Chapter 5
Chapter Five
I tugged on a dressing gown and mooched into the open space of the flat. Robbie took one look at me and turned the kettle on. He made a cup of tea for me while he started his day with coffee, black.
‘What do you want for breakfast?’ he asked, looking into my depressingly bare cupboards.
‘I’m fine,’ I said on a yawn. ‘I don’t need anything.’
A banana rose up from the fruit bowl and hovered pointedly in front of me.
‘Ghost and I agree,’ Robbie said, arms crossed. ‘You need something.’ He eyed the banana. ‘I don’t think that’s going to cut it, Bob. I’ll run out. Don’t go anywhere.’
‘Bob?’ I said with a laugh.
‘It’s rude to keep calling him “Ghost”. He could be a Bob. Bob’s your uncle. He has uncle energy. He cares.’ More than Robbie’s own uncle had done.
‘Yeah, I always thought the energy was female. Maternal, you know? She clucks over me. Bobette, maybe.’
Robbie looked toward the still-hovering banana. ‘Raise the banana up if you’re a man. Set it down if you’re a woman.’
The banana rose up.
Huh, I guess she wasn’t poor murdered Barbara Quinn after all. She was a he.
‘There you have it.’ After a moment’s thought, he asked, ‘You okay with us calling you Bob? Up for yes, down for no.’
The banana bobbed up.
‘Bob it is.’ Robbie pressed a kiss to my forehead and headed for the door to get us some breakfast rations.
‘Robbie!’ I protested. ‘You really don’t need to go to any trouble. I’m fine with a banana.’
He hesitated, his back still to me. ‘You got attacked yesterday, Stacy, and I need to take care of you. Every urge in me is telling me to stick to you like glue and pile you under bodyguards, but I know you’d hate that, so I’m stifling that instinct.
But I need to do something. Let me feed you, Inspector. Please.’
‘I … Yeah. Sure. Whatever you need to do,’ I said weakly.
He nodded and walked out the door.
This relationship stuff was tricky.
The banana still hovered in front of me, and my resident ghost, the newly named Bob, pointedly pushed it towards me.
‘Right,’ I muttered. ‘I still need to start my day right.’ Dad had always said that. Start the day as you mean to go on.
I took the damn banana.
I’d taken a headache potion and I was dressed in my uniform, with hair and teeth brushed, by the time Robbie returned carrying the biggest stack of pastry boxes I’d ever seen in my life.
‘Robbie!’ I said, half-laughing. ‘I can’t eat all of that.’
‘I know,’ he replied, a shade sheepishly. ‘I couldn’t help myself. Any you don’t want you can take to work with you. I just wanted to make sure you had your favourite.’
‘Did you get one of everything from the bakery?’ I asked, half-joking.
He simply nodded.
I tried not to gape at him. ‘Well, thank you.’
He set the boxes down and pulled back the lids so I could examine the array of buttery goods he’d brought me. The pastries were a smorgasbord of icing sugar-dusted perfection, each item looking as golden and perfect as the next. My eyes zeroed in on one treat.
‘For future reference,’ I said as I picked up the custard slice. ‘This is my favourite.’ I bit into the slice and hastily caught some of the custard as it oozed out of the side. Layers of thick puff pastry, topped with thick vanilla custard and fancy fondant. Was there anything better?
Robbie watched me, indulgent and smiling as I valiantly battled my way through the slice.
‘It’s messy,’ he rumbled when I was done. He caught one of my fingers and licked off the dab of custard lingering there.
‘It is,’ I agreed, a shade breathlessly. ‘Messy but worth the clean-up.’
His eyes heated and I could tell he was thinking fun thoughts.
‘Hold that thought,’ I commanded. ‘I’m dressed, ready to go to work.’ My smile faded. ‘And we need to talk about my latest case.’
Robbie sat and snagged an apple turnover for himself. ‘All right. Tell me.’
‘The case I was called to yesterday evening? It was Ash Aspen.’
My ogre paused mid-bite. ‘Why that little fucker.’
‘Yeah. Jingo’s jumped ship, and I don’t know who to. He orchestrated the death of Ash Aspen, and now he’s in another host.’
‘Do you want me to shake up Reed? He’ll talk by the time I’m done with him.’
It was tempting. That alone told me the answer to his offer. I was a by-the-book girl. I had to be. If I joined the ranks of the corrupt, then I didn’t deserve my badge. ‘I appreciate the offer, but no. I need to do this by the book.’
‘You and that bloody book,’ he muttered. ‘Sometimes I almost get jealous of it.’
I cupped my hands around his beautiful face. ‘Well don’t. I’m marrying you, not the book. Which reminds me, you and Mum were talking venues last night, weren’t you? Did you narrow it down?’
‘Yes. We’re down to two places that your mother and I both like.’ He pulled out his phone and showed me the picture of a ridiculously stunning country mansion. ‘This is Capesthorne Hall. It’s an eighteenth-century Jacobean-style country house.’
‘You can’t call that place a house! It’s a huge sprawling mansion!’
‘Yes, it’s big and would certainly have the capacity we need. We’ll need space not just for key ogre families here, but some foreign ones as well.’
I blinked. ‘Right. It’ll cost an arm and a leg.’
‘It’s actually very reasonable.’ He shrugged. ‘Even with exclusive use.’
‘Okay, and the other?’
He pulled up another image. ‘Peckforton Castle. Built in the nineteenth century but with a deliberately gothic feel.’
I gaped at it. A castle. I could marry Robbie in a freaking castle.
I looked at my fiancé. It suited him, a castle. Not just because he was a warrior king, but because he deserved to relax on his wedding day, and with key ogres placed around the battlements, he could let his guard down in this beautiful fortress.
‘The castle,’ I blurted. ‘Let’s do it there.’
He lifted an eyebrow. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ I leaned across the table and kissed him. ‘I’ve got to get going or I’ll be late.’
‘You’re the boss,’ he pointed out. ‘You can be as late as you want.’
‘What I want,’ I said primly, ‘is not to be late.’
Looking amused, he started packing up the pastry boxes. ‘We don’t want that then, do we? I’ll drop you and the boxes off, Inspector. We may as well start your team’s day with a sugar high.’
‘You better not be bribing them with pastries.’
He batted his eyelashes at me. ‘Who? Me?’
I burst out laughing, loving this man all the more.