Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
LUKE SAT AT his desk at work, looking at a tricky coding problem that had stumped his software developers. At least, that’s what he was pretending to do. In reality, he’d doodled a row of circles and was busy colouring in every other one. First red, then green, then blue. Did he have a yellow pen anywhere?
He lifted his hands up to rub his eyes, fingers brushing against several days’ worth of blond stubble. Shaving seemed like too much effort at the moment.
Nearly two weeks had passed since the life he’d enjoyed with Ash was thrown into chaos. First by his sister being kidnapped, then by the revelation that his girlfriend wasn’t the sweet ex-housewife she’d pretended to be. It was five days since Ash rescued Tia then promptly disappeared, and the whole episode had left him shattered.
Tia’s distress was all too obvious as well. “Please find her,” she’d begged over breakfast that morning, stirring her Coco Pops into a soggy mess. “I’ve got to thank her. She saved me and changed my entire life over the last few months. I have to tell her that. I need her to know.”
“I’ll try; I promise.”
Tia hadn’t come out and said it, but Luke knew she blamed him for Ash’s departure. He hadn’t exactly been kind when she admitted her deception. Guilt over that gnawed away inside him, because despite everything, Ash had come through and got his sister back in one piece, even getting abducted at gunpoint herself in the process.
Then she left. He and Tia had been waiting for her back at their home, but she’d gone to the airport and got on a plane without so much as a goodbye. By the time he came to his senses and started looking for her, any connection had been severed. The friends she’d been working with didn’t leave their contact details, and she’d taken her phone. The only evidence she’d ever existed was a handful of clothes at one end of his wardrobe and a couple of photos on his computer.
He racked his brain for anything useful. Was her name even Ash? He’d heard a few people call her Emmy, but when he’d brought it up, she’d brushed it off.
“Most people call me by a shortened version of my middle name,” she’d said.
Ashlyn Emily Hale.
He repeated it over and over like a mantra.
Tia’s wasn’t the only life she’d saved. When Luke foolishly went to meet her kidnapper in the dead of night, Ash had followed him to an isolated forest and stopped the man from putting a bullet through Luke’s brain. The concussion he’d received in the process made the wild ride back to civilisation hazy. She’d taken him to a huge house in London, but as they’d arrived and left in the dark, he didn’t know whereabouts.
His vague recollection of what the street outside looked like hadn’t been enough to narrow down the location. He thought maybe Chelsea or Kensington, Knightsbridge even, but he’d got his driver to take him around those areas and nothing had looked familiar. When he thought back to the events leading up to Tia’s rescue, he realised he’d been kept carefully cocooned away from the action in the palatial abode while people worked around him.
Why hadn’t he asked Ash’s friends more questions? They worked at some sort of security company, but he’d never found out the name of it. When Dan visited for the final time, Luke had been dead to the world, the events of the last few awful days having caught up to him in the form of a dreamless sleep. She’d left a message with his housekeeper wishing him and Tia all the best for the future before she left as well.
The only other friend of Ash’s he’d had contact with was a guy called Mack, who’d turned out to be a fellow hacker. Luke had sent him a message yesterday, but it bounced back, undeliverable.
He had nothing.
Nothing but an earful from his mother, anyway.
“That awful girlfriend of yours turned up at my house,” she’d informed him when he admitted defeat and answered her eighth call.
“Which one?” Luke had several exes that fell into the “What was I thinking?” category.
“Ashley. She was incredibly rude. I’ve never seen Mrs. Squires so distressed.”
Score one for Ash. Mrs. Squires made Hitler look benevolent. “When?”
“A few days ago. Right before my bridge supper with the Renwick-Smythes. She arrived in an Aston Martin, if you can believe it. Obviously stolen. Nobody refined enough to own such a quintessentially British vehicle would ever be so uncouth.”
“What did she say?”
“She accused your father of having an affair. Where on earth did she get such a ridiculous idea?”
“I don’t know, Mother.”
Ash had been right on the money with her suspicions, but his mother lived in a world ruled by denial and social standing. He’d have more chance of crossing the Arctic in flip-flops than getting his mother to accept the truth.
“I suggest you find yourself a lady with some manners.”
“Yes, Mother.”
He sighed as he hung up. Never before had he let his guard down enough to actually start caring for a woman, but Ash had smashed through his defences and broken his heart.
When she’d ended up living in his house, nothing had felt so right. They’d spent every bit of his spare time together, and what’s more, he’d enjoyed it. Not because of what they’d been doing—watching a movie or eating a takeaway were hardly the most exciting activities—but because she’d been by his side. Pre-Ash, the scariest word in the English language, the one guaranteed to send him sprinting in the opposite direction, had been commitment . Now the one that terrified him was love. What if he only had that one shot at it? And he’d missed.
