Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 109783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
“I feel a bit of a fool.”
“You’re not a fool. I was only famous for one show and a couple of movies. If you didn’t watch the show or those movies, how were you supposed to know who I was?”
“I feel like we have a lot to talk about on our next date.”
“You still want another date?”
“Of course.”
On our second date, I’d told Cameron as much as I was comfortable telling him. I didn’t mention how difficult things had gotten for me. In fact, I pretty much glossed over the ugliness of the end of my career and merely explained I wasn’t happy acting.
The picnic would be our third date.
My phone buzzed again.
Le Roulé it is. Can’t wait to see you.
My smile died a bit.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t looking forward to the picnic. I liked Cameron. He was sweet and funny and he genuinely seemed to love being a doctor. He was also a very good kisser, which I discovered on date two.
But I couldn’t quite say that I couldn’t wait to see him. He didn’t make my belly flutter or my chest ache like the mere thought of Fyfe did. Yet I’d decided that was a good thing. Being out of control of my emotions had gotten me hurt.
This way I was in control, and I didn’t think that was a bad thing at all.
My phone buzzed again, and I picked it up thinking it was Cameron. It wasn’t. It was my old landlord back in London.
“Pete?” I picked up. “Is everything okay?”
“No, luv, it’s not. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we were doing annual smoke alarm checks on the flat and my bloke found something dodgy.”
“Dodgy?”
“There were cameras installed inside the smoke alarms, luv. One in the living space and one in the bedroom.”
A wave of nausea rose as I processed why there might be cameras in those smoke alarms. I gulped in a breath, swallowing down the vomit.
“Eilidh, you there?”
“I’m here,” I whispered.
“I’m real sorry, luv. We don’t keep CCTV footage longer than thirty days and we had the current tenant look and he don’t recognize anyone coming into the building as a threat. He’s not famous or nothing. Quiet bloke. So we reckon this has to do with you. They had to be installed sometime in the last year. You know we check those things annually,” he repeated, sounding just as freaked out as I felt.
“What do you want us to do, luv? I mean I would usually go straight to the police, but with your public profile an’ all, I thought you might want to deal with it private like?”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Pete, can you hold on to them? I … I need to discuss this with my team and then I’ll let you know what we’d like done with the cameras.”
“Got them safe and locked away so no one touches them, luv, all right.”
“Thank you, Pete.”
“I’m real sorry about this, Eilidh.”
We hung up and I stared in a daze at the screen.
If someone had been recording me, they most likely had footage of me naked. They might have footage of me in private moments in my bedroom.
Shaking, I felt my panic building. The instinct to keep this to myself was there. To shield my family from the shit show of public life … but I’d learned my lesson. Pushing away from my desk, I hurried from the annex and into my parents’ house.
Dad was just throwing back the last of his coffee as Mum grabbed her car keys. School was on break for the Easter holidays and Mor had shocked us all by asking to accompany her friend to a caravan park with her friend’s parents in the Cairngorms.
“Writing go well?” Mum asked, her dimples flashing. Her smile fell at my expression. “Eilidh, what’s wrong?”
Tears burned in my eyes as I looked from my mum to my dad. My gaze locked with Dad’s and I wished I were seven years old again and he could make everything better with a hug. Through gritted teeth, I explained what Pete had found in my smoke alarms.
Dad did draw me into his arms, and I let myself cry against his chest as Mum smoothed a hand over my hair.
“Fyfe,” Dad announced gruffly. “You need Fyfe to investigate this. It’s his job, Eilidh. If there’s a way to track this person down via the cameras, Fyfe can do it.”
Of course.
Fyfe was the first person I would have thought of under normal circumstances.
As if sensing my hesitancy, Dad withdrew slightly to search my face. “I don’t know what happened there, but this is too important. If someone broke into your flat and planted cameras, we need to know who and why.”
He was right.
I nodded. “I’ll go talk to him.”