A bright sparkle of diamonds caught my eye, and I realized that I was twisting my rose-and-thorn ring back and forth on my finger, something I often did whenever my mind wandered back into the past. I let out a tense breath and forced myself to release the ring. My gaze skipped over to some framed photos perched on the corner of the desk, a recent picture of Mallory and me grinning during her and Mosley’s wedding and an older image of me and my mother sitting on a park bench.
In the picture, Lily Rose was smiling wide, but her blue eyes were dim, her face was pale, and her shoulders were stiff with tension, as if she knew that the peaceful moment captured in the photo was nothing more than a brief respite from my father’s temper. Lily Rose had tried to leave Renaldo, multiple times, but he always found us and dragged us back.
I traced my fingers over the curve of her cheek, the glass cold and slick against my skin. “I wish you were still here with me,” I whispered.
All the light in my mother’s eyes seemed to vanish, and her smile faded, almost as if she could hear me from wherever she was in the afterlife and was just as sorry as I was that we weren’t together anymore. Another bittersweet heart sting zinged through my chest. I tried to massage it away, just like I had the pain in my knee, but it didn’t work.
It never did.
Still, I didn’t want to sit here, stare at my mother’s face, and lament what I had lost. I had already done that more times than I cared to remember, so I closed my laptop, shot to my feet, and stalked toward the door—
Smack!
Once again, I slammed into that stupid filing cabinet, and more pain shot through my leg. In an instant, my left knee was throbbing as badly as my right one had earlier. I cursed and hobbled forward, but for once, I didn’t mind the pain.
It helped distract from the aching hollowness in my heart.
ChapterThree
My knee kept throbbing,but I left my office, locked all the doors behind me, and stepped out into the chilly night air.
Instead of heading back to my car, I plunged deeper into the shipping yard, striding past the forklifts and other equipment and moving along the rows of containers that were stacked up like oversize building blocks two and three stories above my head. During the day, the metal containers would show their true colors of rusty red, burnt orange, and mustard yellow, although tonight the moonlight painted them all a dull, gloomy gray.
Numbered placards topped metal stakes that were driven into the ground at the end of each row of containers. I pulled up the list of the latest arrivals on my phone and stalked down a few of the aisles, making sure everything was where it was supposed to be. But just like inside the warehouse, all the containers were in their proper places.
I could have gone back to my car, but I was still feeling restless, so I kept walking until I reached the back of the shipping yard, where a lone container stood underneath a towering maple tree. This container was dented in several places, as though it had been dropped on its sides one too many times and was no longer in service, but it had gotten plenty of use lately.
The container was unlocked, so I swung the door open, stepped inside, and turned on the string of bare bulbs hanging on one of the walls. A table and some chairs, a cot with a pile of folded blankets, a TV, a radio, an old milk crate full of books. Everything looked the same as the last time I’d been in here, but an aura of stillness permeated the space, something that saddened me more than I’d thought possible.
Because Hugh Tucker was gone.
Given how loudly Tucker had complained while he’d been recuperating in here, he probably never wanted to see this place again, and rightly so. Even I’d gotten sick of the shipping container, and I hadn’t spent nearly as much time in here as he had.
But as my gaze drifted over to the cot, memories of Tucker filled my mind. How thin and deathly pale he’d looked in the beginning. How his shoulders had slumped with exhaustion after the smallest movement. How he’d struggled to do every little thing for himself instead of asking me for help. How his black gaze had found mine time and time again. How the heat shimmering in his eyes had made all sorts of emotions crackle like live wires deep inside my own body.
I had spent hours in here, ostensibly keeping an eye on Tucker in case he needed anything—or tried to escape. The vampire’s body might have been weak, but his mind and especially his tongue had been as sharp as ever. Sometimes we would snark at each other, playing our weird little flirting game. Other times I would type away on my laptop, working on invoices and the like, while he would sit on the cot and read one of the books I’d brought from my personal library to help him pass the time while he healed.
Often, when he came to a particularly good passage, Tucker would read it aloud, although I’d never known if he was reading to himself, or to me, or to both of us. Either way, he had one of the sexiest voices I’d ever heard, with just a hint of a Southern drawl softening his crisp, polished tone, and he took the time to make all the characters and situations come to life. His low, silky voice had echoed through the container, becoming more and more appealing with each line he read, and more than once I’d stopped typing, completely absorbed in the hypnotic cadence of his words…
I shook myself out of my unwanted thoughts. That version of Hugh Tucker was long gone, if it had ever even truly existed, and he was never coming back here—unless he tried to kill me, something that was a distinct possibility.
You didn’t hire someone like Tucker to do your accounting. No, the vampire was sly, clever, strong, and ruthless, and he would no doubt excel in any role he chose to take in the Ashland underworld moving forward. I had no idea why he was meeting with someone as petty, cruel, and obnoxious as Clyde O’Neal, though. Tucker should be starting his own crew, not playing second fiddle to someone else like he had to Mason Mitchell and the other Circle members for so long.
I huffed. Instead of procuring mint-condition comic books and other expensive items, maybe I should hire myself out as a life coach. “Life Lessons with Lorelei” or some such nonsense. It was always easier to tell someone else what to do, rather than doing such things yourself.
Life lessons aside, this container was just a metal box now. Tucker was the one who had given it life, warmth, and interest, and without him, there was nothing noteworthy about it at all—except for the fact that I was standing in here mooning about the mercurial man who used to occupy it.
I sighed, although the cold metal walls quickly soaked up the soft, lonely sound. Oh, yes. The container was simply another empty space, just like Mallory’s bedroom at our mansion.
Mallory and Mosley. Gin. Even Tucker. Everyone else was moving on with their lives, having all these fresh starts, but I was still the same old Lorelei Parker, as deeply entrenched in my routines as this container was stuck in the mud.
Anger erupted in my chest, burning through the weary resignation and icy numbness that had gripped me. I might be stuck in place, but I didn’t have to be stuck inthisplace. Not anymore. And I most definitely didn’t have to keep mooning over Hugh Tucker.
Disgusted with myself for thinking about him yet again, I slapped off the lights, slammed the door shut behind me, and stalked away from the shipping container.
I saidgood night to Dario, drove home, and finally did what I’d told Mallory I was going to do all along: take a long, relaxing bath, make some hot chocolate, and curl up with a book in front of the library fireplace.
Tonight’s read was a noir private detective story that Bria Coolidge had chosen for the book club I was in with her, Gin, Roslyn Phillips, and some of our other friends. Bria was a police detective herself, and she always picked the sort of book where femmes fatales did bad, bad things, everyone had an ulterior motive, and you could almost see the dense fog cloaking the landscape and hear the moody soundtrack wailing in the background. As if we all didn’t already get enough of those things in Ashland on a daily basis. Still, the story was entertaining enough, although I had guessed who the killer was and most of what was going to happen about one hundred pages in.
