The Reed Security Relationship Manual: A Reed Security Romance - Giulia Lagomarsino (best book club books of all time TXT) 📗

parents had become like her parents since we reconnected. They were always talking on the phone, and my mom was always whispering in her ear about having grandkids. Hell, just getting her to marry me was hard enough.

When I didn’t hear anything, I slipped off my shoes and tossed my bag on the ground, taking out my notebook. After grabbing a beer from the fridge, I sat down at the kitchen table and dug in. I tapped the pen against my lips as I thought about what I would put in the manual.

1. Don’t tell your woman you want to eat her like a mangy dog eats garbage.

That should be pretty self-explanatory. Actually, that shouldn’t even be advice. Who would actually say that? Me. I scratched out that line. It really didn’t need to be in the manual.

1. Don’t tell your woman you want to eat her like a mangy dog eats garbage.

However, there was something related that did need to be in there.

1. Do not under any circumstances ask women for advice on how to seduce your woman when they’ve been drinking, or when they’ve been reading romance novels.

I grimaced, thinking about the shit advice they gave me. Those women had me such a nervous wreck that I completely screwed up everything. Of course, that could have just been Jessica. She was a knockout. I took a deep breath and focused again.

2. Trust your woman. If you don’t believe what she’s telling you, no matter how crazy, she’ll never want you.

I had plenty of experience with that, and while I still wasn’t ready to admit that what we saw were ghosts when we “cleansed” the house, I wasn’t going to tell her she was wrong either.

I rubbed my now throbbing forehead as I tried to come up with anything else that would be useful. It was just so damn hard. My relationship with Jessica was based on a damn thumb war gone wrong. However, there was also the fact that my old buddy had been trying to tell me on his deathbed to take care of her. I just hadn’t wanted to believe it. I thought he was hallucinating and spewing bullshit, but it turned out he was right.

3. Listen to the ghosts of your past.

I glanced at that one again and scratched it off. It was too specific to me. Nobody else had ghosts that spoke to them. And the only person that knew was Becky. I’d like to keep it that way as long as possible.

3. Listen to the ghosts of your past.

3. Do not call your woman’s vagina a honeypot.

I nodded to myself, glad that I came up with something useful. My mind kept drifting back to the day I lost Mike and the words he said to me.

“Take care of her. She’s waiting for you.”

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered…were we fated to be together? It sounded so ridiculous. I didn’t really believe in fate and all that bullshit, but there was a reason Mike said her name as he laid there dying. There was a reason that he mentioned her flaming red hair and her sassy attitude. He was leading me to her, and had continued to speak to me throughout my life. I just assumed it was guilt nagging at me, but then I met Jessica. What if I never walked into that bar and sat beside her? What if the thumb war had never happened? What if I never stayed in that house with her? What would have happened to her? Would I have lost her forever? No, she was fated to be with me, of that I was sure. And I hadn’t been sure of a whole lot other than her.

4. Take care of your fated.

I looked down at the list and sighed. I was going to sound like an idiot. Nobody believed in fated relationships. It was ridiculous. I should just scratch it out, but the longer I stared at it, the more I knew I couldn’t scratch it out because it was real.

“What are you working on?”

I jumped about ten feet in the air as Jessica snuck up behind me. I quickly gathered my paper in my hands and tried to hide it from her, but I was too slow. She narrowed her eyes at me and held out her hand. I shook my head slowly. There was no way I could let her see this.

“Nick, is there something you’re hiding from me?”

“No,” I croaked out. “I was…planning a trip for the two of us. A sort of babymoon thing.”

“People do that before they have the baby. We’re not having a baby yet. How did you know about that anyway?”

I huffed out a laugh. “You know…because of Tony and the whole…Molly thing.” I swallowed hard, hoping that she bought it, and she really did seem to. She nodded and turned. Just as I was dropping my guard, she spun around and snatched the paper from my hands. I tried to get it back from her, but she was too fast. I watched in horror as her eyes scanned over the few notes I had taken.

“What is this?” she asked, looking up at me.

I shook my head slightly. I had no idea what to say.

“Is this for the manual?”

“You know about that?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding me? Everyone knows about that.” Her eyes went back to the paper and she nodded. “Well, you have some good points.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, I mean the whole ‘not asking women for advice about sex’ is definitely something I would agree with. Seriously, I’m not even sure how you thought that was okay.”

“Hey, I was having trouble…connecting.”

She smiled at me sweetly. “Your sexual frustrations are what make you so appealing.”

“I don’t have sexual frustrations.”

“What would you call them? Mishaps?”

Hell no. That sounded worse. “Look, it’s in the past. Can we forget it?”

“Trust your woman,” she laughed lightly. “Yeah, I would say that was definitely a low point for you. Not that I