“Yes. I would like that.” He’d known he would take her with him, but he wasn’t going to force her to work. The fact that she wanted to was a huge plus. “I would love it if you would give me advice on the strength of the business. I would pay you. Well, when I can.”

“I’m a captive audience,” she said, her lips curling slightly. “Looking through your books and making a study of the business could take my mind off things.”

Things like the fact that an assassin was after her. Things like him. It killed him that she was lumping him in with all the bad things in her life.

She looked up in the distance. “What’s that?”

He squinted to see what she was talking about. Up ahead there seemed to be a bunch of cars parked on the sides of the main street running into town. “I don’t know. It looks like something’s going on in the square. It’s not carnival season or shrimp fest. We party a lot down here. Once we get past the square we’re only a few miles from the house.”

“Uh, I don’t think you’re exactly the most hated man in town, Remy,” she said, pointing at a huge banner that someone had draped across Main Street.

Welcome Home, Our Hero

Papillon’s Favorite Son, Remy Guidry

He stopped the truck in the middle of the road.

Now that was something he hadn’t expected.

* * * *

It had been the single hardest day of her life.

Okay, that was total hyperbole and insanely untrue, but sitting in Remy’s big old truck as they drove all day with weird shit right outside the window and about a million places she would have loved to stop and explore along the way but hadn’t been able to because she had been proving she could brood had been pure hell.

She hadn’t even gotten to run around the massive Buc-ee’s when they stopped for gas and to use the restroom. She had to pretend she wasn’t interested in its thousands of weird candy choices and hadn’t wanted to ask how they sold both barbecue ribs and garden gnomes, and a surprisingly large selection of socks.

No. She’d frowned and gone to the bathroom and hadn’t bought that CD that promised all the country classics sung in chipmunk voices.

She hadn’t gotten a waffle at the Waffle House they’d stopped at for breakfast. She’d gotten adult food, food that didn’t require maple syrup, and it had sucked.