Instead, thanks to a painfully slow group of out-of-towners who were stopping every five steps to take selfies from about twenty-five angles each time, Nash and Chelle made a quick left at the path leading toward the pet café where they’d first met up. Unlike that day, though, it was packed with people and dogs of every size and shape—not to mention a handful of cats in walking harnesses similar to Sir Hiss’s. Still, he managed to find them a table away from the path.

“So you know about the bet,” he said after they’d sat down, gotten pup cups for Mary and Groucho and a hit of catnip for Sir Hiss, who was now as mellow as the orange ball of fluff was probably ever able to be.

“Yeah,” Chelle said as she held her steaming cup of hot cocoa in her gloved hands. “It’s kinda why we’re married.”

That reminder annoyed him more than it should, a feeling he folded up and put in his back pocket before it could get out.

“Well, the gossip sites found out, and then someone made a TikTok, and after that all of the press attention just sort of took off.” He sipped his hot cocoa with extra marshmallows and watched Chelle for any signs of familiarity. “You really had never heard any of this?”

She shook her head. “My For You Page is aspirational home DIY projects and thirst traps.”

“Stay on that side of it, then.” Except for the thirst traps. Fuck those guys.

“So, do people stalk you like you’re famous or something?” she asked.

If this was famous, he would like to go back to being just another rich guy in a city full of them. “More like I find photographers outside my building when it’s a slow news day.”

She made sympathetic noises. “That sounds very not-fun.”

“It could be worse.” He picked up Mary’s pup cup so she could better get to the goodness at the bottom. “I could be on the run from a veiled chimera.”

“Ah,” she said with a chuckle, “you’ve made it to book two.”

Made it? More like he immediately started it as soon as he read the last line of book one. Like he even had a choice. There was no way he should be the only one reading her books. He’d already started priming Macon with hints about a great new unpublished author without giving away the fact that the author was Chelle. Yeah, he’d lied and told his brother that he’d found some really good fanfic, which there was a ton of, so that his brother wouldn’t question how Nash had gotten his hands on an unpublished manuscript.