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Gracie

      DECEMBER

       Chapter 10

      19 December

      Gracie didn’t sleep well the night after the police visit. She had blackout blinds at her bedroom windows and an eye mask to keep out any hint of residual light because working so late she often slept in until gone noon. She was usually an eight-hour girl – anything less and she woke up grouchy and stayed that way for the better part of the day – but things were playing on her mind, despite her best efforts to ignore them. Like her family, for instance. The family she had distanced herself from long ago, and barely gave a thought to any more.

      When her parents split, she’d been sixteen years old. George and Harry had been twelve and eleven respectively. As kids they had endured years of furious rows and recriminations, their father cold and withdrawn, their mother shouting and screaming. There was talk of affairs, and it became obvious who’d done the cheating – their mother.

      How the hell could she have done that to Dad. To all of them?

      Dad had been managing a casino in the West End at the time, working all hours, and Mum had cited that as the reason she had strayed. Gracie had been numb at first, and then coldly enraged at her mother. Of all the trampy, despic able things to do. Dad had worked hard to give them a comfortable home, a decent life, and this was how she repaid him.

      Gracie remembered the pain of it all, even now, and how judgemental she had been, as only a teenage girl with her hormones in turmoil could be. Her relationship with her mother had never been an easy one. Gracie was cool, and Suze was a bundle of out-of-control emotions. She made no secret of the fact that she preferred ‘her boys’, and found logical, strong-willed Gracie hard to manage or understand – but after the affair thing blew up in all their faces, Gracie had detested her.

      So when Dad decided to go and work in Manchester, Gracie had winged the last school term and abandoned her exams. She knew she wanted to work in the casino business, so what was the point of more school? She’d been blessed with a prodigious natural talent for maths, so she could weigh up odds in an instant, and add up a row of figures at lightning speed. She knew exactly what she wanted in life; she didn’t need any careers adviser to tell her. Coldly, dis passionately, she had announced to her mother that she intended to go with him.

      George and Harry had of course sided with Mum, and had been angry, hurt and resentful that Dad and Gracie were choosing to leave them. And although Dad tried to keep in touch with his boys, asked if he could visit them, Suze had said a flat, spiteful no. Gracie knew that he’d sent them presents and cards and letters, but he never heard a thing back from them, not a word. She knew how much it had hurt Dad. She knew too that he could have tried for proper controlled access through the courts, but the split had been so devastating that he had quickly lost heart.

      So, time passed.

      Contact was lost.

      Ancient messes – ones she preferred not to think about now.

      But the phone call from the girl – what was her name, Sandy? – had brought it all back, unnerved her, made her go on the defensive. She’d shut down on her emotions, snapped at Brynn. She felt bad that she had lashed out at the one person who had always been solidly supportive of her, helping her through the hideous time after Dad’s death. Brynn had always schooled her in the business, never running out of patience when she was slow to pick up anything. She promised herself that she would apologize to him as soon as she got in to work.

      Gracie showered and dressed and ate breakfast in the bright, well-fitted kitchen with its view out over the Manchester ship canal. Yet even the view failed to charm her today. Her flat was in a converted corn mill, its old antecedents clearly visible in its bare, minimalistic brick walls and high ceilings. She’d bought it with a huge mortgage, and had loved it from day one.

      Yesterday’s post mocked her from the kitchen table, where she’d left the letters in the small hours of this morning. Divorce papers. So, finally, it had come down to this. Lorcan wanted rid of her, wanted to make it all legal and above board.

      Probably – and she felt another little stab of unease, a little niggle of something suspiciously like genuine pain – probably he had found someone else. After all, he was a good-looking man. And there he was, in her mind. Lorcan Connolly. Black, close-cropped hair, bright blue eyes that skewered you where you stood, a mouth like a gin trap. Six feet four inches of Alpha male who looked like he could get physical – in the bedroom or out of it – without any trouble at all.

      Stop it, she told herself. You made your choice. You walked away.

      Ancient messes.

      She wasn’t going to think about them now. She pushed them to the back of her mind and took the lift down to the secure underground car park.

      Gracie loved her car. It was a smooth, powerful beast, the silver Mercedes SLK-Class roadster, and she steered it effortlessly through the traffic, watching out for manic cyclists and distracted Christmas-shopping pedestrians with iPods stuck in their ears, meandering across roads strewn with multicoloured Christmas light displays with barely a glance at the traffic. She cut all thoughts of trouble out of her brain and hummed along with ‘Addicted to Love’ on her bass-heavy sound system, safe in her luxurious cocoon. Warm, too. Heated seats. Outside it was frosty-cold, with a pink-tinted sky up ahead. They were forecasting snow and Gracie thought that for once they’d got it right. The sky looked odd.

      Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, she thought. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.

      A white Christmas. How romantic.

      Oh yeah? This from a woman who just got divorce papers?

      Shit. Why did she have to keep thinking about that?

      She heard a siren long before she saw the fire engine in the rear-view mirror; cars behind her were edging in to the kerb to let it pass. She did the same, nosing the Mercedes in as far as she could. The huge red Dennis, lights flashing, siren blaring, eased past the long line of cars, then whipped through the red light up ahead.

      Going the same way as Gracie.

      The lights changed, traffic started moving again. The sun was a golden ball hanging low in the crystal-blue sky to her left.

      Gracie’s gut tightened.

      Hold on. Ahead was where the sky was lit up so peculiarly. Not to the left. That wasn’t the sun that was . . . a pretty big fire. There was a plume of black smoke spiralling up, and now another fire engine was coming through, everyone easing out of the way, Gracie too; and that ominous pink light was still there in the sky. Someone had a real mother-fucker of a fire going on somewhere.

      Gracie got closer and closer to her destination, and now she could see the front of Doyles casino. Her heart leapt into her throat and her hands clenched on the steering wheel. She stared in disbelief. The engines were there, firemen were unravelling hoses, shouting at each other. People were running, yelling; others just stood and stared. And the frontage . . . my God, the frontage was on fire.

      Later on, Gracie had no memory of actually stopping the car. All she knew was that she was unsnapping her seat belt and throwing herself out of her seat, then running hell-for-leather across the road to where the firemen were milling around, and the only thought in her head was oh my God, where’s Brynn?

      Brynn lived in the flat over the casino, alone. She half staggered up the middle of the road, cars honking as they swerved and came to a halt, a policeman there, waving cars back. Gracie just stood there; she could feel the heat from here, could hear the hungry crackling of the flames. The glitzy ‘Doyles’ sign was gone. A gust of wintery air blew a choking veil of spark-spattered smoke back into the road and her breath caught on a wheezing cough.

      The policeman turned and looked at her. ‘Move back, miss, will you? Right back.’

      ‘I own the place,’ she

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