Page 9 of Scripted for Love and Poison (Sol and Luke Mystery #2)
“ T hat was Claudia,” Sol told him, her voice still hoarse from the sleepiness.
Daylight had only just begun to creep in, but he’d been awake for at least an hour.
He hated jet lag so much. They’d made it to their hotel extremely late the previous night, as the circumstances surrounding TV critic Travis Wise and his emergency trip to the ER had been thoroughly discussed by several ceremony attendees.
Everyone had wanted to talk to Sol and Luke as they’d had a first-row view of the events.
They’d tried to leave the venue for at least an hour, being intercepted every single time by another journalist or critic who wanted to ask them about Travis’s near-encounter with death.
Luke had resented all of them. Journalists had to be the most unabashedly nosy professional group he’d ever met.
By the time he and Sol had finally managed to arrive at their hotel room, they’d simply crashed, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the adrenaline-fueled events of the evening.
But despite the extreme tiredness, he’d still woken up unseasonably early that morning. He had just started to finally fall asleep again when Sol’s phone, which was normally silenced, started ringing, waking both of them up.
It was Claudia, Sol’s former editor.
Sol took the call, and when she was done, she said, “You were right. Travis was poisoned.” She stood by the room’s windows, the morning light filtering through the cream-colored curtains.
She was wearing black, cheeky knickers and a white, see-through T-shirt knotted at her waist that she’d borrowed from him.
He would have fixated more thoroughly on the sexyness of her state of undress if it wasn’t for the message she was delivering.
“They found traces of cyanide in his blood. He was lucky, apparently, to have ingested a very small amount of food during the ceremony, or he could have been dead.”
“Someone tried to kill him? Is he doing okay?” Luke managed to ask, still in a semi-dazed state but pushing himself to sit up in bed.
Sol clutched her phone in one hand, playing nervously with the hair at her nape with the other.
“Claudia just talked to Travis, and he’s doing fine.
I’ll try calling him later. I’ve always liked him.
Everyone likes him. He’s the nicest guy in the business.
I don’t really think anyone would want to kill him. ”
“You always think everyone is innocent. But it looks like someone did try to kill him. What about one of the creators of the TV shows he reviewed? There was a screenwriter sitting at our table, right?”
“Travis isn’t like that. Even if he doesn’t like something, his reviews are always polite, considerate. I learned a lot from him,” Sol said. She was visibly distressed. “And I think I read his review of Slowing Down —that’s the show from the showrunner at our table, Abbie Domingo. Travis liked it.”
“True. It was the chap who didn’t remember you, the one who had worked with Simon Smith on the review dissing Haughty Horizons .” Luke tried remembering everyone who was at the table with them yesterday. “And they think the cyanide was at the food from the ceremony?”
“That’s what I gathered. We’d been inside the damn hangar for almost three hours by then.
Anything he may have eaten before that was poisoned would have acted much quicker.
Claudia said they think he was only saved because he barely ate anything from his plate.
Travis has a severe nut allergy and only nibbled a bit of the hummus and grapes, afraid they might have been in contact with some nuts. ”
“So his allergy to nuts could have saved his life?”
“I mean, when you put it like that ...” Sol climbed onto the bed to sit crossed-legged next to him. “Claudia talked to her bosses at Performance Weekly , and they are thinking about investigating this.”
“I think it should be investigated,” Luke admitted.
“Since you were there last night, and I mentioned you’re a private investigator with experience in the industry, they were wondering if you’d be willing to take the case,” Sol said. Did she sound tentative?
“I think we are,” Luke said, even if the idea of having to stay in Los Angeles for longer than necessary made his skin crawl.
“We are?” Sol asked in disbelief. She seemed to have realized he hadn’t exactly been wowed by this whole California experience.
“Not we as in you and me, cara. But we as in Divya and me, as soon as I talk to her and if she agrees,” he clarified.
The last thing he needed was for Sol to get enmeshed in this case.
It was true that they’d met and fallen for each other because she’d ended up entangled in a previous case he was investigating.
But, on that particular occasion, poisoned critics hadn’t been a feature.
“In the last twenty-four hours, one critic has gone missing under mysterious and apparently violent circumstances. And another one got poisoned and almost died. It’s as if there’s someone out there trying to get rid of critics, and I have a vested interest in the well-being of the profession, particularly when it comes to one of its members. ”
Sol’s eyes widened. “What? You’re doing this because you think I could be next?”
“I’m doing this because there’s clearly something to investigate, and as you’ve put it, the Bakshi & Contadino Agency specializes in Hollywood matters. That, and I want to make sure you won’t be next. So, who’s the client exactly? And are we getting paid this time?”
“You know you sounded exactly like Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting , right?”
He gave her his sexiest, most rakish of smiles and kissed her. The case could wait for a bit. There was something more important that they needed first. But Sol’s phone started ringing once again. Claudia wanted to know if he’d take the case.
He couldn’t avoid thinking about how much he wasn’t enjoying the whole Los Angeles experience. Was it so much to ask for a decent sleep and uninterrupted time alone with one’s romantic partner?