I had said my piece and it was time for me to shut up.
"Please don't ignore her." Okay, so I can't shut up. I was on a roll and he was still listening. I continued and spilled my guts about everything that I thought pertained to their relationship and how she felt about him being gone all the time and I think he was happy that I told him. I know it was good for him to hear.
"Charlie?"
"Yes," I said and turned to look at him.
"I'm really sorry if I offended you before we left for Africa. I was pretty drunk and I'm truly sorry."
"History," I chuckled and waved goodnight.
***
My morning started like any ordinary morning. I got up, took a three-hour shower, ate more pancakes, a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and let Gregory convince me to try Espresso. He made me a triple shot mocha, and let me just say I felt wired.
I went into Westport for a couple of new outfits and a new bag. The mall was full of teenagers and that made me think of Bella. I stopped by the DMV, posed for a new driver's license and that made me think of Bella and how excited she was that I let her drive in the savanna. I mean, how cool was I? I think I must be the world's greatest nanny. I went to the bank and canceled my checking account and MasterCard. I felt so violated by the thought of some international criminal holding onto my identification that I was somewhat inclined to change my name.
I didn't. I refused to give into the fear and decided to buy a gun instead.
"What exactly are you looking for?"
"Small, sleek, easy to handle…You know, a girl's best friend."
The man behind the counter at Gun Town held up a twenty-two with a pearl handle.
"I was thinking more along the lines of a nine millimeter. Black." I glanced over the counter and pointed to the bad boy that I wanted. "That one."
He handed it to me and it was a perfect fit. It molded into the contour of my hand. I never thought that I would buy a gun for personal reasons. I knew someday when I joined the force I would need one, but this was serious. I was about to become a statistic. "Perfect."
"What do you need a gun for?" the man scoffed, and swiveled around to grab the paperwork that I needed to fill out. "You look like such a nice girl."
I had to laugh, because I was a nice girl: a nice girl with grit, gumption and a fear of international spies sneaking up on me in the dead of the night. I was probably being completely paranoid, but my father always taught me it's better to be safe than sorry.
I knew that I had to wait the usual five-day waiting period, so I picked up some pepper spray in the mean time. When I returned my answering machine was blinking again. I listened to yet another message from my father.
I dialed my parents' number.
"Dad." I could hardly talk over the tightening in my chest. I cried. I think he cried, too.
We talked for an hour about everything that I had said in the letter and then he asked me if he could visit sometime.
"Of course," I said happily. I knew he hadn't been back east since he was a kid and he had never once suggested it before.
"We're having a big get together for Josh when they return from Austria next month, do you think you can make it home?"
"Are you kidding? I'll be there." I smiled and listened to him talk about the hospital and about how he might open his own practice so that he and Mom could travel more.
I didn't mention anything about what happened to me overseas. I just didn't feel the need to put him through that and for once, I wasn't so anxious to talk about myself. I knew that I was a good person and I guess now that I was proud of myself and felt good about my life, I didn't need to hear it from him anymore.
***
Two days later, I reached the front door of the main house just as the limo driver emerged from the driver's side and moved around to let Bella out. To my surprise, a tall gray- haired man was the first to emerge, followed by Gammy, Roald, Nicole and finally Bella.
She ran to me with open arms and hugged me tighter than anyone has ever hugged me my entire life. I felt loved and truly happy to see her.
"I'm so glad to see you. I missed you. I missed you and I love you, Charlie," she gushed, and peeled herself off my shoulders to turn around and make the introduction. She let go of me and grabbed her grandfather's hand.
"Pappi, this is Charlie. Charlie, this is my grandfather, Claude Munson."
He was regal. Handsome and smiling happily with his hand wrapped around Bella's much smaller hand. I was surprised to see him.
"Miss Ford." He bowed. Probably some sort of weird European ritual of sorts, but he bowed just the same. "Our entire family will be forever in your debt. I'm so thankful; I don't even know how to begin."
