Pitch Black: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 1) (23 page)

What did he want?

I soon found out. Before breakfast he screwed me over the kitchen island. After breakfast, he took me over the dining room table, and then in the hallway. We’d been aiming for the lounge at that point, but we didn’t quite make it.

“Why are you acting like a nymphomaniac?” I gasped after the second round.

“If Tia’s moving in, it’s going to put a dent in my plans to christen every room in this house. I want to cross a few off the list before she gets here.”

“Fair enough.” I was all for that.

Chapter 23

WE PICKED TIA up from hospital in the afternoon, complete with several bottles of pills and a long list of dos and don’ts. On the way home, we stopped off at the house Luke grew up in, where Tia still lived with her mother. Woodley Hall was a huge country pile that screamed old money.

“Nice,” I said as we turned into the drive.

“It is now. It was in a terrible state when our father died,” Luke said. “We almost lost it after he ran out of money. I’m sure that’s what caused his heart attack.”

Tia gasped from the back seat. “We nearly lost our home?”

Luke nodded.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, you do now.”

Luke had tried to shield her as she grew up, convinced he was doing the right thing. I wasn’t so sure—the world might be full of shit, but living in a bubble was no better.

Luke’s mother was reading a novel in the lounge when we arrived. When he’d called earlier to tell her Tia would be staying with us for a while, the news was met with a vague comment of, “I hope you both have a good time, darling,” and that was that. It was almost as if Tia was popping over for a brief visit rather than moving out for weeks.

Even now, Mrs. Halston-Cain made the effort of raising her eyes from the book seem like a chore. When she saw me standing behind Luke, a slight look of puzzlement came over her face. I say slight because most of her facial features had been frozen in place by Botox.

“Who are you? Do I know you?”

“I’m Ashlyn. You saw me yesterday at the hospital.” And ignored me completely.

“Ash is my girlfriend,” Luke said.

“Oh.” Her tone conveyed her disappointment. “What happened to Caroline?”

“I broke up with Caroline three months ago.”

“Such a shame. Caroline was a lovely girl. It would have been a wonderful family for you to marry into, what with her father being a banker and her mother being such an active member of the hospital fundraising committee. Girls like Caroline don’t grow on trees, you know. Are you sure there’s no chance of you getting back together?”

Hey, don’t mind me, lady. I’m only standing right next to your son.

“Mother! Show some tact, and don’t be so rude to Ash.”

“Sorry, darling,” she said, when in reality it was clear she was anything but. “So, Ashlyn, what do your parents do?”

“My dad’s an accountant and my mum’s a teacher.”

Nice, normal professions, I thought, but still her face fell. It was tempting to tell her the truth, that my mother was a drugged out hooker and my father was a sperm donor, just to see her reaction. But I couldn’t do that to Luke.

“Never mind, dear, I’m sure you’ll find a nice man to marry one day, in spite of that.” The words, “Just not my son,” remained unspoken at the end of her sentence.

Her attitude didn’t go unnoticed by Luke. “That’s it. We’re getting Tia’s things, and we’re leaving,” he snapped.

Tia rolled her eyes at me and mouthed, “See.”

Yes, I did indeed see.

When we arrived back home, Luke supported Tia while she hobbled up the steps into the house. She’d had her ankle X-rayed, and while it wasn’t broken, it was still the size of a grapefruit. Her broken arm prevented her from using crutches, but she’d been given a cane.

“It makes me feel a hundred years old,” she said as she shuffled through the hallway.

“Better than hopping,” I said.

Luke got Tia settled on the sofa in the den while I carried her bags upstairs. It took me three trips. How long did she plan on staying?

The following morning found me in the kitchen, having breakfast with the newest addition to the household. I was eating an egg white omelette—I’d gotten pretty good at making those—while Tia snarfed down a bowl of Lucky Charms with her good arm. The TV was on quietly in the background, playing one advert after another for all things festive.

“What are you and my brother doing at Christmas?” Tia asked.

“Luke’s made dinner reservations for the pair of us at a restaurant in town. Have you got plans with your mother, or do you want me to see if they have space for one more?”

Tia sighed. “Mother has plans, but I’m not part of them. I never am. She said Mrs. Squires would make me something nice for dinner, but she won’t. She hates me.”

“I doubt she hates you.”

“For Christmas dinner last year, she gave me chicken nuggets and microwave chips.”

“Okay, I’ll admit it doesn’t sound like she went all out.”

“She’s awful. She’s rubbish at cooking, she doesn’t clean properly, and she gets in everyone’s business. She’s been our housekeeper since Dad was alive. I’m sure she’s only around because she has too much dirt on mother to fire.”

“So you want to come with us to the restaurant, then?”

“Yes, please.”

I sent Luke a text asking him to change the booking, and a few minutes later he called me back.

 
“The restaurant’s full. The manager said there’s no way they can accommodate an extra person.”

“Did you tell them we wouldn’t need a bigger table? We could all squash onto ours.”

“I tried that, but no go.”

“Shit. Tia’s dreading Christmas Day with Mrs. Squires.”

“I can understand that—Mrs. Squires is a hard-nosed bitch. She makes Ilse Koch look like she was just a bit misunderstood.”

“If she’s that bad, we can’t leave Tia on her own. Is there another restaurant we could try?”

“I doubt we’d get a table at this short notice. How about we stay home?”

How about we dish up cardboard with a side of burnt bits? Because that was how bad my version of a roast dinner would be.