Rubbing his eyes, Luke stared again at the code on the screen. He’d spent his whole life talking to computers, but in the last week, it seemed as if they’d suddenly started to speak a different language because the words in front of him meant nothing.
He carried on colouring his circles instead.
At four in the afternoon, a knock at the door made him jump. He peeled off a couple of paperclips that had stuck to his face when he’d fallen asleep on the desk and tried to look busy.
“Come in.”
His secretary poked her head around the door. “Sorry to wake you, but Tia will be finishing school shortly. Do you want to pick her up or shall I arrange a driver?”
With Ash gone, he and Tia only had each other now. Nobody else understood what they’d gone through. After a heart-to-heart over pizza last night, they’d decided Tia would move in with him officially since she was seventeen and hated living with their mother. Luke quite understood why. He’d broken the news to her mother this morning, and her initial unhappiness at the idea had soon dissipated when she realised that not having to pretend to be a parent would give her more time to spend at the country club.
“No, I’ll get Tia. Can you send her a text message to let her know I’m just leaving?” It wasn’t as if he’d get anything done at work that afternoon, anyway.
“Of course, Luke.”
He took the express lift down to the basement car park and bleeped open his silver Porsche 911. Normally, the roar of the engine gave him a buzz, but even the burst of acceleration as he pulled out onto the main road didn’t make a dent in his misery.
Tia’s school lay half an hour from the office, and thanks to his secretary’s well-timed wake-up call, Luke pulled up outside just as Tia exited the building with Arabella, her best friend for as long as Luke could remember. Secretly, he’d always found the girl a tad irritating.
“It’s my turn in the front,” Tia said as they neared the car.
“Well, make sure you pull the seat right forward,” Arabella grumbled. “You know there’s hardly any legroom in the back.
“Good day at school?” Luke asked.
Tia shrugged. “Okay. We’ve got a new project to do for art and a ton of chemistry homework.”
“We’ve got a mock exam next week for chemistry,” Arabella said.
“Better knuckle down then, girls.”
The pair chattered away for the rest of the trip to Lower Foxford, discussing schoolwork, clothes, movies, and make-up the way teenage girls did. Not boys, though. Luke listened carefully for that, always in big brother mode.
At a red traffic light, Arabella told a joke and Luke glanced across at his sister, catching a half-smile, the first he’d seen since the kidnapping. That gave him hope. Perhaps with time, Ash’s desertion would get easier for both of them.
Luke dropped Arabella home first, hardly a chore since she lived on the same street, then slotted the 911 neatly into his garage alongside his Porsche Cayenne. Yes, he had the mansion, the cars, and the money, and to anyone looking from the outside, his life was the picture of success. But on the inside? His heart ached with every beat.
Still, the world kept turning, right?
He hefted Tia’s schoolbag over his shoulder and pushed through the door to the house. In their new routine, he headed to the kitchen to grab a beer and Tia followed him.
“Have you heard from Ash?” she asked as she reached past him into the fridge and grabbed a can of diet cola.
“Nothing, Tia.” He hated to dash her hopes, but he needed her to understand they’d probably never hear anything. “I’m not sure she’ll get in touch, sis. She did leave the country, after all, and we don’t know who she really was.”
“But we were friends. I know we were. Even if she hates you, she still might call me.”
Nice of his sister to be so tactful. “I suppose, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Have you done your homework yet?”
“You sound just like Mother.”
She grabbed a packet of crisps and stomped off to her room. The windows rattled as she slammed the door in the otherwise silent house.
Tia couldn’t have meant that, surely? Luke had aspired to many things in his life, but being like his mother wasn’t one of them. Should he lighten up on Tia a bit? He took a slug of beer and scraped a hand through too-long hair. Talk about being out of his depth. He only wanted the best for his sister, but being responsible for a teenager was hard . Ash had instinctively understood how to handle her, but he didn’t share that magic touch.
A sigh escaped, so loud and heavy it filled the room. Food. Food would help. What had his housekeeper left in the fridge? A lasagne big enough to feed Luke, Tia, and half the village, it seemed. In true cooking-for-dummies style, the post-it note stuck to the top told him what temperature to set the oven at and how long to cook it for. Would Tia show her face to eat?
“Food’s ready,” he called once the timer dinged.
When he shouted for the third time, she slunk downstairs in her pyjamas, feet shoved into a pair of dinosaur slippers that Ash had bought for her. That was a good sign, right? That she’d reappeared? During dinner, he carefully avoided mentioning Ash, and they actually managed a pleasant conversation. Well, Tia talked about her horses and Luke listened. Three months ago, chatting like that would have been impossible. Tia had acted like a spoilt brat by default before Ash came on the scene.
He had so much to thank Ash for, but how?
A movie after dinner, alone, did little to occupy his mind, and he fell asleep dreaming of Ash’s curves. Her smile. The way she’d curled against him in the evenings when they watched TV together.
Man, he missed her.
Please, let tomorrow hurt a little less.