“I have two days off from the panto, so I’m leaving early the day after tomorrow. Maybe we can grab lunch and you can tell me about the girl you brought for Christmas dinner?” She stared at him tellingly. “Unlike my favourite son, you didn’t tell me anything.”
Sorrell couldn’t help but smile.
“It’s okay, Aunt Dee, he didn’t tell any of us about her either,” Rayah said, pulling her hair back into a pony tail. “We think she was hired.”
“Not rising to that, Ray,” Alex said. “Keren, do you want a lift home? Scott has said he’ll take you when he goes back to town but I wasn’t sure that would be safe.”
“Probably not,” Keren said. “And I should head off. I’m running an emergency drop in tomorrow. Let me grab my bags—I’ll be a minute.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “I’d grab your bags for you. I just have no idea which are yours.”
It was late when Sorrell left the farmhouse with Zack to walk home to the hotel. The snow had eased off, but what was on the ground was now freezing. The tractors would be out again in the morning, clearing what they could and going to help move cars that were stuck on the main road. If the roads were passable into the town, there would be an influx of visitors tomorrow evening. It was Saturday, and the Mummers’ Plays were touring the pubs and bars, so it would be extra crowded.
“I’ll check the hotel,” Zack said as the lights illuminating the sign glowed in the distance. “You’ve been out all day and it is quiet round here. Unless Lena’s been back?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t heard from her but I was expecting her back this weekend. I might send her a text tomorrow if she isn’t here, see if she wants to get some lunch on Sunday,” Sorrell said. “Do you want to stay tonight?”
His hand gripped hers a little tighter. “You’re asking if I want to spend the night making you come on my cock?”
“No,” she said, trying to sound offended. “I was asking if you wanted to stay.”
“Do you want me to spend the night making you come on my cock? If I remember, last night you were getting pretty good at it.”
Sorrell knew she was blushing. “There’s no point trying to argue with you, is there? Stay. I want you to stay.”
“So the interrogation you got off my mum hasn’t put you off?” he said.
“That wasn’t an interrogation,” she said, protesting.
“Oh, it was,” he said knowingly. “She’s just really talented at getting information from you without you realising.”
Sorrell remembered what she’d told Dee. She had a bit of explaining to do, knowing that she needed to tell Zack about her parents before his mother got there.
“About that,” she said.
He laughed. “Told you so!”
It looked as if Lena had been and gone, her bedroom door open and the lamp left on. Her wardrobe was also open which was unusual and it looked like she’d been back and left in a rush.
“You think she’s okay?” Zack said. “I know you’ve said before that she’s tidy.”
Sorrell shrugged. “She’s a twenty-one-year-old girl. I’m hoping she’s rushed out because she’d been getting ready to meet with friends, or even better, a date. I’ll send her a text.” She took her phone from her bag and dropped her a quick message, following Zack out of the French doors and across the snow to her cottage.
“So Dee didn’t give you too hard a time,” he said, sitting down on the sofa that they’d done more on than sit on recently. “I had told her some bits about you, otherwise you’d have been grilled and there’d have been nothing subtle about it.”
“She did. She asked me what my parents did,” Sorrell said, watching his reaction as she sat down opposite from him. She wasn’t concerned about his reaction, because everything she knew already about Zack told her that he wouldn’t give a shit about her parents’ business or their wealth, but even so. She supposed it was a pretty big thing and he might think she was keeping it from him. Had that been her intention? Maybe. A legacy from the dick called Mark.
He stretched back. “They’re retired, aren’t they?” he said, his T-shirt rising up to expose abs that her eyes automatically fixed on. “Sorrell? Eyes up here.”
“Sorry,” she said.
He gave her the shit-eating grin that suggested he was more than happy for her to stare at his body any time she wanted. “What did your parents do before they retired?” he said. “And why are you sitting over there when I could be using that body to warm my hands.”
She laughed. His hands were always warm and whenever he did touch her he warmed her up in more ways than one. “Because I need to tell you what they did before they became pensioners.”
He looked puzzled for a moment. “I figured they were successful,” he said. “They’ve been in Sydney, Dubai and Shanghai since I’ve known you and you haven’t had to scrimp on the décor for the hotel, so I figured you had money behind you that you wouldn’t have earned from counselling.”
She gave a very brief nod. He was intelligent. There was no way he would’ve thought they were on a state pension if they were Facetiming her from a five-star hotel in Shanghai. Although to be fair, where they’d stayed after that had been a bit different and they were spending Christmas in a commune.
