Page 2 of Scripted for Love and Poison (Sol and Luke Mystery #2)
S ol didn’t immediately return to Luke’s side after hanging up Julie’s call. She breathed deeply first. She was feeling all the stress from the last days catching up to her.
She knew she should have booked the flight to LA to leave a couple of days earlier so she’d have been able to get some rest before the frenzy of activities that awaited her in the Californian city, but things had been hectic—someone would argue even a bit crazy—the past few weeks.
Nothing had gone back to the normal bliss she and Luke had enjoyed pre-Christmas.
But how could it? The holidays had been dreadful—an absolute, utter disaster.
And now she’d lost her bag and was supposed to find a missing reporter!
Just thinking about the days before the LA trip both infuriated her and made her heart sink.
Her past experience dealing with the acute stress-inducing holiday season should have prepared her for this recent one.
Yet, there she was: forty-three, two husbands and a couple of significant lovers down, and she still hadn’t been able to confront the latest end of the year in the smartest, most rational way.
And rationally is how you should always do Christmas.
How Sol should have proceeded was having a serious talk with Luke and telling him how things would go their first Christmas as a couple: She would fly back to her hometown, as she always did, and would spend the festivities in Barcelona with her family and friends.
He would remain in London and do whatever he normally did during that time of the year.
Even if Sol had been living in London for almost four years, all her knowledge about British traditions for the holiday season came from watching Love Actually, so she assumed Luke’s family would be serenaded by neighboring carolers, would buy not-necessarily-exciting-or-needed presents, and would eat panettone—Luke’s family was Italian, after all.
And the thing was, Sol had sat Luke down and had tried to tackle the Christmas issue—only not in the clearest way. Because Luke had interpreted her words in the opposite way they were meant and had assumed she wanted them to spend that time together.
In his defense, they had been spending almost all the previous time together—except for work and socializing with friends, and the four summer days she’d spent with her parents in Greece, agonizing through monuments and ruins under the scorching sun.
Of course, the source of the misunderstanding with Luke could also have been that Sol was having a hard time disentangling herself from him for any extended period of time, so she hadn’t made herself clear on purpose. Even if she knew better.
Even if the two-person detective agency Luke ran with his friend and professional partner, Divya Bakshi, meant that he sometimes wasn’t available on evenings or weekends because he was on surveillance duty, he still spent most nights at Sol’s quaint Georgian cottage on Roupell Street.
And on those occasions when he couldn’t make it to London’s South Bank for whatever reason, Sol usually trekked to his cozy (read really really tiny) studio flat by Finsbury Park.
Sol had to admit that she hadn’t been expecting things would be so comfortable—and easy—with Luke when they’d started seeing each other in a committed capacity the previous spring after they’d met in a less-than-ideal situation.
Theirs hadn’t been a meet-cute. She’d been the prime suspect in a theft investigation.
He’d been in charge of investigating her.
She wasn’t his type. He was ten years younger than she was.
She didn’t want a relationship. He shouldn’t have seduced a person of interest. And yet somehow, they had ended in bed together and been unable to sleep apart even for one night since then.
Only they should have slept apart. During the whole of the Christmas season.
Instead of that, and against her better judgment, Sol had brought Luke to spend the first part of the season in Barcelona.
The Novo clan hadn’t exactly taken to him.
Not only did they consider Luke too young and unsuitable for their daughter, Sol’s two past divorces prevented her parents from warming up easily to anyone anymore.
Not that they had ever been too warm to begin with.
Plus, her mother was adamant in her belief that Sol should never have left her first husband and was still sore about it.
To make things worse and even more uncomfortable, Sol’s apartment in Barcelona had been unavailable, as there had been problems with the heating system that weren’t repaired on time.
Sol and Luke were forced to stay with Sol’s parents as a result.
There’s nothing like spending a couple of days in your old room with your partner to make you want to go back home for a little bit of peace—and intimacy.
After the mainly glacial silences and charged stares of the Novos, Sol and Luke hadn’t gone back to London as initially planned but to Reggio Calabria.
New Year’s Eve was spent with the Contadinos, and the family had decided to all fly to their grandmother’s home in Southern Italy.
That had been even more disastrous. Not because Luke’s parents or his two older sisters, or his aunts and uncles and many many many cousins, hadn’t liked Sol, but because they’d been so nice and warm with her.
And yet, she hadn’t enjoyed the experience.
It wasn’t them, though, it was her . They were all perfectly nice people.
She would have liked any of them if she’d met them under different circumstances.
But the reality was that her two divorces had left her scarred, and—as a result—she had a pathological mistrust of in-laws.
She couldn’t avoid thinking that, if things came to an end between her and Luke, they would all turn on her—the same way it had happened in the past.
It also didn’t help that the old Contadino house was picturesque and lovely but not necessarily equipped to host so many people at the same time. Luke and Sol had slept on a bumpy sofa bed, sharing the room with at least two of Luke’s cousins.
She would have preferred to be home, just her and Luke.
Or Luke could have been celebrating with his family, but she’d have still preferred to be home, by herself—not having to share a bathroom with at least twenty other people.
The only silver lining to the whole holidays-with-the-in-laws affair was that there had, indeed, been panettone.
Plus, she’d discovered zippuli con alici, fried anchovy- stuffed dough in the shape of balls, and pitta ‘mpigliata, a typical Calabrian Christmas pastry filled with nuts, honey, and spices.
But nothing had been the same between Luke and her since the dreaded Christmas together. Their conversations felt short and rushed. It was as if they were eternally tired and almost hadn’t enjoyed any quality time together. And she knew Luke was thinking and feeling the same.
And now there they were, in Los Angeles. He hated being away from London. She had no clothes. And she was supposed to help Julie find a cranky journalist.