Lucky Stars (Ghosts and Reincarnation #5)(28)

“Yes,” Lewis unusually concurred with his sister. Then again, he liked the look of the blonde lady, she was very pretty and she reminded him vaguely of his long since dead Mum. “Though, maybe something happened because when they came back, they were walking really quickly.”

Myrtle giggled. “I know! He was practically dragging her.”

“I wonder why they were in such a hurry?” Lewis asked and Myrtle bit her lip.

“Did you see them kissing?” Myrtle whispered.

Lewis didn’t look at his sister when he answered back in a whisper, “Yes.”

Myrtle’s voice was worried when she asked, “Do you think Miles found out Jack kissed his girlfriend?”

Lewis’s eyes moved to the window and he looked down the road, the taxi long gone.

“I hope not. He can be not very nice and I don’t think he’d like Jack kissing his girlfriend,” Lewis replied and felt his sister shiver beside him.

As he’d been doing for quite a number of years (over two hundred of them), he tried to protect his sister from anything that might distress her.

So he leaned in, bumped her with his shoulder and shouted, “Flip-flop!”

Myrtle needed no further encouragement. She shot up several inches from the floor and darted across the room, her ghostly body melting through the wall. She did a forward spin and headed down and through the stairs.

Then, when she found her hidey-hole, she shouted, “Flip!”

And some ways away, she heard her brother’s ghostly, “Flop!”

Eyes firmly shut, Myrtle floated in his direction.

Chapter Five

Jack Meets Lila and Rachel

Jack

Three months later…

Jack saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

He turned his head to see his assistant, Olive, and her short, squat body. She was wearing a heavy tweed skirt even though it was the middle of a very warm summer. One tail of her blouse had come untucked. And her short, naturally grey but dyed peach (for some reason unknown to him) hair was spiked as if she’d been running her hands through it with severe agitation.

Olive Mayfair could singlehandedly plan a successful war with multiple fronts but she wouldn’t be able to do it without displaying a great deal of tremendously disorganised, blatantly obvious stress.

She stood at the windows to the conference room where Jack was sitting in a meeting and she was gesticulating wildly, like she was guiding a plane in to land and didn’t quite know what signals to make so she was making it up as she went along.

Her eyes were wild.

With one look at her Jack knew either the world was coming to an end or there was a toilet backed up in the branch of his bank located in Iowa City, Iowa.

He looked back at the conference table at which he was sitting at the head.

The ten people in the room with him were all watching Olive.

“Excuse me,” Jack muttered, put his hands to the arms of his chair and pushed up. He grabbed his Mont Blanc pen, a present his father gave him when he graduated from Oxford, and his wildly expensive phone which could, if he’d take the time to programme it, likely call Mars, a present from Yasmin.

He pushed through the door, Olive lunged forward immediately, grabbed his arm and dragged him away from the windows.

She tugged him to a stop, looked up at him and, with a grave expression on her face, declared, “We have a problem.”

“You don’t say,” Jack muttered dryly.

“This is Code One!” she announced on a whispered screech.

Jack crossed his arms on his chest and regarded her silently.

“Lila Cavendish and her daughter, Rachel Abbot, are here,” she told him.

Jack felt her words like a sharp, strong jab direct to the gut.

“Excuse me?” Jack asked, hoping he hadn’t heard what he thought he’d heard.

“Lila Cavendish and Rachel Abbot, grandmother and mother to Belle Abbot, are here. In your office. Right now.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed as his temper flared.

Why Belle’s mother and grandmother would be in his offices in London, he could not fathom.

He also didn’t care.

“Get rid of them,” he demanded and Olive threw her hands out at the sides.

“I knew you’d say that and I tried. They won’t go.”

This surprised him. “They won’t go?”

“No. I didn’t even let them into your office. They marched right in. Lila even made herself a cappuccino with your espresso maker.” She paused. “And your milk! Straight from your fridge!” she said this last like it was a crime punishable by death.

“Why are they here?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know. They won’t tell me. They’re demanding to speak to you,” Olive replied.

“Tell them I’m in a meeting and they’ll need to make an appointment,” Jack said.

“I did that already. They don’t care. They said they’d wait ‘until the cows come home’, whatever that means. We don’t have cows in London,” Olive noted unnecessarily.

Jack made a decision and turned toward his office. “I’ll take care of them. Go back to the meeting. Tell them I’ll be five minutes.”

He watched Olive nod and walked to his office trying, not entirely successfully, to control his anger.