Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 75323 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75323 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
She never looked at me, gave no sign that she’d noticed me like I’d noticed her.
Hm.
I tossed the trash and made my way back to my room, wondering what kind of business Lula could have in this area. From what I understood, any family she had was in California. And this was not the kind of place anyone went for vacation.
Could she be on the job? Doing something for the Murphy brothers?
Technically, she was their accountant. But maybe she needed to make some kind of investment in person?
But if that was the case, there was no way she was staying in some fleabag motel. The Murphy brothers would put her up in luxury. She was, after all, their most valuable asset. Keeping her happy meant they got to keep doing their illegal shit without getting the IRS breathing down their necks about where all the extra money was coming from.
Lula wasn’t just an accountant.
She was a mafia accountant.
And she was the queen of cooking the books.
I considered calling my brother or even texting one of the Murphy brothers. But something told me not to, to hold off until I got back to Shady Valley to ask about her at all.
Hell, maybe I was just so homesick that I was conjuring her up.
But as I dropped down onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, I knew that wasn’t the case.
I knew who I’d seen.
I’d been admiring Lula for longer than I cared to admit. You could drop her face into one of those Where’s Waldo? Books, and I would find her in a heartbeat.
The question wasn’t if I could trust my eyes.
It was why a woman like Lula was in a place like this.
I needed to get my ass back to Shady Valley to find out.
CHAPTER TWO
Lula
The clanking of glasses and the rush of water as the dishwashers cleaned the pub’s glassware used to be background noise to me, something almost soothing that helped me get through my work.
Cillian had offered to rent me an office or allow me to work from home. I declined both. From home because I had a strict work/life balance that I felt was important, considering how high-stress it was to hide funds from ill-begotten means inside the everyday operations of the Murphy brothers’ pub, The Bog. As for the office, well, a part of me was already worried I didn’t have nearly enough of a social life as it was. If I was sitting in some cushy office on my own somewhere, that was only going to get worse.
So, I had a tiny little office in the back of the pub.
“Office” might have been generous. It had been an extra supply room at some point. But when it got too hard to share an office with Cillian, he had his other brothers clean it out and spruce it up for me. So instead of the scuffed, peeling linoleum you could find in his office, I had a lovely wide-plank, light-wood click floor under my feet. The beige paint that had been on the walls since before I was born had been stripped and replaced with a stark white and gorgeous accent molding. My white desk was likely too big for the space, but the nature of my job meant that I needed to make sure there was no evidence of what I was doing, so there was no need for printers, scanners, notebooks, or binders.
I’d recently added a plant stand and all my plants from home, along with a strong full-spectrum lighting setup.
When asked, I claimed that the point of having plants was to enjoy them, and that I worked so much that it made sense for them to be at work with me.
Because they could never, ever find out the truth. No one could. Well, no one else. Two people were enough. One, the person responsible for the mess I was in. The other, an antisocial town recluse who barely ever spoke to anyone and was known for his discretion—his job demanded it.
Outside of them, I didn’t want my employers to know. My friends. Not my cousin Detroit. No one.
I couldn’t stand how differently they might look at me if they found out. Just the thought made a shiver work its way up my spine.
Or maybe that was the sound of a rack of dirty glasses slamming down on the platform beside the sink just a few feet away from me.
I let out a sigh and closed the lid of my laptop. It was no use. Each sound coming from the dish pit was setting my teeth on edge, making it impossible to think clearly.
For the first time in my career, I kind of wished I’d taken my boss up on his office offer.
Quiet.
A place to rest.
No one to see me and assume correctly that my entire life had just been turned upside down and shaken.