Still, as annoying as he was, being alone all day wasn’t as relieving as I’d hoped. Turned out I really did take comfort from my burly little brother’s presence, and I was jumpy as hell without him.
Thinking about why he was stretched so thin right now didn’t help either. I heard the click of Luke hanging up on me in my sleep, felt it like a punch to the gut, and despite doing everything I could to push him from my mind, he was all I could think about.
“You’re worried,” Gus said.
“Am not. He’s not my problem.”
“So? Doesn’t mean you can’t care.”
The conversation had, predictably, ended badly, but my denial left a bad taste in my mouth, because the truth was, I was worried. Luke had only been gone a couple of days, and we’d spoken once, but I knew him, even though I didn’t want to. He was struggling, and probably had no one around him who’d noticed.
Luke was good at that, at walls and facades, but never with me. I hadn’t seen his face last night—God, I miss his face—but I’d heard the catch in his voice, the dullness belying his anger. Perhaps I didn’t know what he needed anymore, but he needed something.
Another knock at the door startled me. “Bloody hell!”
I set my knife down and stormed to the back door, wrenching it open. There was no one there. I stepped back, seriously considering calling the police, and something on the step caught my eye before I could close the door. An envelope, and a small red box.
Stooping, I retrieved them and retreated inside. There was no writing on the envelope, but instinct—and logic—told me this delivery had nothing to do with Luke.
Unease turned my stomach. Nothing had happened since the break-in, leaving me to wonder if the concerns I’d shared with Gus about Laurent had been a figment of my imagination. Yeah, the dude was an arsehole, but was I really so important to him that he’d mess with me like this? He’d ditched me like I was nothing to him. Divorced and fleeced me like I was little more than inconvenient. The idea of him loitering around Rushmere didn’t make any sense.
But even as I thought it, flashes of how Laurent had treated his previous partners trickled into my brain. The derision with which he’d spoken of them, and the fury in his eyes when we’d stumbled across one once, living her best life.
He didn’t like people to be happy.
A laugh escaped me. Right, because you’re so damn happy, Mia.
The ridiculousness of my entire thought process gave me the courage to open the envelope. It was empty. The box was empty too, but a waft of something hit me when I opened it—cologne...expensive French cologne, and bile bubbled in my throat. It was him. It had to be.
But why?
And what the hell did he want?
* * *
I was no closer to figuring it out the next day, which was, thankfully, Friday, leaving me one more working day in a week that wouldn’t seem to end. The May Day bank holiday had gifted me two days off. I had zero plans of leaving the house and five p.m. Saturday couldn’t come fast enough.
First, though, I had a double bill of weddings to prep for.
“You should hire some help,” Gus said through a mouthful of rustic twine.
“I thought you were helping me?” I replied sweetly. “I can’t think of any other reason for you to be hanging around.”
“Hilarious. I bring you lunch, you put me to work, and I still get grief?”
I rolled my eyes. “You brought me lunch because you miss Luke and you hate eating alone.”
He didn’t deny it, just flicked water at me, and our dance continued well into the evening. I was dead on my feet when I drove us home, and didn’t think to ask where Luke’s van was until the following morning, but Gus was still in bed, so I spent my entire Saturday wondering if Luke had come home.
At five o’clock, I downed tools and shut the shop, taking care to check all the windows locks before I left a Mia-shaped hole in the door in my hurry to escape. But when I got home, any relief I’d felt at finishing my working week was eclipsed by the suffocating silence of an empty house. Gus had left a box of fish fingers in the freezer and buggered off for the night.
I couldn’t face dinner for one with Captain Birdseye. I opened some cheap Chablis instead and got my drink on while I roamed the house, searching for something—anything—to keep my mind off the two men who seemed intent on making my life hell, though there was no comparison between Laurent and Luke. One had broken my teenaged heart, the other...nah. No fucking way was he grinding me down. And despite the creepy delivery I’d received a few days ago, Laurent didn’t stand a chance against Luke when it came to space in my brain. Age-old recklessness and renewed obsession with my one true love had seen to that.
One true love. It sounded trite even in my own head. Pathetic. I was sick of thinking about it, about him, and most of all, I was sick of myself.
Didn’t stop me playing an unhealthy game of chicken with my phone, though. Like Luke hanging up on me hadn’t made his feelings about talking to me perfectly clear. Yeah, because it’s all about you.
Not for the first time, my selfishness when it came to Luke reared its ugly head. For years, I’d cursed him, hated him, and blamed him for just about everything I could think of. The only hardship I hadn’t managed to pin on him was my mother’s death, and when the fog of grief had begun to clear, a moment of clarity had hit me hard. Had me packing my bags and fleeing to France...straight into the arms of a man the polar opposite of the one who’d left me. Luke’s light had been dimmed by loss and pain, but he was worth a million of Laurent.
So why did you push him away?
A week ago I’d been sure of my answer, but now that Luke had thrown up a wall of his own, doubt crept through every fibre of my being. The lines between love and hate were blurred and I was beginning to realise I’d never hated him at all.
Chapter Seventeen
Luke
I sipped warm beer from a tiny glass as my uncle droned in my ear about networking, free food, and an open bar.
“Take it while it’s there, son. The amount we pay the bloody council in business rates.”
“I pay the council,” I corrected mildly. “And nothing here is free. We paid for the tickets.”
A fact that was leaving an increasingly bad taste in my mouth. Why the fuck was I here? The local business gala was everything I hated—bad clothes, bad food, and bad company if Jon didn’t shut the hell up anytime soon. I fiddled with my collar. The Navy had conditioned me to ridiculous outfits, but it had been a while since I’d worn anything but jeans, and the shirt and tie combo Fran had forced me into was making me sweat. Or maybe it was the two hundred people crammed into the town hall, none of whom I had a single thing to say to.