Action, p.5
Action, page 5
“Come on, Davy. This isn’t a car. It’s a Corgi toy.”
“One.”
“Be reasonable. It’s pink.”
“Two.”
“It’s French. There’s a reason the French are known for their food and not for their cars.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Three. Hold on tight. You’re going for a ride.”
And damn if she didn’t put the car in gear.
“OKAY!” He was dragged three feet.
She screeched to a halt and raised an eyebrow eloquently.
“I’ll get in the car,” he told her.
“I didn’t invite you, idiot.”
He tried to appear as though he had more control of the situation than he felt.
“Look, I either ride in there with you, or on your roof – what’s it to be?”
She muttered something towards heaven.
“Fine. Get in.”
He strode around the pink monstrosity and yanked open its tin-can door. It didn’t even have proper windows, it had flaps. He wedged his six foot frame into the passenger seat and was surprised to find he fitted. Length ways anyway. Width was another matter. The car’s designers had wedged two seats into the same width that all other cars put one. He was plastered against Davina, shoulder to knee.
“Move over, I can’t get to the gear stick,” she said.
“Move over to where?”
She looked like she was going to hit him. He squeezed himself against the door to give her an extra whole inch of space.
“This car was built for dainty French women who don’t eat,” he told her. “Not for normal people.”
“I’ll have you know James Bond drove one of these,” Davina said as she manoeuvred them out of the garage. “There was a chase scene in For Your Eyes Only. His 2CV was bright yellow. He wasn’t scared of a little colour. If it was good enough for James Bond it should be good enough for you.”
It took him a minute to follow her argument. He was too busy focusing on the traffic and the fact that pretty much every car on the road was bigger than the one they were in. Plus, he had the distinct impression that if they crashed the roof would peel off like the lid on a can of sardines.
“This isn’t a car,” he told her. “It’s a marshmallow on wheels.”
That really cheesed her off. They drove in silence along the seafront past the white stone Georgian terraces and out through Hove. They were driving through the industrial area outside Shoreham when Davina suddenly giggled. Jack wasn’t sure he’d heard right until she turned towards him with a wide grin.
“If this was a date,” Davina said, “it would be really bad.”
Jack felt a strange tightening in his stomach. It was something he’d never felt before and couldn’t quite identify.
“Good it’s not a date then,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
“No kidding, Einstein.”
As he watched her whole face light up, Jack found himself excusing the fact that she was trying to grow drugs in his basement and unreasonably wishing that it was a date.
When they arrived at Aunt Millie’s house Davina wouldn’t let him in. He sat in a tatty rattan chair on the veranda and fumed. This was the worst surveillance job he had ever done. What was he supposed to do? Sit around waiting for her to throw him some scraps of information? She was treating him like the family pet. He stood up, stalked to the kitchen window and stuck his nose up against it to see what was going on.
“Sit,” Davina shouted when she saw him.
Jack growled.
“Let me in,” he said. “This is stupid.”
“Well it would be. It was your idea.” She was baking again. She stopped what she was doing to point in his direction with a flour covered knife. “You’re not getting in here until the two weeks’ notice is up. Any sane person would go away and get on with their life, but no, you decide to follow me around, hoping to see who knows what. Well, suck it up or go home.”
“I could knock down the door if I wanted to.”
“Yes.” She glared at him. “You could.”
The words ‘just you dare’ hung in the air between them and were given more weight by the fact she was holding a knife.
“If you’re not doing anything illegal why don’t you let me in?”
“Even if I was doing something illegal, having you around wouldn’t matter because you’re NOT WITH THE POLICE ANYMORE.”
Jack glared at her before throwing himself back into the old rattan chair. It strained under his weight and he heard a pinging sound as another section of the weaving gave way beneath him. It didn’t feel stable so he swapped to another old chair and put his feet up on the matching table. This wasn’t working. He needed a new plan. He needed to wrestle back control. Control he hadn’t seen since she’d hit him on the back of his head. He needed evidence that she was up to no good, something he could take to his mates, something solid. His eyes narrowed. He needed to bug the house. A slow smile curled his lips. First thing tomorrow, when Jessica Rabbit was at work, he’d do just that. Feeling much more relaxed, he put his hands behind his head and leaned back into the chair.
“Here,” Davina said as she kicked the door open.
She plonked a tray beside him. It held sandwiches and a large mug of coffee.
“Feeling guilty?” he said as he reached for it.
“I feed people.” She shrugged. “If you don’t want it, I can take it back.”
He grabbed a sandwich and took a huge bite.
“Didn’t think so,” she said.
They stared at the overgrown garden.
“So.” Davina turned towards him. “What are you going to do with the place once you get rid of me? Sell it? Live in it? Run a B+B? There are enough rooms for one, but you’d need more bathrooms.”
Jack honestly hadn’t thought about it. He shrugged.
“I haven’t thought past dealing with you, princess,” he told her.
“Well.” She leaned against the veranda post. “Good to know I consume your every thought.”
Jack grunted while he ate. She wasn’t wrong.
“It is lovely here though, isn’t it?” Davina said on a sigh. “So quiet. It must have been beautiful once.”
The late afternoon sun caught the red in her hair and made it glow. He looked past her to the shabby garden and saw it through her eyes for a second.
