Read Online Shadowed Ground by Vicki Keire - Free Book Online

So shut up and sleep, or go lay down in my bed with no blanket.”
    He couldn’t remember dreaming, but he held himself perfectly still until her breathing deepened and evened. Sleep wouldn’t come, so he watched her dark hair against the white pillowcase until the sun came up, remembering apple orchards and annoying little girls.

Chapter Eight: Heironymous Tuttle, Esquire
    Heironymous looked mournfully into his glass. It was almost empty; ice and the barest hint of amber liquid slid around the bottom of the heavy cut crystal. He didn’t bother looking up as he addressed the bored blond bartender.
    “Another, David. Leave the bottle this time.”
    Long, manicured fingers snatched his glass away. “They only say that in movies, Heiro. In real life, this is where I get to say, ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’”
    Heironymous frowned carefully at his now-empty hands. “I was enjoying that drink, and quite looking forward to another.”
    The bartender shook his perfectly styled head. “You need to head on home, Heiro. I’ve never seen you like this. Let me call Jackson.”
    Heironymous Tuttle, former junior partner at Savannah’s largest and most expensive law firm, promptly burst in to tears. “You can’t call Jackson,” he said, accidently wiping his nose with his Rolex. “Because… because he’s not there. No one is there. I have nothing and no one but an empty mauve box of an apartment and a very depressed cat.”
    He heard David breathe a very weary, “Oh, dear,” before a bottle of Jack appeared in front of him. The dangerously cute blond bartender held a glass with ice in one hand, and held out his other empty one palm up. “Car keys first.” He waggled his fingers threateningly. Heironymous handed them over without a second thought and took the glass eagerly.
    “Mauve,” he told the glass spitefully. “Who paints an entire apartment in complementary shades of mauve? Jackson, that’s who. I should be glad he left me, really, even if this is the worst day of my entire life. At least he took his wretched taste in décor and his dreadful Doctor Who box sets with him. And he left me… the cat…”
    Heiro found himself in tears again and hated himself for them. He wouldn’t be that man, weeping over a stupid ex who didn’t deserve him. No, he had more important things to cry about, like the fact that he’d just lost his job over how to handle the death of one the firm’s most important clients. He felt his courage restore the longer he sipped his Jack Daniels. Really, he shouldn’t have waited to get fired. He should have quit, weeks before, over the way Goldman and Sibley were handling the Burke case. He suspected some of his boss’s policies were, in fact, borderline illegal. To delay probate the way they had… and to discuss the particulars with total strangers, not even relatives…
    Heironymous downed his drink in one smooth gulp. That had been the icing, hadn’t it? Just how strange the strangers had been, speaking to each other in a hissing kind of language that still made his neck all shivery, just remembering. They looked strange, as well, as if they had been put together like badly made automatons instead of proper people. And when he’d identified their human companion as Charles Ravenwood, patriarch of the Burke’s archrivals, he’d begun digging. Callista Burke had warned him about the Ravenwoods, during one of their rare face-to-face meetings, when she’d come to change her will about three months ago. Steely-eyed even after the recent death of her brother, Callista set up a trust for her underage niece while her bodyguard hovered.
    Three months after her brother’s death, and now Ms. Burke was gone herself. He pulled the crumpled obituary from his coat pocket and poured himself another drink. The circumstances were terrible enough that the firm should be talking to the police instead of total strangers. Burned to death in a car accident, just like her brother.