The men were milling around the driveway several feet from the front door while Jules and Diane shared a series of kisses and embraced.

As Bette and Tina emerged from the door several feet behind them, Jules was holding Diane loosely around the waist after they released from their embrace, looking curiously into her partner’s sky blue eyes, which seemed to be full of emotion.

Logan and George were each laughing uproariously, slapping their thighs, and partially doubled up with laughter, while Peter was gesturing, apparently in the middle of a story.

Brom was further away from the rest of the group, twenty feet out into the driveway that led to the front door, talking to Dave. Personal security was thinner than usual around them this morning and through the afternoon, because Dave was coordinating activities in Winchester, where they suspected the partner of the man who had attacked Bette in the tunnels was holed up in. Meanwhile, Peter’s security detail was taking care of something Peter and Bette had planned for concerning the truck and trailer Bette had driven into the equestrian estate the night before. Tina’s guard was back in New York keeping an eye on Angelica and was monitoring things around their townhouse.

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Miller

The drive from her hotel to the fields bordering Peter’s estate proved to be a quick and easy one. Much sooner than she expected, she found she was just a mile from the narrow road that led to Peter’s equestrian estate. Miller pulled into a clearing in the shade formed by a grove of trees off of a country road that peeled off from the main road she’d been on. She backed up to hide the late-model and well-equipped SUV that the head of a corporate security firm that she’d done her last few jobs for had arranged for her to use for this job.

Using one of the burner cells she’d picked up in the electronics store in the mall near her hotel, she tapped a text out to Jackson that she was in the area and could meet as he’d requested. She tapped another text after he acknowledged her text to tell him she’d tell him where they could meet after she found a secure spot where they couldn’t be observed from the road.