He sat back.

“You didn’t tell me they’d called your parents and your sister.”

Damn it. She hadn’t told him that on purpose; she knew he’d lose it.

“Of course they have; come on, you knew they would. But what I’m saying is, they’ll stop after a while, once we get boring to them. Please let us get boring to them, okay?”

He slid his phone back into his pocket.

“Okay. Even though I really want to tell those assholes off, okay.”

She stood up, and pulled him with her.

“Good, now that’s settled. Hopefully, in a few months, this will be nothing more than a lovely story someone tells a kid in trouble about rising from adversity. ‘If Olivia Monroe could get arrested as a teenager and later be the founding partner at one of the top law firms in Los Angeles, you can, too!’ they’ll say.”

Max followed her into the kitchen.

“One of the top law firms in Los Angeles, huh?” he said.

She took leftover pizza out of the refrigerator.

“People always told me to dream big, you know.”

Chapter Eighteen

Max was home for the weekend a week later—the last weekend before August recess—and he had to admit Olivia had been right. Maybe because they’d been boring, or maybe because much bigger news had knocked them out of the headlines, but the stories about them had almost completely died down. Random pictures of Olivia still popped up from time to time—once heading into the community center, another time walking into the gym—but even the paparazzi didn’t care about them anymore after those first few awful days.

They still took precautions—Olivia had swapped cars with different friends to make it harder to follow her; she and Ellie had hired a temp for a few weeks to answer their phones; and Max had stopped going to her house, for fear the press would discover where she lived. But other than all of that, life had mostly returned to normal.

Max looked over at her, in her spot in the corner of his couch, and smiled. That line of tension that had been there on her forehead for the past month had faded. But . . . her shoulders still looked too tense as she hunched over her phone.

What she needed was a vacation.

Wait. Yes. What they both needed was a vacation! Max pulled up his calendar on his phone and smiled.

“What are you doing next weekend?” he asked.

Olivia sat up and narrowed her eyes at him.

“I sort of assumed I’d be here—why, are you gone then? I thought your town halls didn’t start until the second week of August.”

His staff had built in a few days of break for him, which he hadn’t had time to think about until just this moment.

“This last month has been so hard, and I think we deserve an actual vacation,” he said.

A smile spread across Olivia’s face.

“What do you have in mind?”

Max grinned at her.

“Hawaii.”

Olivia’s mouth dropped open.

“Hawaii? For just the weekend?”

Max shook his head.

“For, let’s say . . . five days, if you can manage it? I get back here from DC on Thursday night, God willing—we can leave Friday morning, and come back, like . . . Tuesday night. I know the office has been pretty busy lately—can you take a few days off?”

He’d fallen in love with this idea in the last two minutes. Now he just had to convince Olivia.

“Ellie was lecturing me the other day to take a few days off,” she said. “But Hawaii? You know, I’ve actually never been. It was always too expensive for us to go there on vacations when I was growing up, and then I’ve been on the East Coast for so long and Hawaii is so far from there I didn’t even really think about it. Isn’t that kind of far for a five-day trip, though? And isn’t this kind of last-minute?”

Max ignored that last question.

“It’s a shorter flight from L.A. to Hawaii than it is from L.A. to DC—okay, barely, but it is shorter—and the amazing thing about flying to Hawaii is that, because of the time difference, you can take a nine a.m. flight from LAX and be on the beach by noon.”

Well, that was a slight exaggeration, but it was worth it. He could already see the glimmer in her eye.

“I like the sound of that. Go on.”

Shit, that had been his main selling point; he hadn’t had to sell anyone on Hawaii in a while. What to say?

“Second, I know a great hotel there—we won’t have to deal with press or anyone who gives a shit about either one of us. We’ll just lie by the beach or snorkel around and look at sea turtles, or lie by the pool drinking mai tais and eating poke, and it’ll be perfect.”

She pressed her lips together, in that way he knew she did when she was fighting back a smile.

“Beach, turtles, mai tais, poke . . . I love all of those things. But . . .” She stopped and looked at him. He tried to make his eyes extra pleading, and she laughed out loud.

“If you think those puppy dog eyes are going to win me over . . . well, you’re correct, but to be fair, I was mostly already won over by all of that other stuff. Are you sure we can get a room in your dream of a hotel at this late date, though? It’s summer vacation, isn’t everyone in Hawaii?”

He pulled his phone out of his pocket.

“Let me make a call.”

Five minutes later he hung up the phone with a grin on his face.

“We have a room at the hotel from Friday until Tuesday. Are you in?”

With a smile on her face, Olivia looked up from her phone.

“I just double-checked with Ellie to make sure there’s nothing crucial, and she told me she’d fire me if I don’t take this trip, so . . . I guess I’m in.”

Which is how they ended up in two first-class seats from LAX to Oahu that Friday morning. She fell asleep on his shoulder as soon as they took off, but he nudged her awake about an hour before they landed.

“I don’t want you to miss your first descent into Hawaii,” he said.

She smiled sleepily at him and turned to look out the window. For a while, nothing disturbed the endless blue of the ocean. And then, suddenly . . .

“Is that it?” she asked.

He peered over her shoulder and nodded.

“That’s it. I can’t wait for you to see it.”

They landed during a soft, warm rain. At first Max was disappointed that Olivia’s first views of Hawaii would be in the rain, until she pointed.

“A rainbow!”

She had a look of pure awe on her face. Max could have watched Olivia look at that rainbow for hours.

The rainbow wavered in front of them as they drove away from the airport, but finally the sun came all the way out, and the rainbow disappeared, just as they made the turn toward their hotel.

“Now,” Max said. “Let’s see just how fast we can plant our asses in lounge chairs by the pool.”

They checked into their hotel in a flash, and raced, giggling, into their room to change. Olivia threw off her clothes almost before Max had his suitcase open, and before he could pounce on her, she’d pulled a bright red bikini on and slipped on flip-flops. He reassured himself that he’d have plenty of opportunities to pounce on her this weekend.

“What’s taking you so long? I thought this was a race.” Olivia grinned at him, her hat in one hand and a bottle of sunscreen in the other. “Get my back, will you?”