
I tell him where we’re meeting Bernard, and we head in that direction.
Twenty minutes later, Bernard is driving his BMW north on the highway. I’m in the front passenger seat, and a very grumpy Jayden is sitting in the rear. Old show tunes play through the speakers, loud enough to hear them, but not too loud to prevent us from talking.
Bernard and I get to know each other better while we drive to our destination. Or more accurately, I ask him a million questions about the 1960s version of my grandmother.
“So how come you never got married, yet you own a resort for married couples?” Talk about an oxymoron.
“Do you believe in soul mates?”
“You mean that whole crap about there’s only one person out there for me? And after he dies, I’ll never find love again?” Not that I’ve had much luck yet finding love the first time.
I mean two-way love.
Not the kind of one-sided love I had with Richard—because if I’m looking to fall in love and settle down, it would be a pisser of a deal if my soul-mate lottery ticket has already been wasted on him.
Bernard laughs. “That answers my question. Unlike you, I do believe in soul mates. Your grandmother was mine. But I was too much of a fool to realize it at the time and I put my career first. I lost the great love of my life because of it.”
My grandmother didn’t believe in soul mates, either. She married one of her co-stars back in the ’60s. Divorced him two years later. Then married my grandfather.
He died six years ago, but in all the time they were married, she deeply loved him—and vice versa.
