“No.”
“Oh, dumped you, did he?”
“I wasn’t his to dump in the first place. He’s not the kind of man who is into relationships. And why am I telling you all this anyway?” She glares at him. Then she drops her voice to a whisper. “You have been good last night, haven’t you?”
“Aren’t I always good?”
She thinks uneasily of the hanging witch. No, Jared couldn’t have done that. He doesn’t know about the maze and its significance. Right? Fast as he is, he isn’t that fast. Not in the brains department, that is.
“I heard a wolf howl last night,” she says.
“So it’s a wolf. Nothing to do with me.”
She is walking very fast up the stairs. “Yes, but something could have spooked him in the forest.” She glares at her brother again. “You didn’t go hunting last night, did you?”
They are all alone on the top floor of the hotel and she is striding towards the Heartwood suite.
“What’s it to you if I did?”
“Jared,” she hisses, “we’re in a new town. You agreed to lay low until we’re more settled. It isn’t as if you have to hunt.”
“Boy, have you got your tits in a fine twist this morning. Which side of the bed did you fall out of? Oh, I know whose. Was his dick as thick as his skull?”
She has to resist the urge to smack his smug, grinning face. She decides to take the higher ground and ignore him instead. She fumbles in her purse and inserts her key into the lock.
“Let me guess,” Jared says, sauntering in after her. He leaps onto the couch as she goes into the bathroom to wash up. “Either you have PMT or you’re still feeling hot and bothered about the dashing millionaire.”
“Shut up.” She slams the bathroom door behind her.
He whoops with delight. Sometimes, Jared can be such a pain. She leans upon the bathroom door with her eyes closed. Her pussy is still sticky with her dried creams from the torrid sex they had last night. Even when she thinks of Lucien’s cock inside her, a spool of fresh cream trickles from her core, wetting her panties.
Ohh! She must stop thinking of him!
She turns on the taps of the shower furiously, sheds her clothes and gets in. On second thought, she turns off the hot water and lets only the cold water from the showerhead cascade onto her head.
Damn, damn, damn!
*
The rest of the morning is spent with both Jared and she in industrious house hunting. By the end of the lunch hour, they have managed to snare themselves a little bungalow rental that isn’t too expensive.
All they have to do now, according to the real estate agent, is to shift out of their respective hotel suites and move in if they like it. The house is all ready for them.
Shannon takes a good last look at the Heartwood suite. She has never stayed in anything so luxurious in her life, and she will be sorry to be leaving it. Her mind fills with Lucien’s handsome face again and the way his blue eyes caress her when they made love on his big white bed.
No!
She doesn’t even want to check her phone. No point in being hopeful when there is no hope. The good thing about modern technology, she muses, is that you no longer have to wait by the phone for a cute boy to call. You can carry your phone everywhere with you and be miserable while productively running your errands instead of doing nothing at home.
The rental is a small bungalow in the foothills, a considerable distance away from Pine’s Bluff and the top of the hills where the rich live. The real estate agent, Ellie Fitzpatrick-Brown, is waiting for them outside.
“You found it.” She gives them a winning smile. She is a middle-aged woman. Heavily pregnant. Pleasant in a marmsy sort of way. She would be the kind of woman who serves you pastries the moment you step into her kitchen, Shannon decides.
“We did, thanks to my GPS,” Shannon says.
Jared rolls his eyes. “I would have found it all the same.”
They exchange pleasantries all round.
“You’ll love the house,” Ellie gushes. “It’s small but very cozy. Won’t require a lot of housekeeping if you are a young working brother and sister pair. Come in and take a look.”
A thought strikes Shannon.
“This property doesn’t belong to the Walker family, does it?”
A cloud darkens Ellie’s face.
“No.” An unusually firm tone has come into her voice. She leans over slightly as if to impart a secret. “Many people in this town are not overtly fond of the Walkers, if you know what I mean.”
Shannon has that suspicion as well after seeing the hanged witch. “Why?”
Ellie shakes her head. “You both are new here. It is not for me to fill your heads with local superstition.”