"It's okay. It was nothing." But it felt good just the same.
Bella scoffed and rolled her eyes. "She's amazing and when I grow up, I want to be just like Charlie."
Nothing could have made me smile brighter at that point. It felt nice to feel loved, and it felt nice to finally feel appreciated by a family that I worked for.
Over coffee and muffins a couple hours later, I finally finished telling them about Africa and how brave Bella had been, and then I told them about Armenia and how Bella had been so strong and brave and, of course, she was the hero because I didn't even know where we were.
It was great to see Bella snuggled in beside her father and I finally was able to hear what I wanted to hear once he carried his exhausted daughter up to her room.
"Mr. Munson." I kept my voice calm. "I have so many questions I don't know where to start."
"Charlie," Gemma said cheerfully and patted my hand. "We all appreciate what you did for Bella and I just wanted to apologize for the way things happened at the hotel. DuLucere told me that you received some minor injuries and I'd like to extend my deepest apologies. I never meant for any harm to come to you and I would like you to have this as a token of our appreciation."
She handed me a gold-embossed envelope.
I took it with wide eyes and a tingle in my stomach. No one had ever given me a bonus before. I opened it and gasped.
"Oh, no, you really didn't have to do that," I said, and then smiled because there was a check for a whole lot of money in that envelopre.
"Oh, yes. We want you to have it and I hope that your troubles abroad won't deter you from taking care of our sweet Bella. She really has grown quite fond of you," Gemma said.
"She's a wonderful girl, and I'm not going anywhere," I said in memory of our time together. "Are you finally out of hiding? I mean, are things safe for you now?" I asked Claude.
"Things have been taken care of and I am now free to accompany Gemma back to Belgium and resume my life with the European Parliament. As for safe?" He winced slightly. "I don't know if there is such a thing in my line of work. You take the good with the bad and make the best from every situation. It keeps us on our toes." He winked at Gemma.
At that precise moment, I felt my heartbeat quicken and I felt a twinge of loneliness. Gemma and Claude had persevered through assassination attempts, her parents' disapproval, and months and months of being apart from one another yet they still looked wildly in love. Maybe there was something to that. Perhaps love should keep you on your toes.
"I should be getting to sleep, too. Will you be staying for awhile?"
"Just a few days."
"I'm sure Bella would like that."
Roald came down the stairs a minute later. "Bella wants to know if you want to have a sleepover in her room."
"Oh, goody." I jumped up as if my ass was on fire. "Duty calls." I winked and took the stairs two steps at a time.
Life resumed back to normal once Gemma and Claude left for Belgium, but I personally don't think any part of a celebrity's life is quite normal. Roald's entourage was at the house daily now, probably just because he insisted on spending more time at the house with Bella, so they just came to him instead. He was an international superstar after all and I guess that is just wha
t they do.
Roald was more humble about things than Nicole was and he only agreed to meet with the heavy hitters like Barbara Walters and Larry King. Nicole bounced back and forth from coast to coast doing interviews for everyone. Thank goodness Roald had a brain and put his foot down, insisting that Bella would remain out of the spotlight.
Nicole hasn't been back to Greenwich for nearly three weeks.
Roald and Bella spend a lot of time together, which gives me plenty of time to get back into prime physical shape, hone my weapons skills and brush up on my self- defense moves. If anything, I believe that I was meant for something bigger, something better and something that would keep my mind sharp and my adrenaline pumping. I registered for classes at the college, and they are set to start after I return from my vacation at the end of August.
Roald and I sat down over peanut butter sandwiches just last night and coordinated our schedules so that he had three weeks off with Bella during the time that I would be in Hawaii and visiting my family.
Bella was going to get her wish and both Roald and Nicole had promised to set aside a couple of weeks to take her to Disneyworld. After all, we both deserved a good vacation after what we had been through.
