Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 112762 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112762 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
There were a lot of good people here. A community. I hadn’t had a community around me since leaving the Commandos. I had a group of mates I served with who I met up with once a year, and they knew a different version of me. But only Brodan was a constant, and one bloke didn’t count as a community. That is until his family welcomed me in as one of them. With them I got to be the guy who protected their brother, who worked at the estate to protect others.
The guy who’d done questionable things in the name of God and country was buried where no one knew he existed. He only got to come out during sessions with Rich. After, he got stuffed back down again.
The Gloaming was the social hub of Ardnoch. A pub, restaurant, and hotel owned by Brodan’s brothers Lachlan and Arran, a two-hundred-year-old building they’d renovated where the locals gathered within its aged walls every night. Their chatter suggested relief when tourists disappeared once summer was over. Tables and stools freed up in the pub again. Ardnoch apparently had a love/hate relationship with the tourist season. Ardnoch Estate drew folks from around the world, excited at the prospect of maybe spotting a celebrity. Local business owners’ coffers were filled enough to see them through the entire year. But it didn’t stop them from complaining about tourists parking in their driveways or in no-parking zones, of filling their beaches, and taking up all the tables at their few eateries.
I’d avoided the pub during the summer. Now I walked the ten minutes from my rented bungalow to the heart of the village. To the Gloaming, built in the square with a large car park for visitors out front. The historical architecture and design of the village appealed to tourists as much as the celebrities staying on the village outskirts. Everything predated the mid-twentieth century, and dominating it all, near to the Gloaming, sat a medieval cathedral.
Shops, restaurants, and bed-and-breakfasts were scattered throughout the village on quaint row streets. Castle Street was the main road off the square that led out of Ardnoch toward Ardnoch Castle and Estate. It was an avenue of identical nineteenth-century terraced houses with dormer windows. Many of the homes had been converted into boutiques, cafés, and inns. There was Morag’s, a small grocery store and deli that did fucking great sandwiches, and Flora’s, the most popular café in Ardnoch.
Some of the row cottages, however, remained residential. Sloane Harrow and her daughter rented one.
Passing by Sloane’s place, I resisted the urge to stop and knock on her door, to check she was all right. Her worries about Hoffman bothered me. She didn’t need that shite on top of everything else. I’d fucked up asking her if I could sponsor Callie’s training. Stung the woman’s pride. I could respect her need to take care of her girl by herself. I didn’t want her to think anyone saw her as a failure. She was a great mum. Anyone with eyes could see that.
I shouldn’t have offered.
I was too curious about Sloane as it was. The urge to investigate why a single mum from California had ended up as a housekeeper at Ardnoch, with connections to a powerful family like the Howards, had seen me almost look into it. That I wanted to made me back off. I had no business being in Sloane and Callie’s business.
Which was why it was stupid of me to have offered to pay for Callie’s martial arts training.
And to fix Sloane’s car.
And to get in her face about Hoffman.
No. The latter was too important not to know. I was glad she told me. Now I was on alert.
“You look angrier than usual,” Brodan greeted me as I walked into the Gloaming and spotted him at the bar. I’d given the room my usual visual sweep. Beyond the low ceiling with its wooden beams and the typical dark warmth of an old pub, I catalogued which locals were there, where they sat, who was unfamiliar, and where they were sitting. I’d already memorized the exits the first time I’d visited the pub. It was a habit I’d never break, and I’d made peace with that.
Brodan’s brother Arran wasn’t bartending tonight. An older woman, Jess I think her name was, worked the bar.
I slid onto the stool next to Bro and asked Jess for a local ale I’d developed a taste for since moving here.
“I hate sitting with my back to the door,” I grumbled.
“Is that what the dark look is?” Brodan asked.
“What?”
“You look like you want to murder someone. More than usual, I mean.”
I’d sit with my back to the door if there was no other option. But there were options here. Knowing I couldn’t get comfortable in this position, I got up and took the stool on the curve of the bar that faced all three entrance and exit points.