“It was an amazing place when I was a kid,” he told her. “People came from miles around to look at the gardens.”
“You hung out here a lot when you were a kid?”
“A fair amount. Dad liked to keep an eye on Millie.”
“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.
“Jack, darling,” she said with false cheer, “how delightful to see you again. So soon.”
She thought she saw him swallow a smile.
“So what brings you out here, to my home, where I’m supposed to be entitled to privacy?”
“Gardening.”
“On the veranda?”
That did make him smile. It happened quickly, but she definitely saw it.
“Came up here for some shade. You were right yesterday. This place needs some maintenance.”
“I also said it should happen when I leave.”
“Really? Missed that part. No time like the present, I always say.”
Yeah, right. She looked at the back door.
“Have you been snooping?” she said as she put her hand on her hip.
He puffed out his very bare, very muscled chest.
“Me?” he said with mock affront.
Davina was momentarily distracted by the whorls of black hair that made a perfect v shape in the middle of his chest. She shook her head.
“Yes, you,” she told him. “I thought we agreed yesterday that you wouldn’t stalk me anymore.”
“I don’t remember saying that, Davy.”
“It was implied. This is getting creepy. Don’t you have a life? Do you really need mine?”
His mouth twitched again.
“I just came here to tidy my garden. It isn’t all about you, Davy.”
“And will you please stop calling me that? It’s Davina. DA-VI-NA.”
The man was seriously infuriating. Not to mention distracting. What was he doing bare-chested in the middle of October anyway? It wasn’t normal.
“Fine,” she told him as she stomped up the steps to her door, “if you’re gardening, stay in the garden. Keep away from the house.”
She stopped level with him at the top of the steps.
“For goodness sake, put some clothes on.”
Jack looked down at himself.
“This is bothering you?”
“You’re bothering me.”
She put the key in the lock and it only turned over once. She could have sworn she’d double locked it. Her eyes narrowed.
“And another thing,” she told him. “I’m going to put an alarm on the doors, so don’t get any ideas about breaking the agreement.”
“Wouldn’t dare.” He crossed the veranda to stand in front of her. “But a comment like that makes me wonder again what you’re hiding.”
He smelled hot and spicy – it made her mouth water. She pursed her lips. He definitely didn’t smell of hard work and sweat. If he’d been gardening then she was Queen of England.
“Well, Davy,” he said. “What are you hiding?”
She blinked as she looked up into his deep-set eyes.
“I told you. Bodies. Treasure.”
He leaned towards her.
“Body. Treasure,” he repeated. His voice was a low murmur full of meaning.
Suddenly Davina wasn’t so sure what they were talking about exactly. She swallowed hard.
“Look,” she said at last. “This situation is insane. You can’t hang around with me all the time. I have things to do. Things I need to concentrate on.”
He quirked an eyebrow.
“I bet you do. And as much as I enjoy distracting you, I have things to do too.”
It occurred to her that for two people intent on establishing exactly how busy they were, neither of them was in a hurry to leave and get on with things. Davina felt the same dip in sanity that she’d felt the first time she’d met Jack. Against her will, her fingers reached out to toy with the hair on his chest. His eyes darkened. Davina licked her lips.
“I have people coming over,” she said, but she sounded distracted even to her own ears. “You can come back later and watch me then. I promise if I do anything illegal in the meantime I’ll send you a text.”
Jack closed the gap between them. Davina backed against the door as her blood pumped faster through her veins.
“Thanks, I appreciate that,” he said.
He put a hand on the door, either side of her head. She could feel his breath on her skin.
“You have to go,” she told him.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
“No I don’t,” he mumbled.
He leaned towards her, moving in slow motion.
“This is an infringement of privacy.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“I’d need to ask Andy about that, my expertise lies in other areas.”
Before Davina could ask what areas exactly, Jack lazily ran his tongue over her bottom lip. Davina tightened her grip on his chest as his lips teased her mouth open. The man was a kissing genius. At last he inched away from her, leaving her lips feeling swollen. Davina blinked her eyes open. There was a fog in her head; there was no denying that he had expertise.
“If you’re so convinced that I’m a criminal,” she whispered, “why do you keep kissing me?”
“It’s a mystery to me too, Davy,” he said with a sigh.
Davina understood perfectly.
“But you are enjoying this aren’t, you? Getting under my feet. Interfering in my life. Winding me up.”
A slow smile curved his lips, drawing her attention to the scar on his chin.
“Well, Davy, I have to be honest with you, you’re the most interesting thing to happen to me in a while.”
It was the wicked gleam in his eye that almost undid her. She was three words away from blowing her movie, and her life – she’d almost uttered: please come in. Instead she mustered what little self-control she had around the man and pushed him away.
“You have a strange effect on me,” she told him.
Jack put his hands on his hips which made his shoulder muscles bulge. Davina swallowed hard.
“Why don’t we go inside and discuss that?” he said.
She had to bite her lip to stop from saying yes.
“Bad idea. Very bad idea.”
Jack’s shoulders slumped as she sighed heavily.
“You’re probably right,” he said. When he looked into her eyes she felt ensnared. “There’s something about you, Davy,” he told her, with what seemed like genuine bewilderment. “Something I can’t put my finger on. I know you’re up to something. I’m sure of it, yet when I get this close to you other things pop into my mind. Other questions I want answered.”
