“She needed help?”
“No. She needed a keeper.” He grinned at the memories.
Davina appeared confused. He looked around for more sandwiches, but there were none. Shame. Davina seemed to be staring at him expectantly. He sighed. What was it with women? They always wanted detail.
“She lived life to her own beat,” he told Davina. “Every day a new idea. She’d let people she didn’t know stay if they needed it. She took in stray animals. She threw mad parties, most of them fancy dress no matter what time of year it was, and she wrote science fiction novels in her spare time.”
Davina grinned widely.
“I knew I’d like her,” she told him. “I only met her once, at the estate agent’s, but there was something about her.”
“She had her own power source. Lit from within. Dad said she was nuclear.”
“Yeah!” Davina’s eyes lit up. “That’s exactly it.”
The warm afternoon sun made her hair glow as her green eyes sparkled. She was so full of life it made everyone around her seem a little dull. It took Jack a second to realise he was holding his breath.
“I would have liked to have known her,” Davina said.
Jack shook himself from the strange daze that had overcome him. He stood, brushed off the crumbs and lifted his empty dishes.
“You remind me
of her,” he said, without looking Davina in the eye.
There was a moment’s silence. Jack cleared his throat.
“Of course,” he said as he looked up at her. “She wasn’t a criminal.”
Davina’s shoulders slumped, the moment was broken. Jack turned and headed for the kitchen. Davina ran to intercept him at the door.
“Just where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.
He held up the dishes.
“I was going to put these in the sink.”
She took them from him.
“Good try,” she said. “But you don’t get in here for any reason at all until the notice is up.”
With that she spun on her heels. A second later the kitchen door slammed in his face. Jack couldn’t help but grin. Crazy Davy and Mad Aunt Millie could have been peas in a pod. He looked up at the old grey turret, which would always have been more at home on a castle than a standard family home. The architect had obviously danced to his own tune too. Not for the first time, he wondered if this odd old house attracted its inhabitants. It was as though the building had a type – eccentric, gorgeous and flamboyant. Either that or Millie saw in Davina some sort of kindred spirit and rented the place to her because of it. He wouldn’t have put it past her. There was something lost about Davina, and Millie did love to rescue strays.
Jack scuffed his boots on the stairs as he dragged himself off to find a bus to get home. For some reason the thought of going home to his empty flat had completely lost its appeal.
CHAPTER FOUR
12 DAYS TO MAKE A MOVIE...
IT ISN’T BREAKING IN if you have a key, Jack told himself as he opened the back door to Aunt Millie’s house. His house. He was in the kitchen, which was exactly where he wanted to be. The heart of the home. For women anyway. Call him sexist, but when he was on the job he always planted listening devices in the kitchens of houses where women lived alone. If it was a guy, he put it in whatever room held the large screen TV.
The room looked homely and welcoming. The counters were scrubbed clean, the cupboards were well stocked and meticulously organised. On top of that he’d never seen so many baking pans and cookbooks. He smiled smugly. This was the place to plant his bug. With any luck he’d get her discussing how much hash she put in her recipes. He opened his small black backpack, took out what he needed and secured it to the underside of a shelf that, by the dust on it, no one ever touched. That should do the trick. He tested it to make sure he could receive the signal. Job done. Now he could poke around a little more.
The musty smell of furniture that had been neglected and worn, wafted towards him as he walked down the hall. He couldn’t remember the place smelling any other way. It had always been an old house, even when Millie had lived there. His trained eyes scanned the hallway and the two rooms off it for anything out of place. Apart from magazines littered about the surfaces and shoes discarded where they fell, it looked perfectly normal.
There was nothing unusual or obviously out of place. Until, that is, he reached the door to the basement. It was padlocked. A shiny new padlock. He pulled a set of basic picks from his bag and set to work on the lock. And then he heard it. A car. He peeked out of the window to see Davina climbing out of her sissy car. He knew the minute she spotted his abandoned SUV. She pursed those gorgeous lips of hers. Jack bolted for the kitchen door. Years of training kept him calm. It was too late to hide. Nope, he needed another plan. At the speed of light he was out the back door. He threw his bag under an old rattan chair, yanked his T-shirt off, grabbed a handful of dirt from a local plant pot and messed his hands, then as a last minute thought he tipped a bowl of water left for a pet over his head. He’d just finished running his fingers through his hair when Davina came round the corner.
Davina knew the minute she saw Jack that he was up to something. He looked far too innocent not to be guilty.