Page 13 of Bulletproof

“Michelle,” he repeated.

“Sure,” I agreed, drawing Lisa forward, tucking her hand under my arm. “Your assistant should come too,” I said, looking down into the woman’s big blue eyes. “Us support staff hafta stick together.”

She nodded, taking hold of my arm as we started down the front steps. I heard Michelle groan behind me.

TWO

The place I wanted to go to was packed when we got there, so we were stuck waiting, sitting by the door, where the draft was. Hayes suggested we try someplace else, but Michelle said it wasn’t possible once I got something stuck in my head.

“It’s true,” I said, nodding. “I mean, if I don’t get it now, I’ll just want it, and so I’ll eat more stuff to try and fill the void of something I want with something I don’t, and we all know what that leads to.”

“No, what?”

“Overeating,” Lisa explained like he was stupid. “If you have what you want, then you’re sated and eat only that. If you don’t, you just eat and eat and eat until you finally just go back to what you really wanted and have that, but meanwhile, you’ve stuffed your face with every other thing that looked decent.”

“It’s true,” Lily chimed in.

“It is,” Greg validated.

Michelle grunted her agreement.

He threw up his hands as my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Jory?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“This is Eddie Liron, from last night.”

“Oh, hey.” I smiled into the phone. “How are you?”

“I’m better’n Josh Peretti—that’s for sure.” He snickered.

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t see the paper this morning, huh?”

“No. Why?”

“I guess Josh took that dive off his balcony that you saved me from.”

I was stunned. “Holy shit.”

“I know, right? What are the odds?”

I had a pretty good idea. “Your brother was mad that you had been threatened at Peretti’s place. He’d expected you to be safe there, and then you weren’t. He had to have been pissed.”

“He was.”

Older brothers got that way. They were protective. Not normally homicidally protective, but the point had been made. Perhaps I was jumping to conclusions though. I had never even met Eddie’s brother.

“Hey, so I was calling to invite you over to my brother’s place tonight. He wants to meet you and thank you for saving my ass.”

“Oh, that’s not really⁠—”

“Yeah, it is. You saved my life.”