Page 159 of The Black Trilogy

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.

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