While we were shopping in New York City this morning, Bella helped me pick out an entire new wardrobe right down to my sexy new underwear and bras.
"I don't think so. I don't wear thongs," I said haughtily. No amount of humidity and heat would convince me to wear something that was purposefully crammed into my crack. I had a hard enough time trying to extract regular underwear, why would I buy ones made to floss my ass?
"How about these?"
Why did I get the feeling that I was being set up to look sexy?
"Why does it matter? No one will be seeing my underwear." I glanced over my shoulder for the fourth time in ten minutes and stilled. The hair on my neck stood straight on end. I wasn't ordinarily paranoid about someone watching me or even stalking me, and I was somewhat used to media attention, because after all, this was the third high profile celebrity family that I had ever worked for, but today, something just felt off, and I just went with my gut. "Let's just go." I dropped the panties and bras that I had already chosen and took off for the escalator.
I shuffled her out of Bloomingdale's and hailed a cab.
"What was that for?" she asked with wide eyes as the cabbie screeched to a halt near the sidewalk.
"I don't know." I shivered, but wasn't about to tell her that I had a bad feeling that someone had been watching me all day. It was probably just post-traumatic delusions of grandeur, but it felt real. "I just want to go home."
The cab driver circled around and we called Vinny from Bella's cell phone and asked him to meet us at a different location. For all I knew, Vinny was the one who had been watching us. Roald could have the same paranoid delusions that I had and could have easily hired someone to keep an eye on us. That's what I would do if she were my child and someone had abducted her twice in the past month.
Vinny agreed and we met up at Rugliano's Italian Restaurant and jumped from the cab and into the limo. I interrogated Vinny the best I could and asked him many questions about where he had been and if he liked the underwear that Bella was trying to get me to buy.
Vinny didn't answer me. Vinny never answers me. I've heard him grunt a couple of times. I've heard him say, "Yeah," three or four times ever since I met him, and that's it. I figured I'd get him with the underwear question, but he had a poker face that you wouldn't believe. I didn't feel any better about the fact that someone had been watching us.
When we returned to Greenwich, I wanted to change into my clothes for the gym and Bella wanted to play makeover.
"Come on," she begged for the third time. "You could be so beautiful."
I didn't think she meant anything by it, so I just smiled.
"Thanks, sweetie, but I like the way I look. I'm comfortable in jeans and I don't see what the big deal is."
"The big deal is that it's fun. Paaaaa-lleeease."
"Fine." I opened the door to my little cottage out back of the Munson castle and dropped my bags on the floor. Even though I had passed on panties and bras at Bloomies, I had still made a killing at the Banana Republic sale and had even bought a couple of sundresses at Macy's that made me look like a woman.
I picked up the mail that had been piling up for three weeks and flipped through it while Bella helped herself to my fridge. "Tomorrow we can play dress up, but right now, I have an appointment with my personal trainer and you promised Gregory that you would have tea with him." I had almost finished flipping through the pile when a bright photograph caught my attention. I dropped the remainder of the mail onto the floor and brought it up to my face to study it.
"Holy shit," I mumbled under my breath, but Bella has ears like a bat.
"What?" She jumped to my side and looked over my shoulder. "Who's it from?"
I turned the postcard over because I was wondering the same thing.
"That's weird." She plopped down onto the bed.
It's more than weird, I thought. The postcard was completely blank on the other side. The front was a picture of a winery in Tuscany, but the back was blank. Even on the side where my address should have been.
I wasn't paranoid.
A shiver of terror raced across my spine and my breath caught in my throat as I gazed out the window then quickly closed the blinds and sank down on the bed. That postcard had been hand-delivered because there was no address written on it. Was this some sort of sick joke, or was Bifocal Man stalking me?
"I gotta go." I hurriedly got Bella back into the house and then ran back in and got my gun from its safe and tucked it under my front seat. The money that Bella's grandparents had given me had funded my brand new, custom SUV. It was perfect, except I had opted not to get the bulletproof windows. How silly of me.