“Nora’s off, and you realise my culinary skills are limited?” I said.

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not fussy. Could you pick up some pre-prepared meals and bung them in the oven? And maybe something for dessert?”

“I can probably manage that.”

Oh, what I would have given to be able to call Bradley at that moment. He’d have rustled up a four-course dinner and a couple of waiters to serve it without batting an eyelid. Knowing Bradley, probably a band and some dancing girls as well.

My mind wandered back to the year he’d attempted to recreate the “Twelve days of Christmas” out of the well-known carol. The five gold rings were all right, but let me tell you, swans are not as peaceful and serene as they look. 

As Bradley chased one of them through the house, I remembered my husband saying, “Somebody get a gun, we can have them for lunch.”

“No more bullet holes in the walls,” Bradley screeched. We’d finally ended up rugby tackling the sodding thing in an upstairs hallway.

Maybe Christmas at Luke’s wouldn’t be so bad after all. I broke the news about us cooking to Tia, and she cheered up a bit.

“I’d better go to the supermarket, then,” I said. While I lived at Hazelwood Farm I’d got by with provisions from the local shop, but I wasn’t sure they’d have a turkey.

“Can I come? I never get out much, and my ankle feels much better today.”

“Sure, why not?” That way she could pick out her own ready-meal.

Tia proved useful when, with a quick phone call, she commandeered the driver who usually took her to school, and we rode to the big supermarket in town. 

I’d never had to do my own shopping—Toby decided what I should eat, and my housekeeper went out and bought it, so the shopping experience was a novelty. And then somehow, on the drive to town, “we’ll just pick up a lasagne or something and maybe a trifle,” turned into “we might as well get a turkey and all the stuff that goes with it. I mean how hard can it be?”

The car park was busy, so the driver dropped us off at the entrance to the store.

“Call when you want to be picked up,” he said. “I’ll wait somewhere safer.”

Safer?

The meaning of his comment became clear when we found a trolley and headed inside.

Now, over the previous decade, I’d probably been to every war zone in the world. I’d swum with the Navy Seals and done survival training in the jungles of Belize. I’d trekked through the Antarctic, and I’d completed the Marathon de Sables. But none of that compared with the horrors of Sainsbury’s the day before Christmas.

To say it was chaos was like saying World War II was a minor disagreement. The place was mobbed, and we hadn’t been inside two minutes when a catfight broke out over a packet of Brussels sprouts. Seriously. I mean, who even likes those? At home, we had our own tradition. Toby bought the nasty little suckers, and after lunch, my friends and I lined them up out back and used them for target practice.

As we wandered through the melee, neither of us had a clue what we were doing.

“We could start with the turkey?” suggested Tia. “We’ll need one of those for sure.”

We headed for the poultry aisle, only to be greeted with a bewildering array of choice.

I stared at the shelves. “Why the fuck are there so many different kinds? Oh shit, Luke’ll kill me if he hears me swearing around you.”

“I have no idea. And I won’t tell him about the swearing if you don’t.”

“Deal. How about this one? The turkeys on the label look happy.” And that seemed as good a reason as any to buy it.

“Yeah, that’ll do. I don’t like the idea of eating an unhappy turkey,” Tia said.

Next up, we hit the produce section. Recalling Toby’s insistence that I should eat variety, I tossed a vegetable of every colour into the trolley. I had no idea how to cook most of them, but I could work that out later. Tia wasn’t looking comfortable by that point and narrowly missed getting her injured ankle rammed by a tiny woman who could barely see over her trolley.

“Do you want to sit down somewhere?” I asked her.

“No, I’m not going to abandon you in this mayhem.”

Hmmm. “The trolley’s quite big. You could sit in it, and I’ll push you.”

“Okay.” Her giggles bubbled over.

With me lifting, Tia scrambling, and a bit of assistance from a handily placed vegetable rack, she ended up in the trolley. Her leg stuck awkwardly over the top as I steered towards the dairy aisle. Now we were making faster progress. This was good.

I added cream, milk, and ready-made custard to the trolley then leaned back against a shelf to take stock of the situation.

“What else do we need?” I asked Tia, who had googled the ingredients for a traditional Christmas dinner on her smartphone.

“I think we have everything for the starter and main course, but we haven’t got anything for dessert. Head for the bakery aisle.”

I wheeled the trolley in that direction, dodging sprinting toddlers and lost husbands. A Christmas pudding whizzed past my ear, thrown by a little old lady who was shouting at a harried-looking mother in an argument over the last carton of eggnog. I wished I’d worn body armour. Honestly, this was worse than being on the front line. At least the rules of engagement were easy to understand out there.

We finally made it to the checkout, and Tia passed the groceries up to me as I stacked them on the conveyor belt. The shop assistant gave her a dirty look for sitting in the trolley.

I pointed at her puffy ankle and cast. “She got wounded in a battle over cranberry sauce in aisle twelve.”

The shop assistant looked confused, but there were a couple of sniggers behind us. After a nasty moment with an unreadable barcode, we got everything bagged up and paid for, and I called for an evacuation.

The car sped up, the chauffeur wearing the grim look of a man under siege. I hauled Tia into the backseat, threw the bags in the boot and leapt in after her.

“Drive! Drive!” Tia shouted, then collapsed into a fit of laughter as the man stepped on it.

There had been times in my life when I wondered whether it was necessary to employ someone to do my shopping. Never again. The first thing I’d do when I got back home was give my housekeeper a raise.