Star-Crossed(30)

 Brothers are a pain in my ass.

“I guess the business meeting didn’t work off all that womanly aggression you got most of the month.”





77

Jules kicked Wyatt’s leg. “Shut up ’bout my business meeting.”

“Didn’t go well?”

“It went fine.”

“And business meeting’s code for?” Clay asked.

Jules felt her cheeks heat and lifted her head to glare at Wyatt before she turned and gave Clay an apologetic look. “It’s nothing. I had a date. It was fun. Now it’s over.”

“It ain’t that over,” Wyatt observed when Jules’s phone vibrated in her lap. “Is that him you been texting all day?”

Jules ignored Wyatt and picked up her phone to read Romeo’s text.

 No shit! I bet my brothers are a bigger pain in the ass than yours is.

Jules smiled and reminded him.

 My brother is Wyatt “The Deputy” Conner.

It took less than a minute for Romeo to text her back, and Jules laughed out loud when she looked at the screen of her phone.

 You win.

“Why dontcha share with the whole car what’s so funny?” Jules looked up from her phone, seeing that everyone was looking at her. She felt her cheeks heat once more and grabbed her purse on the floor to hide her phone in it.

Then she looked out the window as a distraction when she saw both Melody and Clay grinning at her in amusement. Seeing the signs announcing various drop-off and pickup points at the airport had Jules breathing a sigh of relief.

She sprang out of the car when they finally pulled up on the curb, getting her second wind from the knowledge that they were almost home free. The press had been hounding them all day. At the hotel, at the hospital it’d been constant, and Clay hated the attention on a good day. One day after being shot in the soft spot beneath his right shoulder, with no pain management save a couple of ibuprofen, keeping Clay media-friendly was almost impossible. Especially when he was still overprotective of Melody, 78



whose ex-husband was the one who’d shot him. That asshole was still in the hospital with a serious head injury courtesy of Clay. They weren’t entirely certain he was going to recover to stand trial, and all of them were treading lightly trying not to mention it.

Having Clay nearly kill Melody’s ex-husband with his bare hands was a touchy subject.

The last thing they needed was more tactless reporters firing questions at them.

Jules went to grab someone to check their luggage at the curb. She had everyone’s ticketing information, but they needed IDs and once she got herself handled, she headed back to the car.

“I can carry my own bags,” Clay snapped at Wyatt, who flat-out refused to let Clay mess with the luggage.

Wyatt laughed. “Really? ’Cause that sling on your shoulder and the fact that you’re growling at me like an injured grizzly tells me you can’t.”

“Just go give the guys your license and head inside. Take Melody with you. We need to get y’all off this curb as quickly as possible.” Jules took her carry-on out of Wyatt’s hand and tossed it over her shoulder before she turned around and hollered to Tony and Jasper, Clay’s coaches, who were getting their things out of the other limousine that had pulled up behind them. “Y’all need to go give them your IDs.” Jasper left his luggage on the curb and walked up to Jules. “Do we need our tickets?”

“Nope, it’s all electronic.” Jules tossed Melody’s carry-on over her other shoulder while Wyatt helped the limousine driver unload the luggage they were going to check.

She saw them put Clay’s carry-on on the cart and grabbed Wyatt’s arm. “Get that. He’s taking that one on the plane. It’s got his medicine and everything in it.” Wyatt frowned. “He ain’t taking the medicine. What’s the point of carrying it on?

And don’t say just in case ’cause you know his arm could be falling off and he wouldn’t take the darn pills.”

“Just grab the bag.”





79

Wyatt grabbed it and tossed it over his shoulder with his own carry-on bag, leaving the two of them standing there looking like an oddly matching pair of weighted-down travelers.

Jules struggled to search through her purse while pushing Melody’s carry-on higher on her shoulder, knowing she owed the driver a large tip. She was handing the guy a fifty when Wyatt nudged her and said, “Look what the cat dragged in.” She turned to see three large, luxury limousines parked on the curb in front of them. In comparison to these vehicles, the ordinary airport shuttle limos Jules had rented looked old and mediocre. Car doors were still opening, and every man who stepped onto the curb was olive-skinned and undeniably Italian, but there was one who stood head and shoulders above the others. He wore designer sunglasses and one of those flat-topped, military-style black baseball hats that were in fashion now, but it did nothing to hide his identity. Like Clay and Wyatt, something about a heavyweight UFC