Page 64 of Shadows of the Soul

Trust Rebecca to spill the beans on my broken heart, but not my broken family. It wasn’t like the whole of the party wouldn’t have known something was up from the little fight fiasco.

“I’ll take a cookie,” I said. Because if that was a perk of getting your heart broken, then I was milking it for all it was worth.

Maggie beamed like the cursed sun shining down over the house and ran back upstairs. I perused another six websites, each confirming what I already knew. With a sigh, I downloaded the legal document I required and updated the date and address before printing it out.

“Did you find anything?” Rebecca asked as she floated down the stairs carrying a plate of cookies. Bella wound between her legs with a loud purr. I wasn’t sharing my cookies with the cat.

“Two months,” I stated, twisting the document so she could look at it. “I’m serving him with a formal eviction notice, but because I don’t have any grounds to do so, I have to give him two months to find alternative accommodation.”

She snorted as she placed the cookies down in front of me and sat in the visitor’s chair as she read over the legal jargon.

“What about Aunt Liz?” I asked.

“It seems our devious aunty has been no further than The Big Easy.”

I snagged a cookie and pushed away from my desk. “Why was she in New Orleans?”

Rebecca shook her head. “I have no idea. She drove down, checked in at a small local hotel. She ordered room service for all her meals apart from the night before she came back.”

“What happened that night?”

“On that night, she dined at a Michelin-star restaurant. She met a man, mid-thirties, smartly dressed, and they enjoyed a three-course meal. Then she left. The morning after, she checked out and drove back here.”

“No visits to weird voodoo priests?”

“Not unless that’s who she had dinner with.”

“Huh. Can we find out who the man was?”

“Sebastian is busy tracking down any footage he can find of him. As soon as he has it, he’ll send it over.”

Which meant I couldn’t go any further with the Aunt Liz mystery at present. Which brought me back to my kitty problem.

Rebecca slid the eviction notice back to me. I signed it and folded it up before stuffing it inside an envelope.

“Perhaps he will leave sooner?” she said.

“Why? Because he’s been so amenable thus far?”

She swiped a cookie from the plate and nibbled it. “Have you considered he’s being a male?”

“Is that an excuse for stupidity?”

“No, it’s an excuse for their knee-jerk reactions to situations they find hard to manage. Hudson is a control freak. He can neither control you nor the situation around you. So he did what he could to gain that control.”

“Took me out of the equation?”

She waved her cookie at me. “Exactly.”

“Your theory has some immense holes in it.”

“Go on.”

“First, he already knew who I was, and what my life looked like as he pursued me. It should have come as no surprise.”

“I didn’t say he was rational.”

“And, he was fine until he realized two things: one, the power curse that plagues Roberts women is reversed for every first-born generation female.”

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