time.
He had removed his gloves more than a few times when they had been together in Istanbul. Heather wondered what he had felt from her during those unguarded moments and closed her eyes.
Her fingers tightened in the strange fur at her fingertips. Some of the guys Heather had been involved with in the past had been bad news, sure. The producer back in Minnesota with the wife she had found about too late. The Italian journalist, whom she hadn’t known was a journalist until way too late.
Heather gave a delicate shudder and curled her lip. But this…
Well, it was fucking crazy, that is what it was.
Somehow she really wasn’t as freaked out as she should be, though. Oh, sure she was freaked . There was no way not to be, at least a little. But she had accepted that freaky or not, Lacey wouldn't lie to her.
Lacey, whose gentle, familiar snores were echoing off the wall behind her, had had expected a bit more hysteria. Lacey knew Heather was not remotely a ‘take things at face value’ kind of woman. No doubt Lace had expected a hundred million probing questions. After all, Lacey had seen her interview dozens of people on their old show, 5 Minutes of Fame . Her technique, along with Lacey’s producing skills, had propelled them to the heights of daytime TV. If only in the Twin Cities. And public TV, at that.
Heather smiled. They had both moved on to better things from there, hadn’t they?
And now definitely weirder things.
Lacey was going to marry a goddamn werewolf. Well, not that Ronan was technically a werewolf anymore, from what Heather understood—not that she understood half of it—and not that they were technically getting ‘married’ either. Handfasting. God, it was some kind of pagan ritual.
Heather thought that was the piece that freaked her out the most in all this mess.
Lacey had found her ‘someone’. That wasn’t supposed to happen yet. Lacey, sure, Lacey would get married someday, that was a given, somewhere far in the future.
A future that Heather had always pictured herself alone in—with a string of lovers trailing behind her like ribbons on a kite, sure—but no children. No husband. No in-laws, for fuck’s sake. She loved her own parents fiercely and saw them about twice a year. She loved Lacey better than anyone on earth and this was the first time they’d been face to face in what…? Nearly five months.
Well, shit.
People who didn't know her from anything other than magazines, interviews and such, assumed she was warm and sweet. She wasn’t, not really. Heather just knew how to charm and draw people out. And she used that. Not mercenarily. At least not entirely. She didn’t want to talk about herself—she never ever wanted to talk about herself—so she’d learned how to make other people talk.
And talk and talk.
She liked listening to them because it kept her out of her own head for awhile. Kept her away from the drop offs. It was comforting, restfu l and damn useful.
In her whole life, she'd never really felt connected to any but those three; her parents and Lacey. And sometimes even with them…things got tenuous.
Heather sighed and turned her head. Lacey lay face up on a fat pillow. Her red-gold hair, that gorgeous color Heather had been insanely jealous of more than once, fluffed around her pixie face, the jewel bright eyes were closed. Her sweet, pink bud of a mouth was open slightly as she breathed, and snored.
Heather smiled and felt her heart lighten. Lacey refused to believe she snored, and honestly, it wasn’t ‘really’ snoring. Not the godawful bellowing that men were known for doing, anyway. Lacey's version was a light and rhythmic thrumming that was rather cute. Lacey wouldn’t want to hear ‘cute’ either. Lacey loathed that word, and Heather couldn’t blame her.
It hadn't been easy for Lacey to be her friend. Heather wasn’t stupid or self-absorbed enough to think looks were everything, but looks were what the vast majority of people focused
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