Page 8 of The Celtic Resolution
“Romance?” I shoot her a disbelieving look. “How is that a great joy?”
“Cormac used to say the same thing and now look at him and Evie.”
“Do you hassle Cian this much about his love life?”
“It’s not hassling!” She lightly swats my arm. “It’s loving concern. You deserve someone who makes you happy, and in this life, the chances are rare.”
Someone who makes me happy. The last man who did that was hidden behind a gorgeous green mask and fucking me so hard in a closet that I almost couldn’t walk out with my head held high.
Hands clean, I dry them slowly on a dishtowel as I follow Mom around the kitchen. “I’ll be honest, I’m not actively looking right now, but I’m not opposed, okay? I guess you could say I’m waiting for love to find me.”
Mom turns to me with such hope shining in her eyes and she clasps one of my damp hands between hers. “Just don’t wait too long, okay? I want to see all of you happy before I pass.”
“Mom!” It’s my turn to swat her. “Don’t talk like that. You’ve got decades left.”
“I’m a ticking time bomb.”
“Mom!”
“Soon, I’ll be withering away, as empty as your love life!” Our mingled laughter floods the kitchen as I pull her into a strong, affectionate hug. As often as the teasing is, I know it comes from a place of love and in this family, that’s all that matters.
I arrive back in the city a few days later, refreshed and revived from my time at the ranch. Nothing helps blow away the stressful cobwebs and grind of the city like the fresh air of the ranch. But each day I linger at the ranch is another day thisstrange scheme could disappear from under my nose. With little information on exactly what I should be tracking, I settle for an old-school solution.
Extra CCTV and security at all of our cooking houses, firmer control over when our people are in position at border control, a shift in the shipping schedule of our overseas arms, and double patrol at all our warehouses. No one is given exact instructions on what I’m looking for, so when the reports of anything suspicious start to roll in, they’re painfully varied.
Within days, I’ve learned that one of our men at border patrol confuses interesting with suspicious and I now know more than I ever care to know about several people’s bathroom habits. One warehouse was convinced of an intruder and gave me hope of a lead, only for it to be a sneaky fox. Several drivers scared each other with ghost stories and I spent an entire evening shifting through the terribly written reports of sleep-deprived delivery drivers convinced they were all about to be slaughtered by a highwayman hook man.
I’ve hired more drivers and cut shifts to ease the strain.
Wading through a sea of everything in the hopes of a glimpse at something is an exhausting task until one night, hope arrives in the form of a phone call.
“Miss Gifford?”
“Speaking.”
“That man is here again.”
I straighten like a pole in my seat. “Man? What man? What are you talking about?”
“You, uh… Well, you wanted us to record anything suspicious, right? Well, there’s been a guy I’ve been seeing over the past week or so.”
“A guy…” My eyes dart over the sea of paperwork flooding the table before me. “Where are you, exactly?”
He reels off the address of the shipment warehouse while I scramble through the papers for their reports.
“I thought it might be something because I’m friends with Lewis, one of the cooks, and he mentioned a guy hanging around. He sounded pretty harmless, but I’m pretty sure that same guy is now here.”
“Lewis and the cooking house…” That’s familiar. Where have I seen that before? It takes me too long to search through the heaving pile but eventually, I find a report I cast aside earlier. It reads as a homeless person simply wandering too close to the cooking house, but if this is the same man…
“Tell me what he looks like.”
“Pretty tall. White coat that looks like it’s seen better days. Olive skin, a dark beard, but it’s short, y’know? Not one of those full ones. And brown hair, but it’s all on the top of his head, not the sides.”
It’s the same. The description matches. This can’t be a coincidence.
“Keep him there!” I bark down the phone. “I don’t care how, just keep him there!”
“Where is he?”Night’s fallen by the time I make it to the warehouse, but luckily, the stranger is lingering. For whatever reason, he’s been keeping an eye on the warehouse for hours and given his suspected presence at some of our other properties, it’s reason enough to have a word with him.