So, I wasn't completely paranoid. Somehow, a postcard from Tuscany had made it into our mailbox, here in Greenwich, Connecticut, and that made me very nervous. One—because Bifocal Man—I mean Russo—was the only one there when I told him to send me a postcard. And, two—I was positive that someone had been watching me from various locations in New York City earlier today.
When I reached the gym, I had perhaps the best, most satisfying workout of my life. I felt agile and strong and wound pretty damn tight. My vacation was still a couple of weeks away, but I was more and more anxious to get away. For good measure, today I stopped by the Westport Gun Club just in case anyone was following me and I spent a couple of hours blasting paper men and pretending that I wasn't scared.
It was almost dark when I returned and Bella and Roald were discussing plans to head to Vermont for the weekend. That meant I was on my own, which would be fine. I would rather have Bella tucked away in the woods than standing next to me when someone kidnapped me again.
"Do you want to come?" Roald asked. I smiled. "Really?"
"There's plenty of room and it's very pretty up there. We have a spot right on the lake and maybe it would be good to get away. Gregory is coming too."
One big happy family. I couldn't believe that this was happening. My luck was definitely changing for the better. Now I could escape and hide in the woods for a couple of days, rein in my wild imagination and get a handle on my emotions. What more could I ask for?
"Darien Sparks might be coming too." Bella bobbed her brows and giggled.
Darien Sparks was another action star who usually played bad guys. He was Roald's archenemy in the movies, but his best friend in real life. I watched a couple of his movies with Bella one night and she had heard me say once or twice that I thought the guy was cute, and very nicely put together. Now I understood the need for a makeover and sexy underwear.
I narrowed my eyes on the girl with a playful grin. "How long have you known about this?"
"I dunno," she giggled and ran from the room. I chased her through the backyard before I caught her and tickled her silly. We ended up jumping into the
pool and laughing about me and Darien sitting in a tree--K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Wrinkled and tired after playing Marco Polo, she followed me to my room and grabbed a Calistoga from my fridge.
"You bought them?" She went to my bed and picked up three pairs of very sexy, very small underwear. I looked over to see what in the heck she was jabbering about, I think my heart stopped beating. My knees buckled out from under me and I grappled for the nightstand with a breathless gasp.
She held up the black and white thongs and sent me a sinister gaze. "Tomorrow we make you gorgeous." She giggled but I still couldn't catch my breath.
I had had no part in the purchase of the underwear and my gun was still in my truck. I felt more violated by this intrusion than I ever did at my yearly doctor exams. It terrified me that someone had snuck into my space and left me such an uncomfortable gift. It would have been a different story if perhaps a box of chocolates or a dozen red roses were lying on my bed—but underwear? What's more private than underwear?
"Can we have a sleepover tonight?" I asked and started packing for Vermont, leaving the thongs right where they were. It didn't even matter what she said, I was moving into the main house for the night and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop me.
I don't think I slept a wink that night. I tossed, turned, and listened to Roald's horrible taste in music until he finally turned off Meatloaf and stumbled up the stairs and silence blanketed the house. I think I actually preferred noise because then all I heard were strange sounds and the loud snoring of Hamlet and Othello. Both dogs were as big as horses. Both Great Danes with magnificent black coats and they both slobbered…a lot.
I tried counting sheep, I tried singing theme songs from TV shows, but nothing worked. The strange goings on that had transpired today pre-occupied me and as if things couldn't get worse, I started thinking about Ryan again.
Then I wondered if Ryan was the one stalking me and this was his idea of foreplay. I know, I know, I have thought that before, but perhaps I was right this time. Or perhaps I was just obsessed with sex lately and since I don't get any other form of foreplay I was inventing new scenarios and crossing my fingers that it was Ryan and not an evil guy who wanted revenge for something I did or said whilst I was incarcerated in Eastern Europe.